On the Windows Phone 8, the latest MSFT phone OS, you have a nice Theme selection option, which says:
"Change your phone's background and accent color to suit your mood today, this week or all month"
Quite attractive!
The feature proposes two settings:
On 'Background', you have two options: Light / Dark
On 'Accent color', you have a palette of 21 colors (which seems to be a pretty little choice on a device that, according to the manufacturer, can display 65000 colors or more!)
I should admit, that not having a choice is in a way less time consuming. May be this was the initial OS designer's intended objective.
Now let us leave WP and go back to the desktop machine to have a look at Microsoft Office 2013.
Here too, you have a nice feature to select your theme.
You have the choice between:
- White
- Light gray
- Dark grey
The difference between the three is really too subtle:
I tried them all, and ended up by selecting 'Dark': a little more readable!
On another point: after all the literature about the 'user interface design guidelines', it now seems that Microsoft Office apps are the only applications that can keep being outside of any graphical constraints. Those guys are really too spoiledJ
Conclusion
It seems that someone at MSFT has decided to re-form our education about colors. The 'monochrome' seems to be the new MSFT User Interface Strategy (you can check yourself: Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 2013…)
Some people may find this abusive… but, in a way, we are much less embarrassed with this new reduced theme strategy… we may gain more time to think about things more useful!
It is quite useful and handy to synchronize SQL replicated databases through the Windows Synchronization Manager. You simply click the Sync Manager / Click Microsoft SQL Server / Right-click the desired subscription to synchronize and click Sync. Easy and great!
Annoying problems appear in some particular cases. I encountered one of these cases when I had an orphaned subscription (i.e. a subscription that doesn't have any more a declared publication). This may happen when, for instance, the publisher server doesn't exist anymore… or when the publication had been deleted in some circumstances.
The annoyance is that in this case, Windows Sync Manager continues to display the orphaned subscription and you have no means to delete it as this requires contacting the publisher which may not exist anymore and/or deleting the subscription from a publication which may not exist either!.
At this phase, you indeed have little choices… the most reasonable would be to leave this orphaned subscription displayed and simply ignore it (though a little frustratingJ)… That was what I did until I found some time to dig through (little information, if any, is available on this):
I ended up by finding that Windows Synchronization Manager reads the list of its displayed subscriptions in the registry key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.INSTANCE\Replication\Subscriptions
(MSSQL10.INSTANCE is the SQL version and instance of the subscriber server… which, in the figure below, is MSSQL10.SQL2008).
The subscriptions node contains one key per subscription with required synchronization settings.
I simply deleted the key related to the orphaned subscription. To avoid Windows mysteries, I also restarted the machineJ. That now works as I would like. (Craftsmanship again!)
Browsers add-ons and plug-ins are nice features that can sometimes become annoying. Flash Player, for instance, is nice but extensively used in boring commercial ads.
Fortunately you can either disable the annoying add-on or allow it to run only on specific sites.
To do this in Internet Explorer:
- First click Internet options / Programs / Manage add-ons.
- Select the add-on and click More Information.
- By default, the add-on is allowed to run on all sites. This is displayed as * (asterisk). Click Remove all sites.
- Click OK to confirm your choice and close the Internet options dialog. You are done.
- Now, the add-on will no more be executed on any web site.
- In fact, each time a web site needs to run the add-on, IE will ask you if you want to allow it to run on this specific site.
- The list of allowed web sites is then maintained by Internet explorer.
After some weeks / months / years… this list may become quite long.
Now, what to do to remove just ONE site or TWO of this allowed list?
Internet Explorer allows you to REMOVE ALL SITES… There is no button to remove just ONE site!
So, you remove all sites and start a new history again… More annoying than letting the add-on run on all sites… isn't it?
WHERE does IE keep this list? Mystery!
After a lot of search, I didn't find any information. Until….
Yes… it is in the registry (Please be extremely cautious when modifying this vital thing: The registry)
HKey_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Stats\[add-on class ID]\iexplore\AllowedDomains
Example for Flash Player add-on:
When all sites are allowed:
When only some are:
Now, if we want to delete just ONE web site, simply delete its key.
Again: Please be extremely cautious when modifying this vital thing: The registry