Something funny I noticed in Windows Vista. Their “Connect to a Wireless Network” dialog works a little funny. Take a look, if I open it one way, I get this:
If I open it another way, I get this:
spot the difference? Ignore the fact that there’s an extra network (they seem to come and go around my house), and realize that this is a non-resizable dialog... the second one looks like it’s ignoring my DPI settings (at least in the bottom-half – the title is properly scaled).
It’s just something I noticed about Vista – it seems to be a lot less High-DPI friendly compared to Windows XP. Which is odd – surely the number of people with high DPI displays is increasing, making it more important? Oh well, I guess this is beta software!
While I’m on this subject, they also have this “new” method for doing high DPI where they basically just scale the whole window’s bitmap to match the DPI of the display. But it’s absolutely horrible and I switched back to “Windows XP-style DPI” as soon as I found the option, which didn’t try to out-smart the application. You see, 90% of applications written with the Win32 API “just work” in a higher-DPI (because dialog templates are specified in “dialog units” which are DPI-independent). The “new” method has to be turned off on an application-by-application basis, and it’s a real PITA. Anyway, it’s usually only those crappy “skinned” applications which don’t work properly (some do, like Windows Media Player). But I try to avoid those as much as possible...