Another Blogger

Random rants and wandering words

1. Joe Cheng [MSFT] Friday, July 13th, 2007 / 10:50

   Great questions!

   > Why does Windows Live Writer use its own font choice for menus, toolbars, and such? Why doesn’t it honor the system font?

   The Windows Live team has its own internal design group that publishes rules for us to follow. (I’m sure they have their reasons but I don’t know what they are)

   > Why do the Windows Live Writer menus (both the pulldown and context menus) look like they were written in Java, rather than with the standard windows UI?

   Because the standard Windows menus don’t let us provide colored icons. This is particularly important for the Insert and Table menus. We went back and forth on whether to use system menus or custom-drawn menus and after seeing both, the custom-drawn menus won.

   > Why does the formatting toolbar have a 2D look-and-feel with a gray background, and the functional toolbar have a 3D look-and-feel with a blue background?

   We’re trying to “bind” the formatting toolbar to the editing region below, while keeping the primary toolbar separate. Also, having two 3D-style toolbars (as we did in the previous release) looked “lumpy”:

   http://www.onfolio.com/writer/ss3.jpg

   As for why there are so many different UI standards/directions… good question, I don’t know. I also wonder why there are so many different product/version naming conventions, even from one version of the same product to the next.

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