Re: The relationship between Desktop and Panel

[John R Sheets <dusk smsi-roman com>]

Dan Kaminsky wrote:
> 
> The number of people who bash Microsoft for doing the same things they do
> are incredible.

Like illegally leveraging their position in the OS market to
absorb and/or snuff out new, competing technologies in other
areas?  Like deliberately altering their software to create
incompatibilities that will force consumers to make a choice
between their stuff and everyone else's?  I personally don't know
of an incredible number of people who do _that_.

> NT4 runs 15 year old applications.

...Yet still has problems running certain applications written in
MS's own MS-DOS.

> >This backward compatibility, as much as anything, leads to
> >everything ending up in the Programs submenu.  You can change
> >that, as a user, after the fact, but it's a lot of work.  You can
> >add your own custom menus above the Programs menu, but few
> >install programs give you that option up front.
> 
> I've never seen one that doesn't.  Every time I install, it's "what folder
> do you want to instlal in?"  then it shows me a list of the folders inside
> of my programs menu.

Yes, and that's exactly my point.  Out of the seven menus on the
Start menu, only **ONE** is even vaguely configurable.  I was
referring to the user items you can place directly on the root
start menu, in parallel with the Start menu, physically above the
Programs icon.  I have yet to see an install program allow you to
put icons there.  It's Programs, and nothing else.

> Would have been nice if there was a shortcut to \WINDOWS\START MENU\ right
> there in the menu.  I mean, there are no .rc files or anything...the start
> menu just follows a directory structure.

Well, if you right-click on an empty space on the Win95 task bar
(heh, almost called it the "panel") and select Properties, you
get a GUI interface to the Programs menu.  It's hard to find, and
should have been IN the start menu, but it does exist.

John