Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

Quoting JRL on the forums this morning:

Just noticed the forum recently surpassed 30,000 articles. That’s a lot of shared knowledge. Good job everyone

It is indeed. What’s more is that forum posts almost always result in success for the original poster – i.e. they find out how to achieve their aims or learn something new and this means other people can learn from the posts too.

I recently had cause to look at the forums belonging to a different automation tool. Now I don’t like dissing the competition but it reminded me how fortunate our users are that we have quite possibly the most active and helpful user community and probably the largest knowledge base for our type of software. Some who consider themselves competitors don’t have forums at all. In fact there aren’t many software products – competing or otherwise – with the kind of user support we have.

Thank you!

For the licensing mechanism for our ClipMagic product (ClipMagic is an easy to use Windows Clipboard Extender if you didn’t already know) we adopted a server based activation system. I know that some people have a passionate dislike for software that needs to be activated, but you can’t please everyone. And until now we’ve had no complaints.

Then yesterday we get a ticket with no name and an invalid made-up email address saying simply:

“Unfortunately I purchased your product without realizing it required web authorization. I’ll just use a competing product”.

Now, before I’d seen the email address my immediate reaction was to reply and offer a refund. Perhaps I’m too nice but I don’t see the point in having customers that don’t want to be customers. But then I noticed that if I did reply the email would simply bounce. The “customer” has provided no identifying information at all!

I don’t get it. He says he purchased but doesn’t want it – and won’t activate it. Yet doesn’t want me to know who he/she is and isn’t asking for a refund. So why bother emailing me? Letting off steam perhaps. But it seems odd that there was no request for a refund.

I’ll file it away in our “Strange Emails” category.

Some people have asked why they can’t change the colour of a button that they place onto a custom dialog.

The short answer is that these buttons are standard Windows buttons and are drawn by Windows. And Windows has some “rules”.

Microsoft lays down some design guidelines. Take a look at this document here which says:

If you use standard windows and Windows controls, these border styles are supplied for your application automatically. If you create your own controls, your application should map the colors of those controls to the appropriate system colors so that the controls fit in the overall design of the interface when the user changes the basic system colors.

So, a standard control, like a dialog button will adopt the colour and design as decided by Windows and the user’s system wide preferences and we as the programmer have little or no control over it. Idealistically this is a good thing.

I believe that convention helps usability. If all buttons look alike a user knows it’s a button and so it’s purpose and functionality is obvious.

Of course, there are exceptions and sometimes there may be a reason (justified or not) for ignoring the guidelines and making a button look like something very different, e.g. in a game. So how do you do it? Well, obviously you don’t use standard Button objects.

On the whole Macro Scheduler dialogs are meant to be just that – standard looking Windows dialogs, designed for requesting data from users or giving them choices and controlling macros.

If you want complete freedom to design something snazzy then arguably you are using the wrong technology and should be considering something like Flash or HTML instead. And there’s no reason why such an interface can’t trigger Macro Scheduler macros anyway.

Having said that there are some things you can do to make more glorified looking dialog “buttons”. One option is to use Image objects. Don’t forget that you can respond to a mouse click on any object, so you can easily have a clickable image. You can trap other events too – such as mouse over events. So if you want to be really clever you can have your image’s mouse over event change the image, e.g. to one with a slightly different border style so that the user knows it is the active “button”.