My version of Microsoft Windows Vista comes with a screen capture tool called the Snipping Tool. It is a very useful tool which I often use. With this tool you can capture a screen shot (snip) of any part of your screen and save it to the clipboard or to a file in a number of formats (HTML, PNG, GIF, or JPEG). Available snip types include free-form, rectangular, window or full-screen.
One day last week the Snipping Tool suddenly stopped allowing me to save a snip to a file. No error messages or message of any kind. Pressing the Save option simply did not nothing. The warning message about saving a unsaved snip still appeared when exiting the Snipping Tool but did not allow me to save the snip.
After some research I stumbled across the answer. It turns out that I had deleted the Pictures folder in my user folder as part of a cleanup of my folders. I never use that folder so I naively assumed that I could delete it. However if you delete that folder, the Snipping Tool does not display a Save File dialog box. Note that the Snipping Tool does not force you to save a snip in your Pictures folder but does require you to have the folder! You can save the snip anywhere you like provided you have the right permissions.
What a poor user interface design! As part of Vista QA did nobody test this scenario? If it was a deliberate design decision to require the Pictures folder, why not display a dialog box warning the user that the folder is missing and is required?
Showing posts with label Vista. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vista. Show all posts
Google Globetrotting Woes
I am currently on the beautiful island of Cebu in the Philippines visiting with my old friend and colleague Charles Richmond at IISC and giving some talks on OS internals. I use a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate when travelling with Mozilla Firefox 3 as my default browser.
Firefox 3 comes with a default Search Bar on the top right hand corner containing a number of default search engines including Google. If I type a search term in the Google Search Bar option, Google figures out behind the scenes that I am located in the Philippines, redirects me to www.google.com.ph and displays the search results with the interface language set Filipino (also spelt as Pilipino) as shown here.
This is not too much of a hindrance in the Philippines but becoming a total annoyance when in Japan, China, Vietman and many other countries. The standard workaround for this is to force Google to display its interface language in English by going to Google.com and setting your user preferences to English which results in Google.com creating a cookie on your machine to persist your preferences.
Maybe it is a bit of overkill or paranoia but I have Firefox set up to delete all cookies when terminating a session for the purpose of personal privacy and security. Thus Google defaults back to whatever interface language Google defaults to for the country that Google thinks I am currently in the next time I fire up Firefox and go to Google.com.
One way to overcome this problem is not to use the Firefox search bar but instead to browse to www.google.com/ncr where NCR stands for No Country Redirect before performing any searchs. Rather than going this route, I decided to write my own Search Engine plug-in so that I always get an English interface when I use the Firefox Google search toolbar. It turns out that this is quite easy to do once you understand what is required.
Cut and paste the following code into a file called GoogleEN.xml and save the file.
There are a number of ways of adding a custom search plugin to Firefox. The easiest way is probably to use the Firefox extension to add the plugin to the Firefox Search Bar. This will store GoogleEN in your Firefox searchplugins subdirectory. On Windows Vista, this happens to be at
The concept of a custom search plugin could easily be extended to include a number of custom plugins for Spanish, German or any language you desire now that I have shown you how to create a basic search plugin. I have omitted details such as namespace declarations because they are unnecessary for our simple search plugin
As often happens, after I wrote this custom plugin, I came across the Mozilla MyCroft Project which has a similar No Country Redirect plugin. Another useful source of information that I found is the OpenSearch Plugin specification.
Well thats all for today. Time to go out for dinner and some sight seeing.
Firefox 3 comes with a default Search Bar on the top right hand corner containing a number of default search engines including Google. If I type a search term in the Google Search Bar option, Google figures out behind the scenes that I am located in the Philippines, redirects me to www.google.com.ph and displays the search results with the interface language set Filipino (also spelt as Pilipino) as shown here.
This is not too much of a hindrance in the Philippines but becoming a total annoyance when in Japan, China, Vietman and many other countries. The standard workaround for this is to force Google to display its interface language in English by going to Google.com and setting your user preferences to English which results in Google.com creating a cookie on your machine to persist your preferences.
Maybe it is a bit of overkill or paranoia but I have Firefox set up to delete all cookies when terminating a session for the purpose of personal privacy and security. Thus Google defaults back to whatever interface language Google defaults to for the country that Google thinks I am currently in the next time I fire up Firefox and go to Google.com.
One way to overcome this problem is not to use the Firefox search bar but instead to browse to www.google.com/ncr where NCR stands for No Country Redirect before performing any searchs. Rather than going this route, I decided to write my own Search Engine plug-in so that I always get an English interface when I use the Firefox Google search toolbar. It turns out that this is quite easy to do once you understand what is required.
Cut and paste the following code into a file called GoogleEN.xml and save the file.
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>GoogleEN</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search (NCR English)</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
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<Url type="text/html" method="GET"
template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="site" value="ncr" />
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="h1" value="en"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/ncr</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>There are a number of ways of adding a custom search plugin to Firefox. The easiest way is probably to use the Firefox extension to add the plugin to the Firefox Search Bar. This will store GoogleEN in your Firefox searchplugins subdirectory. On Windows Vista, this happens to be at
C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Mozilla\\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\seachplugins\ 
The concept of a custom search plugin could easily be extended to include a number of custom plugins for Spanish, German or any language you desire now that I have shown you how to create a basic search plugin. I have omitted details such as namespace declarations because they are unnecessary for our simple search plugin
As often happens, after I wrote this custom plugin, I came across the Mozilla MyCroft Project which has a similar No Country Redirect plugin. Another useful source of information that I found is the OpenSearch Plugin specification.
Well thats all for today. Time to go out for dinner and some sight seeing.
