Betalogue

Here’s a little movie that really says it all:

Do you see an I-beam cursor anywhere in there? I sure don’t. In this movie, I am simply typing (with the extra space between “This” and “is,” of course, since I cannot see my cursor and therefore cannot see that I already typed a space) and then I am selecting text, first with keyboard shortcuts, and then with the mouse.

How is one supposed to know where the insertion point is if one cannot see the I-beam cursor? If you are “smart” enough to use white text over a black background by default, why aren’t you smart enough to use a white I-beam cursor when the background colour is black?

And of course the problem is not limited to text boxes and to black. It affects any text that is formatted with a dark background. In all those cases, the I-beam cursor is at best barely visible and that makes editing the text particularly painful and error-prone.

For the record, the text box in the movie above was created using one of Word 2011’s own “quick styles” for text boxes, in the Ribbon. So it’s not like I created a totally unusual and unexpected situation here.

After all these years, Microsoft is still unable to guarantee the most basic aspects of their software’s usability.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.