I made some changes to my dogfood machine
I’ve made some changes with my dogfood machine. I’m still using the Windows 7 beta, but I’m making changes centered around 2 areas: accessibility and international testing.
First, I’ve changed my font setting for dots per inch from the default of 96 to 120. This makes the text on the screen easier for me to read by making it larger and can also expose scaling bugs. I remember getting my first laptop in 2003 and noticing the default setting on it was 120 DPI instead of the 96 DPI for every desktop I had ever seen. After a week or so at this setting, I will move to 133 dots per inch. Past that, my small screen on my tablet becomes harder to use since the fonts and other UI become so large on my 1024x768 resolution. I’ll keep increasing it, though.
If you don't want to change these settings yourself to see what the difference is, here is what I see at 96 dots per inch:
Here's the same dialog at 120:
At those two levels the changes may appear subtle. But when I get to 192, this is what I will be seeing:
At this point, the large font causes word wrap to be used on that second line down. If the dialog has hard coded sizes, that could cause the last option to be cut off, truncated or even be missing. It's one of the things I'll be looking for.
Also, I’ve changed my regional settings to Japanese. So now when I see dates and times on OneNote pages, I see this:
Email and other applications will use these settings too.
This is pretty easy to set up in Vista and Windows 7 – just go the Control Panel | Regional Settings applet. From there, you can set Windows to use a huge variety of settings to use. We want to make sure that our software can work worldwide and we need to verify we work in the situation that someone from (in this case) Japan can share a notebook with me and I see the expected settings. Once again, I will be changing this as time goes by.
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John