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Other GUI oddities page 6


I’ve long since given away my Acorn Archimedes, and barely used it, so I don’t know if the following is an artefact of emulation (and the RedSquirrel Tools for emulation support) or a huge bug in the operating system itself, but this meaningless dialog pops up quite often:

QuickTime 6 has some intriguing format support. Take an image, any image:

Save the image to both PICT and PNG formats, and zoom each copy in PictureViewer:

For reasons unknown, PictureViewer uses different enlargement algorithms for each format: resize for PICT and resample for PNG.

Since around Windows 2000, Microsoft gave everyone a places bar in common file dialogs. For convenience, they made it extremely awkward to choose what goes in that bar, and non-privileged users are banned from making the change even with TweakUI.

I set one of the items on my laptop’s places bar to \\SPIRE (my desktop computer, always running) which proved not to be 100% reliable:

Note that the first of the two still uses Windows 2000 toolbar buttons, a peculiarity of the endlessly poor customisation of Open and Save dialogs.

Radmin Viewer 3 with a very helpful tooltip:

View complete screenshot

I once observed that, in Task Manager, all the statistics fields are “editable” Unicode fields. You can see that I have already marked two of them as right-to-left and back (upsetting the alignment) and I can also ask it to insert Unicode special characters, although it won’t obey:

View complete screenshot

In fact this is a standard Windows issue, due to the use of read-only text boxes to facilitate selectable text. For some reason, the Unicode context menu items are never hidden:

Here is another read-only text box still with its standard border, demonstrating the behaviour: