Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Mark Sowul — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 01:59:50 GMT

Norman: my language bar is one icon in the taskbar, as it was in XP and is in Vista; I don't know you have yours set up but in my options are: docked in the taskbar, show additional language icons unchecked (probably this is the option you want; i know it's a tough one). Minimize and right-click the language bar and play around.

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Igor — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:34:21 GMT

You can't remove system drive. But that icon is kind of pointless. I just bought card reader which registers itself as a mass storage device with four drive letters (it has four slots).

Windows neatly offers me to remove them even though those four "drives" themselves are not removable -- multimedia cards are!

So many design flaws, everywhere you turn there is at least one.

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Norman Diamond — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 04:23:00 GMT

Saturday, August 25, 2007 7:45 AM by Leo Davidson

> neither Windows nor the SATA drivers seem to have a way to

> exclude devices that I never want to remove from that list

Aha, I see. Yes, it would be nice to have a clickable checkbox or two in Device Manager to say "I don't want to remove this device even if the BIOS says I can" and maybe "I want to be able to remove this device even if the BIOS says I can't, because I know where the cable plugs into the jack".

And come to think of it, yeah I saw one weird PC where that icon offers permission to remove the hard drive (system partition = boot partition = C partition, one 12GB hard drive, it's an old machine) but doesn't offer permission to remove the DVD drive (but pull a lever and it pops out). Now I want to try doing it ^_^

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Leo Davidson — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:45:11 GMT

Norman, I agree that it's correct for Windows (and/or the SATA drivers) to be putting my SATA drives in the Safely Remove list. Technically they can be hot-swapped.

The problem I have is that neither Windows nor the SATA drivers seem to have a way to exclude devices that I never want to remove from that list. It means the icon is always there and that when I use it I risk doing something very bad by mistake.

It's not the end of the world (and at least approaching off-topic so I'll shaddup now :)) but there's definitely room for improvement there. Just needs a registry setting or something where you can specify drive letters or devices which should be excluded from the list, I think.

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Norman Diamond — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:52:44 GMT

Thursday, August 23, 2007 5:46 AM by Leo Davidson

> Safely Remove Hardware is nice, except that with some SATA

> drivers all of your harddrives are considered hotplug (like I'm

> about to open my PC up and unplug the system drive!)

Or like you're about to disconnect a cable and unplug a drive, just like you can do with USB drives? Depending on the method of connection, SCSI and I think 1394 could be detached dynamically too. Even plain ATA can be detached, if the BIOS tells Windows in some manner -- and the BIOS can lie about it too. I think this is one place where we shouldn't blame Windows. When Windows displays that icon, it's doing that part of the job correctly.

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Dean Harding — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:10:32 GMT

Leo: The outlook icon is annoying. In fact, if you go into the help and ask "hide notification area icon" it actually shows you how to set it to "Always Hide" in the notification area properties!!

Still, I use it so that I can set Outlook to "Hide when minimized" so at least it's not eating up a whole taskbar button most of the time...

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:22:57 GMT

Leo, that's a shame, because hiding the icons using the shell is like painting over water damage - it may hide the issue, but it doesn't fix the root cause.

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Leo Davidson — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:46:10 GMT

I've written to a few companies asking for them to make their icons optional. Most of the time people write back saying that I should use the "hide inactive icons" feature of the taskbar but that sucks for two reasons:

1) It doesn't work very well and often gets confused about which apps/icons it is meant to be showing or hiding all the time. I don't know exactly how the mechanism works but when I upgrade the .exe for one program that I want always shown it often gets reset to "hide when inactive" an I have to go back in and change the settings yet again. Other programs which change their icon or tooltip often also seem to confuse the taskbar. As a result, I would much rather not use the "hide unused icons" feature at all.

2) There are some icons which I have chosen to hide but still use occasionally (for example, Safely Remove Hardware (see below), and Messenger). There are other icons which I never want to see again in my life. When I click the taskbar arrow to show all icons the useless icons get in the way of quickly finding the useful icons.

In Vista the SideBar is the worst example of this and there's no way to hide its stupid icon. (Only useful thing it does is let you bring he SideBar to the front, which I have never wanted to use and never will want to use.)

The NOD32 anti-virus program has a tray icon that cannot be hidden via its options. If you hide it using the taskbar's settings then the tray icon breaks completely, no longer shows alerts and can no longer be clicked to launch anything. Wonderful. Windows already alerts me if my A/V signatures are out of date so I don't need that thing's icon wasting space.

Safely Remove Hardware is nice, except that with some SATA drivers all of your harddrives are considered hotplug (like I'm about to open my PC up and unplug the system drive!) and there's no way to exclude them, so I *always* have that icon there with options which allow me to at least attempt to do something catastrophic. The system drive will always be in use but if I accidentally disconnect a data drive then I would have to reboot to get it back.

Outlook 2007 shows a new mail icon only when there is new mail. It's also optional. That's all good, except the stupid program also shows another icon all the time which doesn't indicate status and only seems to exist in order to provide about five settings via a menu. Unfortunately they are settings which one would very rarely want to change (and could do so via the Tools -> Options dialog) so the icon is absolutely useless yet mandatory. Sigh.

Final point in reply to the idea of a checkbox during installation: I think it's a good idea. If you're new to the app then you can keep the defaults, see if the icon is useful, and disable it via an Options dialog if it isn't. The important thing is that people installing your software have often used it before and are installing an update or on a new machine. Giving them a quick way to not be bothered by the icon is a good thing.

Larry Osterman isn't that into you, either.

Tales from the Crypto — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:54:06 GMT

In previous articles, I've pointed out: Programmer Hubris - He's just not that into you Programmer

re: Applet Mitigations - Notification Area Handlers

Norman Diamond — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:31:44 GMT

> Norman, I despise the language bar, it's one of the first things

> I turn off on a new installation.

Well that's hardly a solution, and not what I was suggesting.

It's laughable that Windows XP and a few other recent versions allow text services to be turned off, so that users will be unable to input the language of their country and the default language of their Windows system. In comparison, one of the few things that Windows 95 got right was that it didn't allow deleting the last remaining IME that would be needed to input the language of the Windows system.

</digression>

The language bar used to be minimizable to 1 icon in the notification area. That was the right number of icons. Not 4, not 5, not 0.

In Windows 95 you had to install IME 97 or later in order to be capable of minimizing the language bar.

</digression>

By the way on another issue:

> a flurry of complaints from users because they felt that if the

> icon wasn't present, defender somehow wasn't working

There is a good historical reason for this. Sometimes the first indication a person would get about a crash of their antivirus program or firewall would be that they suddenly noticed the relevant icon was missing. XP SP2's security centre has its own icon to make that redundant.