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Submission details

59 +69/-10 votes

Dotted Lines on Selection

Submitted by crestind on June 12, 2008 to Aesthetics, Legacy

Before Windows had all the fancy light up effects, it used a dotted line to show when something was selected. But now that we do have all the glow effects, except for you XP holdouts, the line is unnecessary and ugly.

Remove the dotted line except for special circumstances such as high-contrast.

Low

Low

Not fixed

Discussion (12 comments)

crestind wrote on June 12, 2008, 6:08pm

I remember those lines from my first computer... Packard Bell with Windows '95 and FREE Encarta.

crestind wrote on June 12, 2008, 6:12pm

Changed problem description.

crestind wrote on June 12, 2008, 6:14pm

Changed problem description.
Changed solution description.

wasker wrote on June 12, 2008, 6:15pm

Voted down. Dotted line is a must.

.Chris wrote on June 12, 2008, 8:06pm

why is it a must? its ugly as hell. eveything else in vista has glow or a teal/blueish hover...

tino wrote on June 12, 2008, 8:47pm

I also think it is not a must. There should be a better design for this. Especially on round buttons like the pearls in Photo Gallery, it looks really ugly to have a square, dotted rectangle around it.

But the element is necessary for keyboard control.

brian.shapiro wrote on June 12, 2008, 11:15pm

They can probably now do a better job with effects in Aero, so they should look at it, but I don't think a dotted line is necessarily 'ugly', just not pretty.

ion wrote on June 13, 2008, 9:01am

It's funny because sometimes this dotted border won't disappear from desktop icons. I can see there were some work to hide it but sometimes it just remains there until the desktop looses focus.

Nidonocu wrote on June 14, 2008, 11:11pm

Keyboard focus is a needed thing to be visible, but it could certainly look a lot better.

eikonoklastes2 wrote on November 18, 2008, 11:14am

They've updated this in Windows 7. It's now a blue rectangle that looks much better than the dots.

nyp wrote on May 8, 2009, 12:30pm

This is not fixed in Windows 7, period.

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