Auto-hide is one of the most frustrating things in the world. Is there a utility to change auto-hide behavior?

[CZroe]

Even since I first got a monitor capable of greater than 640x480 resolution, I couldn't WAIT to ditch "autohide" in Windows (then, Win95) and never enable it again. Unfortunately, it's a necessity on my widescreen netbook with it's limited vertical resolution.

Originally posted by: CZroe ranting
So, I've been using it for a few months and it's like I've regressed to 1995... ARGH! It has all the same usability issues, such as not always going away when you need it to, popping up in your way when you don't want it to, refusing to come up when you DO want it to (prompting me to just hit the windows key), etc. ARGH! If anything, it's worse in this day and age due to the necessity of touchpads and the lower likelihood of having a mouse available. Just try to use mIRC while switching between channels and other apps or moving the insertion point to correct typos (you don't want to bump the wrong arrow key in mIRC). Having to repeatedly click in the field (at the bottom of the screen) to type in a channel causes constant clashes with the taskbar popping up and entirely covering the field you wanted to click and type in. Going back to correct a typo is almost scary. Yeah, you could take advantage of the MDI interface by reducing the channel to a window within a window so you can position the input field wherever you want (away from the taskbar), but that makes the Windows unusably small in an already cramped screen resolution and it makes the application's window-switching "taskbar" (meant to switch between the maximized windows) an incredible waste of space. If the application had a status bar by default, it would be easier, but why trade one intrusion on the usable space for another?

It seems that the majority of the issues come from the way you manually reveal it rather than the way it automatically hides, so this could be fixed without even renaming the feature. Why not just make it go away automatically and only appear when you, the user, either presses the CTRL+ESC, the Windows key, or moves the pointer all the way down off the screen (or the last line) and click? The problems with it not always going away when it's in your way could be fixed with a simple "hide" button that you can enable whether auto-hide is enabled or not. Some people may not always want auto-hide but still may need to hide it often. Moving or resizing the taskbar every time they want to type in a bottom-aligned field is a hassle. I'm hoping that there is a utility or something that can approximate this behavior. Obviously, Microsoft has no intention of fixing or improving it. They need to go back to UI Design 101 if they ever hope to claim "intuitive usability" as a reason to use Windows.

Originally posted by: Another CZroe rant
I don't expect Microsoft to fix this... after all, file copy dialogs still steal focus and cancel with a press of the space bar (which is pretty common if you were typing words in another app), the start menu editing customization still often require closing and reopening the menu, and the Windows XP system tray hiding features still glitch when you close apps. Ironically, it was done better, earlier, by PC Magazine's TrayManager in Win9x/ME. To see that they still haven;t fixed features that were never really useable since their introduction tells me that MS wanted them to be "flaky" by design (so you' assume it was fixed, say, in Vista or Windows 7 and buy it). No single human being has tried to reorganize and rename Start Menu items from within the Start Menu without encountering those glitches since the feature was first allowed in Win95's IE4 Desktop Update, so you can't say that the creators considered it "done enough" to release and never fix when they knew that every single users using it would encounter their sloppy work (still there in 98, 98SE, ME, 2K, XP, and even in Vista if you revert to the XP-style start menu). It's not that MS doesn't know how to design a proper UI, it's that they set the guidelines and then REFUSE to follow them. For example, I don't blame them for my netbooks shoddy wireless network card, but when I disable and enable it under the Network Connections control panel applet, I don't expect to look back and see that it's still disabled with no error message. When doing it again and watching the "Enabling..." dialog closely, I see it flash "Connection Failed" and disappear a second later without even so much as a sound. Why would a status dialog that KNOWS it encountered an error allow itself to close without ensuring that the very user it was attempting to communicate with got the message? SLOPPY PROGRAMING AND GUIDELINES. Where in MS' UI guidelines does it say that an error dialog must disappear in less than a second and have no acknowledgement buttons or obvious indications left behind? If I have to wait for any reason while it keeps me advised of what is going on, it stands to reason that I may look away or do something else while I wait with the expectation that I can come back and see if it was successful or it there was a problem.

 

[Qbah]

Man, I would LOVE this for my netbook! I have no clue if anything similar is available... Autohide with you needing to click the bottom for the task bar to show up would rock. It's so frustrating when you're on a touchpad and want to get to a low part of your screen and the bloody bar pops out! And then you have to go above it and sometimes also click and try again... Or it doesn't want to hide and that hide button would solve it soooo easily... Bookmarked this one for any chance of such an application to exist

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: Qbah
Man, I would LOVE this for my netbook! I have no clue if anything similar is available... Autohide with you needing to click the bottom for the task bar to show up would rock. It's so frustrating when you're on a touchpad and want to get to a low part of your screen and the bloody bar pops out! And then you have to go above it and sometimes also click and try again... Or it doesn't want to hide and that hide button would solve it soooo easily... Bookmarked this one for any chance of such an application to exist

What I would REALLY hope for is a way to move the mouse cursor to the bottom of the screen and just keep moving, causing the whole desktop to scroll down a tiny bit rather than cover the applications... kind like those video drivers that support a larger resolution than your display and simply "pan around within it" using your mouse cursor. My old ATI Rage card could do that in 1996. This would solve the problem of dragging things onto the taskbar to switch to another app and then continue dragging into that app. Of course, if the behavior were done right by Microsoft, it could be "click or drag-onto to reveal."

I've been searching for utilities all day but there are no shortage of apps CALLED "Taskbar" (as if we want other "bars" cluttering up the screen) and apps that hide buttons on the task bar, so finding something like this through Google it seems to be a lost-cause. The best I could turn up is a little app called TaskBar Hider 1.0 that shows/hides the taskbar with a shortcut key (Win+X by default) and adds a near-useless system tray icon. They could at least justify the system tray icon by allowing you to left-click to hide & right-click for properties menu, but there isn't even a "hide" option in the menu! Regardless, if I can't find anything better, I think I'll be using this little app A LOT.

EDIT: AWESOME! I see that they have the source code (Visual C++). Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could use this to make a utility with:
1: A tray or quick-launch icon with a click-to-hide option
2: The ability to unhide when either the windows key is pressed along (steals focus) or a hotkey is pressed
3: The option to reveal by moving to the bottom and clicking (may not be possible without something replacing the missing taskbar and occupying a single row of pixels)
4: Fix the bug where it is impossible to dismiss the tray icon's menu without selecting something/clicking it and deselecting it.

I wonder if this works with Vista and Windows 7?

Originally posted by: CZroe rants again
Along the same vein as having a "manual hide" button to trigger the feature when needed without enabling it for good, I'd like a "Enable Hibernate and Hibernate" button or an option to enable but only create a hibernation file when hibernating. Yes, I understand that you don't want a hibernation file getting fragmented when you want to quickly dump RAM contents and read them back when restoring, but I also understand that you can't always dedicate the storage space and yet you may need to suspend regardless of the setting. For example, my netbook has an 8GB SSD of which dedicating 1.5GB of storage to a hibernation file would be unreasonable. Yes, you may often have the room for it but the feature is not going to magically enable and disable itself for you as you offload things to external drives and other computers. So, what happens when you are knee-deep in so many things that you can't finish immediately, but your battery is dying and you don't want to close down? For example, IE doesn't handle saving multiple browser tabs with back-buffers as well as Chrome/Firefox, but poor netbook performance often necessitates it. You should be able to squeak out as much time as you can on batteries continuing the work and then manually hibernate when the battery goers critical. Instead, you have to waste that precious little time on batteries to enable hibernate through multiple dialogs (takes a VERY long time on a slow 8GB Acer Aspire One SSD), which is a severe interruption when you are desperately trying to do as much as you can before running out of juice. Thanks a lot MS. Why can't I have my "Hibernate" button anyway and just automate the process of enabling and creating a Hibernation file? Hell, it wouldn't be bad if it just waited until the first hibernation to create the 1.5GB hibernation file, considering that I could deal with that (just disable, delete, enable, and it'll be ready to use when you absolutely need it without wasting 20% of your storage space in the mean time).

 

[Ken g6]

Have you tried:

1. Right-click the taskbar.
2. Click Properties
3. Uncheck BOTH auto-hide the taskbar AND keep the taskbar on top of other windows

That appears to keep the taskbar hidden, when another window is maximized, unless you press the start button or Ctrl-Esc, etc.

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: Ken g6
Have you tried:

1. Right-click the taskbar.
2. Click Properties
3. Uncheck BOTH auto-hide the taskbar AND keep the taskbar on top of other windows

That appears to keep the taskbar hidden, when another window is maximized, unless you press the start button or Ctrl-Esc, etc.

Hidden, and inaccessible. You can't drag something to another application and switch to it by dwelling on the Taskbar button and you can't bring it to the front without stealing focus (Win key). It also completely destroys your ability to search through and minimize applications one by one by clicking the taskbar button once to bring to the front and again to minimize (something that also often inexplicably stops working and has never been fixed in 15 years). Microsoft: If it can be done without losing any functionality with limited annoyance, why not put a little extra thought into it before settling for the next 15+ years?

 

[techmanc]

Not gonna muck around with my taskbar but would moving the taskbar to the top to the screen help at all ?

 

[Qbah]

It's about the task bar not taking space when not needed and easily accessible on demand when needed. Putting it on top will annoy the same... if not more (I use Chrome for example, takes the least space on the screen, the address bar is very high)