Very cool link 🔗.

How do modern .NET projects have the slowest Settings experience in the world?. I've been staring at this for over a minute

RT @ijsthee: @iupdate Step 1. Hate on how unreadable liquid glass beta 1 is.Step 2. Apple diales it back.Step 3. Hate how there is no liqui….

RT @tenobrus: bro i'm so sick of this shit there's no such fucking thing as "top banana"

RT @uwukko: when are news gonna stop feeling like the onion articles

RT @HeeySora: i wish this behavior actually was against Apple's ToS and i wish i was joking

A great Friday evening

The first build to re-introduce this feature after its disappearance in later Windows 3.1 builds is Windows 95 (Chicago) build 58s. The same sneaky win_ini edit is needed to enable it and it already resembles the modern-day implementation much closer - no old 🪟 visual remains.

Ultimately, this finding moves the debut of Dragging full window contents from 1995 to 1991. 4 years! A crazy difference for how big YoY leaps were in the 90s. I'm happy that early betas like this one managed to sneak out of MS because otherwise history like this would be lost.

The final build of Windows 3.1 goes out of its way to read the value from win_ini but the global variable it gets saved to never gets used again by the window manager.The SPI_GETDRAGFULLWINDOWS property is even present in documentation, just taunting puzzled developers until 1995.

You might be wondering, how come this is only getting figured out now? The answer is simple: while the setting itself stayed, the functionality got removed before Windows 3.1 got finalized. Old books mention the setting with question marks, confused about what it's supposed to do.

✍️ A friend of mine noticed that very early Chicago builds contain the string 'DragFullWindows' in the window manager. As we tried to pinpoint the first occurrence of it, we managed to travel all the way back to Windows 3.1. One can even find books from 1993 mention this setting.

In the video you can see two different work-in-progress implementations of the feature. One where the old window position visual gets dithered and another where it's left intact. As of beta 026 there is no variant which makes the old visual go away instantly like we are used to.

For a long time the "Show window contents while dragging" feature was thought to belong to the Windows 95 development cycle, eventually releasing as part of the Plus! pack. Tracing its origins however revealed a much more interesting story: Windows 3.1 beta 026 already has it! 🪟

I like it 🫧.

RT @nukirisame: nothing in the world makes me angrier than nyt connections yet i play it every single day.

You have the opportunity to set the stage in a world where even Apple is now afraid to let knowledgeable people pick the brains of those directly involved in decision making. Have the courage to make a step in the right direction and take and act on input from someone who cares.

I wish Microsoft would put on some big boy pants and let a knowledgeable, genuinely passionate Windows developer interview the Windows UI leadership. “Line must go up” management mentality caused decisions aside, the internal priorities seem so strange these days.

I want to meet the person who decided that "Edit in Notepad" should show up in every file type's context menu in Windows 11. Ah yes let me open this EXE in a Text Editor 🤨

Most of the time you see a good client UI change land nowadays it’s because of compliance or profit margin chasing that just happened to align with a popular community request. If they actually gave a shit about UX you wouldn’t need to be in the EU 🇪🇺 just to uninstall Edge.

Every time we’re robbed of a good piece of UI we’re told some PR slop about how it simplifies and declutters the interface. That interface then gets gradually re-cluttered over the years, except now in a user-hostile way. So much for ditching the search bar in taskbar in 21H2. 🫡.