Post Your GUI Tips!

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Post your favourite Interface configurations here!

Comeon, you readers must have a million of them!!!

 

I (shameful I know) am not going to post any yet but ask if anyone still knows one I lost:

 

I'm looking for one that might be hard to explain (I may post a screenshot later if I can find somewhere to store it) I saw it a long time ago on a now closed board:

What I want to do is make several new toolbars on the taskbar that are folders on my computer. That is easy enough, but I want them cascading (like the start menu) That is also easy (just drag them to the right of the taskbar so only the Title is showing and the little double arrow will appear)

The problem with this is it can take up too much of that valuabe taskbar space especially in low resolution. What you can do is rename the toolbar with a special set of characters that makes it have no title and only an arrow which can sit anywhere on the bar as a tiny button. You can then have several of them and you know which is which by the order they are in. DOES ANYONE KNOW THAT SET OF CHARACTERS???

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I wrote something on taskbar configuration a long while ago...Im just going to be lazy and past it here now:

 

I see many people making shortcuts to a:\ c:\ d:\ etc in their quick launch. A good idea but heres a much better way:

 

Drag the "MY COMPUTER" icon onto the taskbar. A new toolbar should appear. right click the left side of the toolbar and untick "show text" and "show title" there you have it. not only can you right-click/properties on it and drag&drop to its contents, but if you hold CTRL-left click you can browse the items similar to the start menu. Update: This works much better with XP's 'lock taskbar' feature

 

Issues:

Label your hard disks so they are in alphabetical order. While you can drag and drop these items to arrange them, it doesn't work too well. It sorts the CD-ROMS by drive letter until you insert CDs and then by volume labels so they can get out of order. Holding the mouse over it before clicking to see the tooltip can be a good idea. Win2000 also gives a brief properties in the tooltip.

 

 

Getting rid of the other icons: While Win2000 has only Control-Panel, Win98 is the worst as it has scheduled tasks, web folders.....you can remove some of them by running REGEDIT.EXE and looking under "\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace". The values of these keys explain what they are. You can delete them to not show them under MY COMPUTER. Don't delete "Dial-Up Networking" ({992CFFA0-F557-101A-88EC-00DD010CCC48} if you use it as deleting this icon will prevent it from being accessable through any other way. If you accidently delete it, you can remove/add it again through control panel/network or add/remove programs.

 

To Hide Printers & Control Panel, insert the following into the registry.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]

"NoSetFolders"=dword:00000001

NOTE: This will delete them from the start menu also. To put it back into the start menu, right click the start button, select "open" and right-click in the window and select "New-> Folder and call it "Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}" (without the quotes). Printers is an option in here so you won't really need to make a printers menu. Your Start Menu should now have a cascading Control Panel (better than before!) Microsoft did't let you do this as an option until WinMe/2000.

 

UPDATE: ABOVE IS ALL 98, FOR XP:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\DelegateFolders\{59031a47-3f72-44a7-89c5-5595fe6b30ee}

delete it.

 

TIP: Don't go overboard with the icons. Having to draw bitmaps all the time slows down your video response and uses memory, resulting in increased swapping. Anything on the desktop/toolbars can't be swapped out of RAM as it always has to be there, even if it is in the background behind a game. This actually uses more than you think - Just as on disk, many small files can use lots more RAM and cause fragmentation.

 

 

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While your at it, You might find turning the address bar on in the taskbar convenient. You can type in program names including DOS commands, URLs here. To make your own, look under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths Some examples are:

 

Key name: Default value: Path value:

edit.exe C:\UltraEdit\UEDIT32.EXE C:\UltraEdit

doc.exe d:\mydocu~1

UPDATE: paths will be different in XP.

 

By typing edit in the address bar, I can start writing a text or bat file quickly,

By typing doc, I can open the MY DOCUMENTS folder. The best thing about it is the word completion/history features (Use TAB and UP ARROW as in BASH or NT command prompt [when configured]), which make doing things very quick. You get all the advantages of a command-line system in your GUI!!!

It's also handy for other non-obvios uses, like just a place to write a quick note, or a spare space for copy/pasting.

 

 

Issues:

 

-"Browser mode" Windows sometimes seems to go into "browser mode" where everything you type, even stuff declared in the app paths registry key, will try to go to http://yourentry/

I call it a bug.

 

-Icons - they don't always update correctly.

 

-If you're going to use the address bar, it is a good idea to use a double sized taskbar and give task switching a whole line. You should use a reasonably high resolution for this.

 

Again, this was written for 98 and some might not apply