Girlfriend is on a PC, is in Word, has her habitual 52 documents open and wants to navigate from the one she’s in to one of the others.
She is one of those people Microsoft must’ve had in mind when it enabled Long File Names back in Windows95. She doesn’t name her documents “PRTFOLIO.DOC” or even “Portfolio Common Stocks '98.doc”, but generally something like “Copy of New Fully Indexed Common Stocks from Schwab Shearson Etc. Reinvestment Schedule B Revised May '03 with Annotations.doc”. As opposed to “Copy of New Fully Indexex Common Stocks from Merrill Lynch Before Transfer to Schwab Shearson Etc. Revised April '03.doc”, see?
So…she goes to the Windows menu.
Ten choices plus “More Windows…”
Click “More Windows…” and this itsy bitsy teenie tiny window pops up showing about 20 characters’ worth of file name for about ten or eleven more file names’ worth of vertical space.
No horizontal scroll bar. No little resizeable side or corner arrows. Inside this itsy bitsy teenie tiny window are several file name lines “Copy of New Fully Indexe…”
This is seriously fucking stupid. There’s enough screen real estate on this 21st Century screen to display 40 of those stupid little boxes. But why have boxes like that in the first fucking place? Why can’t you click on the Windows menu of your program and have a drop-down list that shows you all of your open files, and if there are too many to show up on your screen, you put a little scrollie arrow at the bottom so you can scroll down further and see yet more, all in one easy glide? Or, OK, have the window pop down and stay down and put regular window scroll arrows at the side, but make it a big box to begin with, auto-resized left to right to handle the longest file name you’ve got, and if your files names are wider than your screen, fine, toss in a horizontal scroll arrow at the bottom or something.
Does Microsoft think people don’t really multitask or something? Do they ever try to use this stuff to see what it feels like?