Windows Media Player and “In Use” External USB Hard Drives

I have a lovely new 1TB external hard drive and moved all my music onto it a short while ago.  Now even though I have iPods and iPhones, for playing that music from my laptop, ITunes on Windows is pretty poor so I’ve tended to use Media Player and, more recently, Zune for that task.

Now, as you would expect I wanted my music into these programs automatically I included the music folder in my library as shown:

Now given I’m on a laptop and I usually want to leave work at the end of the day I’ll Safely Remove the drive from my laptop before packing up, but now when I do I get either the infamous “Windows can't stop your 'Generic Volume' device because it is in use” message or the “Problem Ejecting USB Mass Storage Device” message as shown:

But I closed Media Player (and everything else) so it can’t be locking files can it?

Now, as it happens, in the past I’ve seen Windows Search Indexing locking external drives, but I’d already made sure that the drive isn’t indexed by turning off the flag in the properties window:

and if I look at the Indexing Options in Control Panel I see this:

You can see that the G: drive (the external) isn’t indexed, yet if you look at the location summary in the bottom pane there’s a folder called Music there.  What gives?

So I expand the G: drive settings and what do I see? That the folder is, in fact, indexed by Windows Search and it is very likely locking the drive.  What the…?! Why isn’t the G:\ drive showing with a greyed checkbox to indicate that one or more child folders are included.  Thanks for the great UI there, Microsoft.

So if I just clear it now, then I’ll be able to safely remove the drive, but this is what happens in Media Player’s settings:

Which of means that new items I add to my Music folder won’t automatically appear.  That’s not what I want.  In fact it sucks.

Maybe I should just use the Zune player instead? Unfortunately, by default, Zune relies on the Windows Media Player library settings, so to break the dependency I have to go into Zune settings and unlink the Zune folders from the windows libraries.

Now I can add the Music folder from the external USB drive and Zune will automatically index the folder and pick up changes to the contents, just as I wanted.  And it does it without keeping the drive locked when I exit the program.

So now when I want to go home, I can just close Zune and then safely remove the drive as I would expect.

 

Phew! Talk about a major pain in the butt! How is a normal, non technical person ever going to figure this out for themselves.  Maybe I should’ve just stuck with iTunes – at least it doesn’t lock your external drives on you.

Bad Keyboard Design

I have to wonder at times what goes through designer’s heads and wether they use their own products.  Have a look at the following keyboard for a HP machine I’ve been given to use when on site.

Look at the size of that Shift key on the left there. The thing is about half it’s normal size, which of course means I keep hitting the key next to it far too often and screwing up my typing.  I have to train my hands to perform more finger gymnastics than is normal, and can’t easily slide my left thumb into position like I normally would (maybe I shouldn’t use my thumb for shift, but it’s a habit I’ve picked up from gaming and it’s hard to overcome).

But  maybe there’s a reason why they did it.  A reason why they cut the left shift key in half but kept the right hand one full sized?  Oh, there’s it is! It’s so they could add an extra (and duplicated) key on the keyboard! I for one know that the backslash and pipe characters are easily the most commonly used ones in my arsenal.  On my laptop the backslash key is so worn away from use I can hardly make out the symbols on it any more.  It’s worse than even the ‘e’ and return keys!  Thank goodness keyboard usability was sacrificed to add an extra one of those puppies!  Thank you HP! Thank you!

OK. Rant over.  Time to go steal a keyboard from someone else in the office, and while I do that why don’t you let me know what the most annoying keyboard design is that you’ve used or seen?

How To Create a Flicker Free TableLayoutPanel

The TableLayoutPanel that comes with .NET 2.0 is handy for doing simple HTML style layouts without the hassle of having to embed a browser control in your form and write the HTML.  The control is designed to be a lightweight container (not as powerful as the DataGridView, but more flexible in it's approach) and you can embed any control you like in it.

The main problem however is that the control flickers incredibly badly when it gets resized. 

For windows forms applications the way to remove flickering is to enable double buffering.  For a form you can just set the DoubleBuffered property to true, and while this will reduce flicker when you resize the form itself, the TableLayoutPanels on the form still flicker as they resize.

So to fix this you just need to turn on double buffering for the control.  Unfortunately, the control doesn't feature a "DoubleBuffered" property.

You could try setting the ControlStyles for the control as well, however the SetStyle method is not exposed by the control.

So that means we'll need to use subclassing to set the double buffering flags.  The following C# code shows you a simple double buffered TableLayoutPanel :

using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace MyNameSpace
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Double Buffered layout panel - removes flicker during resize operations.
    /// </summary>
    public partial class DBLayoutPanel : TableLayoutPanel
    {
        public DBLayoutPanel()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint |
              ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer |
              ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
        }

        public DBLayoutPanel(IContainer container)
        {
            container.Add(this);
            InitializeComponent();
            SetStyle(ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint |
              ControlStyles.OptimizedDoubleBuffer |
              ControlStyles.UserPaint, true);
        }
    }
}

Create the class as shown, rebuild your code and the toolbox should now show you that a DBLayoutPanel control is available for your UI pleasure.

Oh, if you happen to have already built forms using the standard TableLayoutPanel you won't need to delete them and start again.  Just go into the *.Designer.cs code-beside files and change the TableLayoutPanel references to DBLayoutPanel ones (watch your namespaces!).  Rebuild your application and everything should run as it did before, this time without the flickering.

UI Prototyping in PowerPoint

At work we do almost all of our UI design mockups in Visio but because they're static it's sometimes hard to get a feel for what will really happen when people click on things and how usable it is.  In other words it's easy enough to see if the "look" is right, but what about the "feel"?

Well it turns out that you can emulate some limited interactivity using PowerPoint.  I hadn't thought of doing that before until I ran across this blog entry from one of the guys responsible for the Office user interface.  It's pretty interesting and it might well be time to try it out :-)

What is the Common Browser Resolution These Days

I'm sure you've heard that a web site should be designed for the lowest common denominator,. That way you maximise the potential audience that can view your site easily.

Of course 14 inch monitors died out years ago along with Windows95 so designing for 640x480 is silly. But 15 inch screens (800x600) are almost impossible to buy new these days and I've been wondering how many of these are still in use and why people still design sites for that resolution (or for IE 5.x and Netscape 4 for that matter).

I use sitemeter to check visitor patterns for the blog and one of the things they have is a way of checking resolution of screens. Here's what I saw when I checked recently...



As you can see, almost everyone has a resolution of 1024x768 or higher. The 800x600 resolution is a paltry 3%.

Similarly, colour depth is at 32-bit for 94% of the visitors as well.

I guess the days of designing for limited colours and small resolutions are over. 1024x768 resolutions at full colour can now be treated as the lowest common denominator.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, IE 5.x made up a whopping 1% of the visitors. It's all IE 6+ and Firefox these days. No Safari, Camino or Konqeuror and very little Opera.

How to Create Passionate Users

I've always thought that the "Head First" series of books were great.  Head First Design Patterns in particular in an excellent book and really makes a lot of sense.

Well I recently discovered that the authors have a blog called Creating Passionate Users.  It's all about making what you do more focused on the person using your products than on those making the products.  In other words it's more about you than it is about me.

Sure, the posts are on obvious subjects like thinking about your users, but if you're anything like me, the day-to-day of working in a company has a habit of getting in the way and you find your focus drifting to the internal company issues rather than staying on finding new and better ways to solve the issues that you're users/customers have.

The good thing about the way these posts are written is that they're not condescending or insulting to your intelligence.

If you've got any interest at all in the people who use your products then I'd strongly recommend having a look at this blog.

Tech.Ed 2006 - Keynote

Every conference has to open with a Keynote Address otherwise it's not a conference, right. Normally keynote addresses involve product announcements and how wonderful life will be in the brave new world using this, that, and the other. Tech.Ed took a different angle to their keynote and had an anthropologist come and speak.

An anthropologist? Yep, someone who studies human behaviour. Employed by Microsoft. Go figure. If I recall correctly, Anne Kirah was the first anthropologist hired by MS and was responsible for some very "enlightening" revelations around windows and it's usability.

The beta process in particular was really interesting and explains why Microsoft has improved so much in this regard. Older versions of windows went through beta testing to figure out what was usable and what wasn't and one of the things that MS had determined in their beta testing was that the average person could get a brand new PC out of the box and up and running, connected to the internet in about 3 hours. And this was in the days of 28.8 K modems, wierd ISP configurations, slow install processes, and the like.

Upon hearing this Anne was a little suspicious so she thought she'd go check things out for herself and got a few test subjects (people in their own homes) to go through the process. As it turned out, these people couldn't even get Windows installed, let alone connected to a modem, load up a device driver, set the correct PAP/CHAP settings for their ISP (whatever the hell that was) and connect to this mysterious thing called the internet. She didn't try to helpthese people but rather asked the people how they were feeling and what they were thinking as they were trying to get things working. She video taped the whole process and showed a small snippet in the keynote - the frustration and anger seething from one of test subjects was clearly obvious and when Microsoft saw this they were staggered. They asked the obvious quesion - Why do beta testers have relatively little hassle and why do Anne's subjects struggle so much?

The answer turned out to be the segment of the population participating in the beta tests. All the past beta testers had an IT passion, they enjoyed getting through the complexities of installing, connecting, configuring and tweaking PC's and rarely reported problems once they sorted them out. Anne's subjects were normal people and didn't do this. They didn't understand I.T., technical terms or computers in general and they definitely wouldn't know what to do when faced with a default windows installation (anyone ever wondered where the idea for the Windows Start button came from?).

Ever since this revelation, Windows has been beta tested by average non-IT people and Vista is a great example of what happens when the feedback from these people is fed back into the product.

On the flip side, there was a rather ironic moment in the presentation. For whatever reason the power point used to back up the message was awful - the classic bullet pointed, multi-lined, ill-conceived presenter-prompter style of powerpoint. The funniest/saddest slide was the one talking about information overload. The idea that we have too much information on screen, and that we need to remove clutter is great - it makes for more usable applications, better presentations, etc.

The slide that talked about it had 28 lines of text broken into 2 columns (because there was too much to fit into one), it had small text, nested bullet points, a mix of normal and italicised text and all of it squashed under 3 rather small and somewhat irrelevant pictures of people. Absolutely awful and not something that should be done when talking about "information overload".

Here are a few images from the keynote. Some of my team who attended Tech.Ed (Right to left: Sausage Dog, Fish & Aladdin)

And the presentation itself (sorry for the image quality - it was taken on a mobile phone), but you can get the idea about the powerpoint.

Oh, I should also mention that the welcoming party was a fairly tame affair, but there's always some one who will do anything to get a girl to rub their leg, even if it involves standing near a guy in a blue lycra outfit...