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Bug of the moment 2006-07-02


Crtl

BetBest1 drew my attention to the following screenshot of his the other day, of Windows Media Player 6.4.09.1130 in Windows XP Home:

Seems like such a silly and harmless error, but, as Nick Shanks pointed out, “Wow, Windows programmers actually have to type "Ctrl". Next thing you'll be telling me is they have to draw all the text stings in the menu and draw the divider lines themselves!”

I was thinking, it’s no big deal; even if Windows makes your program provide the shortcut strings, your development environment will handle generating all of those strings. But then I realised, clearly it isn’t, else we’d not have ended up with “Crtl”. And whoever was responsible wasn’t even copying and pasting them.

And the irony is that Nick is not as far off as he thinks. Look at the menu: that is not a standard Windows XP menu, that is one of those weird Office-style menus. So clearly someone somewhere at Microsoft was “… [drawing] all the text stings in the menu and … divider lines themselves!”

But here is the clincher. I have Windows Media Player 6.4.09.1129 which also says “Crtl”:

I was going to put it down to the extra 0.0.0.1 being the version where they reprogrammed all the menu set-up to use the new Microsoft Office pastel-shaded menus, but clearly not. Which would in fact suggest that, after all, Windows programmers have to type in “Ctrl” by hand. Which is quite scary.


I am also making this a one-and-a-half-bill by including a new screenshot of an oldie. Just because it made me really angry:

Just the right kind of shift-click (maybe a plain click, I was oddly unable to reproduce it) on the border of a <textarea> tag in Firefox 1.0.x causes the control to simply disappear from the window. The text is there, you can press Back then Forwards to recover it, or Submit to send it on its way, but not read or edit it. I have no idea how they managed to screw that one up. One day I need to upgrade to Firefox 1.5 to see if they’ve fixed all these bugs…


Posted 2nd July 2006 – Comments and questions?