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Colouring lessons


Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 for Windows must be the only program where you can convince it to leave the scroll bar marked as page up or down and both scroll buttons pressed. Or whatever it draws them in inverse video for.

Somehow, Firefox, while maximised, managed to spontaneously put its window up underneath my taskbar, as though I’d pressed F11, but the taskbar was still visible. Guessing I’d hit F11 by mistake, I tried pressing F11 to get it to restore my window. This resulted in the title bar and the taskbar mangled together. Trying to determine what exactly I was looking at, I clicked on the taskbar, only to find that I could drag it – the Firefox window that is – around with the taskbar still “stuck” to it.

The Access-based database program at a previous job appeared to implement its own drop-down boxes. If you switch window with one of these fake controls left open (because it hangs for ages thinking about what to put in the menu – Jet over SMB rocks) it either won’t close or you are just left with a hole in the window forevermore.

As well as winning the prize for perhaps the ugliest Mac OS skin ever (no, fear not, there are worse, far worse) this purple ugly doesn’t even draw in properly:

Surely, everyone has seen this one before by now? Character Map’s delight in mangling up character zoom boxes and the scrollbar.

This is one of many bugs not fixed in XP; I’ve not yet had chance to see whether Vista or 7 resolves this:

Sometimes it is the little things in life. Like being able to draw in a tab properly:

I have a control panel on my Macintosh, called Power Windows. I use it to give me live window dragging. And sometimes, translucent menus. But never to fade open and closed Finder windows, because then you get this:

And this:

Firefox isn’t free of the disease either: