Blog

Where balloons come from

January 02, 2006

You may be one of the people who, like me, wonders why more and more crap from Microsoft makes use of the face-stabbingly-irritating tan balloons that pop up from the Windows XP system tray in the lower right corner of the screen. These balloons inform you of critical information like:

You haven't participated in the survey yet!

A new piece of hardware was found! Nothing can be done about this fact!

Your wireless networking alert level for the next 30 seconds is: Orange

Your caps lock is not on!

Your computer is constantly out of date! Throw it away!

And so on. Well, it turns out that THIS is where they come from. My favorite part is where the author (who is apparently part of MSDN) unironically refers to the text that you would choose to put into the necessarily transient little balloons as "your important message."

Heartening footnote: Since this is a blog entry, the comments following it are filled with vitriolic spew about how stupid the little bubbles are. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who thinks they're awful.

Less heartening footnote: There are Microsoft employees who post vitriolic replies of their own defending the balloon, and saying that it isn't distracting. You can't more literally not listen to your users than that.

Posted by rus at 08:14 PM

Comments

Funny, as I'm reading your post I have a little balloon coming up EVERY 30 seconds FOR 30 seconds telling me that "Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server" Doesn't it try to do this all day every day? It's like a little balloon telling me "Hard Drive is now spinning". Seems odd that it would inform me of this. Now the reason it is doing this is because it is having trouble connecting, why not just tell me that? And why not do it once?

As a side note, my personal favorite Useless Balloon Set (or UBS for short) is the series you get when you attach a USB drive of some sort. At last count they show you 9 messages, none of which do you need to do anything about, and 3 of which say the same thing. Awesome.

Posted by: Greg D at January 3, 2006 07:20 AM

My favorite balloon is the one that pops up after you have lost all your unsaved work because some "critical" patch decided that it was more important to restart your computer without asking you first.

Posted by: Mark Sladden at January 3, 2006 08:25 AM

I haven’t seen a popup balloon in the last year.

In TweakUI, The Program That Makes Windows Tolerable yet Isn’t Installed Automatically For Some Reason, “Enable balloon tips” is an option on the “Taskbar and Start menu” section.

And the comments to Raymond Chen’s blog post taught me how to disable the infuriating Desktop Cleanup Wizard as well! Go into the Display properties, Desktop, Customize Desktop, Disable soul-sucking semi-monthly annoyance.

My computer feels better already. (And Raymond Chen’s blog is actually worth reading to find out about the reasoning behind some of Window’s crazy Windowsisms. The things his team does to make old software work on new versions of Windows can be quite extraordinary.)

Posted by: Shawn at January 3, 2006 11:07 AM

The temperature in your rooms is comfortable. It is not too hot. Do not open windows in an attempt to regulate the temperature. --Harvard

Posted by: Theresa at January 3, 2006 11:18 AM