Colouring lessons page 5
This screenshots gallery generally relates to screenshots of graphical interfaces. The fundamental nature of a graphical interface is colouring in the screen with lots of pretty pixels. And for some reason, we still cannot seem to even get that much to work reliably…
I discovered the following purely by accident – honestly! I did not bait it! A Word 97 zoom rect is left stuck on the screen; I had alt-tabbed into gaim while waiting for Word to think about opening the Find dialog, and the zoom rect shown as the Find dialog opened drew on top of gaim.
Quite how a program is allowed to just write all over the screen like that, I do not know; same goes for the QuickTime barf earlier. Sheez, people, graphical interfaces need to do better than this. I also wonder why the Find dialog has its own entry in my alt-tab list but most of Beleaguredsoft Office is like that, particularly Excel: absurd beyond imagination.
Now this is just magical: Word 98 has forgotten how to scroll. I think Word 98, too, would forget how to breathe if it was not constantly reminded…
And this is the thing, you see, it never gets any better. All of the stupid problems in Excel in 97 are still there in Excel XP. And Word XP is hardly sehr wunderbar either:
Apparently that pile of mash was small caps, as is the following:
Let’s throw in a bonus item too: GTK+ trying to render 32-bit graphics in 16 colours, without much success. Reminds me rather of the BBC Micro except just worse. Or a really faint television signal.
Mackie sent in these pictures of Colour Selector 2.1 running under Mac OS X, where it has a thing for forgetting what it looks like:
I plead innocent, your honour! Although if I have to keep using REALbasic 3.5.1 I will end up pleading insanity, something which has already befallen the Mac OS X runtime, clearly.
The next picture is from BBEdit 7.1.4; if you review the multiple search results window with the preview pane switched off, it gets all confused and cannot decide what to draw:
Finally, scrolling a volume info window in Tiger’s Disk Utility:
This truly bizarre phenomenon was repeatable for that volume.