| > ... people who have never used a computer before. They don't know which window is focused if there are several on screen at once This isn't just a problem for beginners: I'm old hat and I sometimes can't tell what Windows 10 has given focus to at times when I have several things on the go, especially over two or more screens where windows overlapping isn't the obvious go-to clue. The distinction between focused and not is sometimes so close to non-existent it might as well be completely non-existent (like the titlebar text+icons being a slightly different shade of grey), and it varies from app to app (even amongst Microsoft's output) so there is not one set visual cue to follow. It definitely used to be better than this, including in Windows land. When I get around to it (so probably never!) I intend to write a little tool that scans for the top-most window and draws a bright border around/over it somehow. I know this is possible (and probably not difficult) as I did some similar hacky window decorating back in the Win2K days[‡], but I've been almost entirely a database+infrastructure fellow for more than a decade and my desktop dev knowledge has rotted terribly. [†] an always-on-top window positioned so it is a line across the top of the focused window would do, four such objects, one for each side, would be the easy hacky way to achieve a border, a single drawing surface with transparency and mouse click-through would be cleaner but with my current skillset more faf working out the relevant API jiggery-pokery or finding a library that wraps that nicely already [‡] Using Delphi. Anyone else remember that? Does it still exist in a similar form? |