> destructive actions should require a little more confirmation, no? It used to be you had to double-click almost everything if there was a chance of a strong side-effect;
I grew up with Windows 98, so for me the X button would be the baseline that feels perfectly logical and natural. But I want to ty and explain why I think it doesn't contradict the above logic:
I think a long-standing design rule in Windows is that the X button action should have as few side-effects as possible apart from closing the window: Closing dialogs and tool windows typically does nothing except closing the window - and your user expectation is that you can trivially restore those windows if you wanted.
For "Yes/No" or "OK/Cancel" type dialogs, the X button typically maps to the action with the least consequences - i.e. "No" or "Cancel". When all choices have consequences is sometimes even disabled to force the user to make a conscious choice.
In the events where closing a windows has direct, irreversible consequences - e.g. closing a program that has unsaved data - the program is expected to show some kind of confirmation: An "Are you sure" or "Do you want to save?" dialog. So in effect, clicking the X button is even safe in these cases because all that click will do is bring up a confirmation dialog.
All of this requires more effort from the developers of applications, but I think treating the X button as a non-destructive action by default actually gives the user more confidence to explore the UI because there is an obvious way how to safely get back.
I got to use Windows 3 and see it as an improvement over a CLI-only system, and got to edit my X11 configuration for making my monitor don't blow (or at least stop making that infuriating noise out of frequency monitors do - but the documentation was adamant it would blow). I saw the beginning of the GUI spread.
Yet, I was never able to make any sense about the Windows double-click required standards. It just looked completely arbitrary, like any action MS wanted to map into a click, but there was an action mapped there already, they made it a double click. I am pretty sure the author is rationalizing that line about side-effects.
Beside the nostalgic value, this hidden button has a very practical use when you use two monitors. I tend to have a window full-screened on each monitor. To close the window on the right monitor, I just mash my mouse pointer to the upper right corner (without having to aim precisely) and click. The pointer will "stick" to the upper right hand corner of the screen.
That is not possible for the window on the left monitor, because there is something to the right (the other monitor), thus, the pointer will not "stick" and it is harder to close the window (you have to actually aim).
Enter the "invisible button": For windows on the left monitor, just mash the mouse into the upper left corner and double click. No aiming necessary.
In Windows 10, most apps still have this button. But it seems to be tied to using the classic Win32 APIs or something. Modern "Metro" apps like the calculator do not have this invisible button any more. Let's hope that that style never catches on ...
Except this person has a very straightforward workaround: Use the X button. Win95 could have removed the system menu when they replaced it with an icon of the application, but so many programs were fiddling with the frame drawing that some probably couldn't be closed without the system menu.
> "Up and down" made sense. "Line and box"? Windows 95 brought a lot of advantages, but we lost so much of the little touches along the way.
This is a typical migration problem: The line and box icons represent the Taskbar and the full screen window, so they actually make much more sense than Up and Down arrows, but this user still hasn't adapted. Hard to blame him: With Aero, windows don't look like rectangles anymore and bubbles would better represent the Taskbar than a line.
For the same historical reason he likes double clicking for powerful actions, except click vs double-click doesn't have any logic or consistency anymore, mostly since we introduced the Web and the single click. <s>No click is even enough to upgrade to Windows 10 </s>.
Heck, my parents keep double-clicking everywhere in Windows, including in web pages. Submitting forms twice is so much a problem in companies that jQuery plugins exist to discard the second click on links and buttons.
Consistency and user migration path are hard problems. It's necessary to remove features sometimes.
Exactly, this is the important lesson here: Every single little feature that you introduce will be used by someone and you either have to support it forever (the classic Microsoft-strategy) or take it out and risk the anger of a part of your users. Who will probably complain very loudly.
See also: the recent removal of backspace to go back a page in Chrome And Firefox. Luckily I have a 4 button mouse with dedicated back/forward buttons or I would be mad as hell.
Good riddance. The problem with backspace is that it means "delete one character" unless you managed to unfocus a text box, in which case it means "lose the whole form and maybe hose the whole application flow". It was actively harmful.
The default behavior in firefox on linux is to go to a page when you middle-click anywhere that isn't a text box. This took me a while to figure out when I was trying to paste and missed the text-box. I never noticed until I got a linux laptop because missing textboxes on my desktop is a rare occurrence, but with a trackpad I miss all the time.
Ẅ̪͓́̐ͣ̔̏͜h̟͍̩̻͔̼̄ė͈̙̗ͪͩ͌ͫ̚r͉͈̥̎ͅe̥̥̻̹͓̘̋̏͆̓̽͢ ̸͖̞͚̖̒̉̈ͥ̌̚ͅo̵̬ͪ̌h͐ͧ̀͒͑̓ͨ ̢̖̜͙̺̺̏w̱̺͙͖̖̤ͤ͂̊̊ͨ͌̽ͅh͔̪̱̝̣̰̽ͮͩͧ̈́͢ḙ͉͓͉̖̩̰̋̀̽̚r͛͌҉̫̤̘͚e̐̄ͤ͆̓ͣͅ ̑̒̍̓̑͘h̫̤̭̥̜̦̪͐̋̏̚a̡s̞̝̳̅ͥ ̨m̡̻̮̞̗̥͖ͩy͚̘͖ͅ ҉̫̱͇b͙̥̠͈̂́͐ͮâ̦̗̙͙̲̦̹̕cͫ҉̘͕̹̖k̟̠s͔͌͛ͦp̲̝a̷̞̫͓̰̫̫̍̏ͣͦͨͩͅc͕̩ͤ̀ę͍̯͈̂̇̉̏̊͂ͭ ̯̠̼̹̭́ǵ̞̱ơ̞͙͓̱̩̳̺̑̆̆ͣͭ͑͆n͏̫̲͙͔̟̝͖ẹ͈̭͚ͯ̄̕ͅ?̸̒!̬̱͎̓͂ͅ?̳̰̭̫̽̈̔ͧ̚͞ͅ . The info popup to inform me that Alt+Left is an alternative was a nice touch, though. I'm still adjusting...
Cock! That's why it no longer works for me! It was so much easier when I was being lazy because it was a relatively big button I could just absent-mindedly mash when I was leaning on my desk with both of my hands.
The main problem is that the longer you support it, the more ingrained it gets into the minds of the users. So the pain and anger of taking it away increases as it is supported longer.
Everything will have to be taken away eventually, so Microsoft's approach of trying to support things forever is fundamentally flawed.
They do seem to have made a decent shift away from that now though, thankfully.
When I have two screens, I disalign them so that the mouse has a 10px corner on the top right of the left screen. If I go to the top with my mouse, then to the right, it will always be stuck in the corner so I can click Close.
A year or two back, ranting at some website's idiotic abuse of Fitts's law[1], and actually read the background.
Fitts, Paul M. (June 1954). "The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement". Journal of Experimental Psychology. 47 (6): 381–391. doi:10.1037/h0055392. PMID 13174710.
* * * This shit dates from the nineteen-fucking-fifties. * * *
And people fuck it up all the time.
This is why we cannot have nice things.
________________________________
Notes:
1. I will be that guy and note you misspelled it. I've done that plenty myself.
> * * * This shit dates from the nineteen-fucking-fifties. * * * And people fuck it up all the time.
This is one thing that pisses me off about stuff switching to web apps. We had this stuff mostly figured out in the 80s and early 90s, but now web developers are all re-inventing it, often from scratch, or using different or conflicting standards. Now menus close when you mis-point by one pixel, the tab key in forms only sometimes works, drop-downs look different on every single webpage. All the UI work and knowledge of the 70s, 80s, and 90s out the window. Sigh.
Windows 8 and 10 stick the mouse into the corner. It's a guide to help grab the silly corner hot bars from win 8 but win10 keeps the stick behavior. You have to hit the top first then the side and it'll stick.
I think to remember a particular version of Windows (7?) where the close button was a little offset from the right. The click target extended right to the edge of the window though, so your tactic still worked.
Oh yes, the Alt+Space button, which I still use for windows restores (Alt+Space+R) instead of Win+Down for some reason. And for the occasional rescue of windows that have entirely escaped by screens.
Ditto - although another old friend, alt-enter, appears to be now only intermittently supported, with some apps now using f11, or even ctrl-f, which IMHO should always be "find".
Ms have a long track record of supporting legacy interactions and interfaces - for instance, you could still use fileman and progman in win7, although by that stage it did involve installing them yourself. They shipped with every version up to xp. http://chorusofone.no-ip.org/computerstuff/win7progman.html
It's gotten more interesting in Windows 10. With a hi-res surface, scaling often plonks screens in confusing and arbitrary places when docking/undocking. My method is now something like "Alt+Space, M, Hold Left for a few seconds, Hold Up for a few seconds, Hold right for twice as long as Left, Hold Down for twice as long as Up, etc". And it won't work at all on Java sub-windows, who just scale and move any which way. And hitting Win-Left or Win-Right may not even snap the window to a viewport, meaning the secret button nor the red X are at a window extreme.
It's certainly added a fun little extra layer of puzzle to my life. I bet this is how Catherine felt about Atrus' door puzzle locks as she wandered Myst Island.
> A single click on the button brings up the system menu. I never bothered about that much, because this button isn't really meant to be single clicked
I disagree here. I feel single click is more useful than the the double click to close.
To recover lost windows without using alt you can actually hover over the window in the task bar. Eventually a small representation will pop-up that you can right click-on and choose maximise, minimise, move, etc.
This also exists in e.g. Chrome, if you manage to click the corner on the left of the first tab[1]
The way Chrome's UI is handled on Windows seems quite interesting in general. You can see glimpses of it when it breaks or some other program tries to make sense of it, such as screen recording of Chrome windows.
That window is how I always open Chrome's task manager. It's the only way I have discovered so far to open it without remembering the keyboard shortcut.
Another example that comes to mind is Apple's stock Podcasts app. The buttons to skip 15 seconds forward/backward have been removed from the interface (visually anyway) but still work if you press where the icons used to be.
Sounds to me like the result of a fight between the developers and the "product owner" who says "remove that button", and the developers don't want to remove it because it is useful and used by the users. So instead of removing it, he just makes it invisible, and everybody (but the new or naive users) is happy.
Another one is iPad's split keyboard. If you tap the gap next to the last key it will register as the key on the other side of the gap. E.g. you tap to the right of "t" and get "y".
Another is you can reset the iOS App Store by tapping on any of the bottom menu buttons 10 times. It's actually useful sometimes when apps won't download.
Windows 10 also still has this. There's also a keyboard-shortcut to open the menu: Alt-Space. To open the same menu in a child window of an MDI application, use Alt-- (Alt-Minus).
Which was intuitive in the windows 3.0 days because the icon of the top level window was slightly longer (like the space bar) than in the MDI child windows (like the minus sign).
This could be useful to know! I still used to do this on XP, where there was at least an icon there but it seemed to be deprecated. I don't think I'd even tried it in 7+.
Although I am wondering if it has ever bitten anyone by accident, especially given that double-clicking elsewhere on the top bar will maximise a window (and I do this frequently). Could be unfortunate.
Other not really documented leftovers of previous UI standards: I still sometimes use Ctrl-insert and shift-insert for copy and paste, which still work in a surprising number of apps, but not everywhere. I picked up the habit in the DOS 5 era with QBasic/Edit, but it seems to have been an IBM standard from 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Especially useful in terminal apps/ssh clients, where you really don't want to be pressing Ctrl-C by accident.
I use ctrl-insert and shift-insert myself which I picked up from the old "m" editor that shipped with Microsoft's C compiler, version 2. (2 floppies and a green 3-ring binder.)
This isn't a secret button, just a result of using Aero on Windows 7, which hides the button. It was actually something that irked me from time to time, because I'd grab a window to move it, only to hit the button and activate the menu.
I very frequently use Alt-Space to open this menu, then M and an arrow key to start moving windows that are positioned on a monitor that I've powered down and don't want to turn back on. Is its analog Alt-Minus still useful in any programs?
The same holds for all "Metro" apps, apparently. The "top-left-menu" is neither present in calculator, nor the new settings app (or weather, mail, calendar ...).
The menu itself is present. You just have to press Alt+Space to get to it. Alternatively, you can also right click the title bar - even in modern Windows apps.
That's behaviour that's been around since Windows 3.1. There used to be a little menu there with a few options and if you double clicked the icon it would close the window.
Heh, yeah the context menu on the scroll bars is my go-to tell to discover whether it's a real scroll bar widget or an imitation one. (Gotta write an article on that too one day)
Yeah, I like that too. Makes you think twice about re-implementing widgets because of the insane amount of functionality that is tied even to the simplest widgets and still invisible.
Think of how hard it would be to re-implement a dropdown, for instance: You would need to implement keyboard navigation (arrow keys), jump-to-entry (using the letter-keys), srolling with the mouse wheel, flipping through entries while the dropdown menu is closed and probably a thousand other things that I never used but some people do.
I did do this back in the VB5 days and it was a proper pain. From memory I couldn't get the listbox window to draw outside of it's hosting window (needed for controls at the bottom of a window) and allow moving of the hosting window at the same time.
In the end I think I cheated and drew the list box on the parent with an option to go up or down depending on it's relative position.
>context menu on scroll bars - no idea who would use this
It is for accessibility. Alternative input methods, like emulating the mouse by keyboard for instance, might not have mouse-drag functionality, but will have a right-click function.
Is the menu still there on all the apps? So the icon is missing, but the menu opens up? That's brilliant. Haven't used Windows for a long time but every time I do I'm still amazed to find that close behaviour still works.
The link I posted above links to another one with more historical context. I'd never clicked that the icon was meant to look like a space bar.
it's invisible because that's where the window icon is supposed to be. the explorer and some programs like chrome and firefox have invisible window icons or completely hide it (steam for example)
If you want to know where Microsoft got the inspiration for the box and "X" buttons that debuted in Windows 95, check out some images of ye old NeXTSTEP Workspace Manager from circa 1990.
As far as secret buttons I'm most fond of the "advanced settings" dialog in the "advanced" menu that shows up when you hit alt in the network devices folder. Almost nobody would expect a specific folder to make a new menu appear, and it continues to do this in the era of the ribbon when menus are hidden 99% of the time.
I used to use this a lot. A coworker who was really into macs back in like '06 or '07 used it because he was used to the close button being on the left and showed me. I totally forgot about that button.
Similar thing with Chrome on IOS (haven't tried on Android). If you open a new tab there's an empty space at the top where the URL bar normally resides. You can tap this space instead of the "Search or type URL" box in the middle of the screen. This is also a hangover from previous versions where the top URL bar wasn't hidden. Thanks anonymous Google engineer, you saved me from retraining my muscle memory!
This button exits in GNOME 3 as well, except they ruined it. Alt+Space still brings up the menu, but they took away all the keyboard shortcuts for the menu items themselves, so what used to be Alt+Space x to maximize now becomes Alt+Space x, nothing happens, you reach for the mouse and click maximize.
I suspect the problem here is more related to GTK3 and the new window manager, but I can't prove it. I just know it's broken now.
This also existed in Windows Vista and Windows XP. Like the author, I don't know if it still exists in Windows 8 or 10. I haven't regularly used Windows since I left Microsoft in 2007 ;)
In other words, it's actually been improved (or reverted to visible) in Windows 8 and 10. So OP, go ahead and take the plunge; you'll probably like it!
"There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years." 25 Years? How?
He literally says in the article he's been doing this since Windows 2.0... not sure if snarking about Win7 not being that old, but the button in Windows is 27+ years old.
The idea (after glancing at the page for all of five seconds to see what button this article meant) is that if you only started using Windows recently, you don't know it exists, but people who aren't "modern users" have been using that button since Windows 2.0.
I grew up with Windows 98, so for me the X button would be the baseline that feels perfectly logical and natural. But I want to ty and explain why I think it doesn't contradict the above logic:
I think a long-standing design rule in Windows is that the X button action should have as few side-effects as possible apart from closing the window: Closing dialogs and tool windows typically does nothing except closing the window - and your user expectation is that you can trivially restore those windows if you wanted.
For "Yes/No" or "OK/Cancel" type dialogs, the X button typically maps to the action with the least consequences - i.e. "No" or "Cancel". When all choices have consequences is sometimes even disabled to force the user to make a conscious choice.
In the events where closing a windows has direct, irreversible consequences - e.g. closing a program that has unsaved data - the program is expected to show some kind of confirmation: An "Are you sure" or "Do you want to save?" dialog. So in effect, clicking the X button is even safe in these cases because all that click will do is bring up a confirmation dialog.
All of this requires more effort from the developers of applications, but I think treating the X button as a non-destructive action by default actually gives the user more confidence to explore the UI because there is an obvious way how to safely get back.