I can't f'n stand this, wait I mean I can't FUCKING stand this (thanks to whoever enlightened us potty-mouths) - newbie computer users that double click on everything, like http links. Usually some old fuckhead that has to tilt their head back and look through the bottom of their bifocal glasses to see the screen.
Ok I feel better now. Feel free to add other peeves of this genre.

How about user interface code that doesn't gracefully handle newbies that double-click on something which only accepts a single click?

People that can't click on stuff properly annoys me. They try to click on an icon but move the mouse so they end up running something totally different.

And then not admit they clicked the wrong thing! Grr

- Trevor

How about a Windows Start Menu that is much too "jumpy", which makes it difficult to select a specific item, even when you are trying as hard as you can to click the correct icon? Especially when using multiple-level menus which pop in and out of existence when your mouse moves only a couple of pixels. Considering the problem was so bad that they had to add delays and fades into the system in recent releases just to cover up this irritating, dexterity-dependent system.

This is what really pisses me off.

I don't know how i manage to do it, but every so i ofen i'll hit some horid combination of clicks and what will happen is my left mouse button will bring up the menu that the right mouse button is supposed to bring up. So when i left click on an icon to start it, the stupid menu comes up. Then it goes away by itself. WTF?

See this column, in particular question 6:

http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

Since we're ranting about the windows start menu - I hate that programs starting in your systray steal the mouse focus. It means that you have to wait for windows to completely load every systray app before you can do anything useful with your machine. It really bugs me.

OOOooo, neat article, Roger.

/me keeps that link to share with other software designers in my company.

How about when emplode running inside VMware in Linux keeps expanding trees and making my selection drop into some other folder. I don't know how fast it is native.

visuvius, I get this problem every so often and it doesn't really bother me because it's easy to fix.

And example of how, presuming you're on the desktop (and that you haven't figured it out allready):
1) click and hold left mouse button
2) drag box over some icons
3) right click until menu appears
4) let go of both buttons

I believe that's what I do when it happens. Not too sure, since it hasn't happened to me in Win2k much or at all...

Wow. UI Design 101 in a nutshell.

My girlfriend doubleclicks links. I pointed out the error of her ways. Now she methodically double clicks links when I'm near her.

Calvin

argh.

ROFL, that made my afternoon.

Duuude, that was an interesting read. I still really like my mouse gestures. Nothing to click ON, just a click and a motion.

Oh, and the thing I hate about windoze is the stupid arrows at the top and bottom of the menu list. Takes WAAAAAY too long.

In Win XP, where do you turn off the "fading menus" feature?

Since you brought up UI bugs....

My favorite UI bug is in (now) ancient versions of Interleaf (a desktop publishing application -- think Framemaker or Quark Xpress) for Unix. You may or may not know that most Unix machines' mice have three buttons. To do most anything in Interleaf required navigating this remarkably deep set of pop-up menus. Most tasks required navigating at least 4 levels deep, but I've gone up to 20 or so levels. You may think that this is my favorite bug, but it's not.

Once you got to the item you wanted to select, you had to press the middle button. If you forgot and accidentally pressed one of the other buttons, you got a beep and a big popup modal dialog that said ``You need to use the middle mouse button!'' (or something like that -- I'm positive that it used an exclamation mark).

I love the fact that despite the fact that it obviously knew what I wanted it to do, it chose to berate me and make me navigate through that menu structure again. I hated that program.

In Win XP, where do you turn off the "fading menus" feature?

I don't know, but I use TweakUI in Windows 2000 so that I don't get fade-ins, but the menu item I selected fades out. This is my work-around to my startmenu complaint... This way the menus can at least appear quickly to speed up my navigation, but when my mouse slips and I hit the wrong item, I can at least see what the wrong item was for a second after I've hit it.

Note: I am not sure if the link I gave above is the correct one for Windows XP or not. I don't even know if it's right for Windows 2000. They used to have different versions for the different OS's.

I hate how any access of Explorer requires the CDs to be spun up and re-read, pausing the system. Then, adding insult to injury, the listing refreshes changing the point you were navigating to. Particularly annoying if you were in the CD dir at the time.

The settings for Windows XP are here:

Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Settings (Performance) -> Visual Effects

The XP version of TweakUI is here. TweakUI is no longer in the Control Panel. It appears in the Start Menu

- Trevor