I just installed and ran the latest version of Lavasoft’s Ad-aware Free (Anniversary Edition) and was disappointed by the general fuzziness of the text.

So, I grabbed one of my favorite tools, Spy++ to do a little bit of technology spelunking. The interesting thing was that there was only a single window in use:

The fuzziness of the text initially made me think GDIPlus, but a quick scan using Depends seemed to indicate that wasn’t the case:

The text rendering just isn’t right:

For example, check out the kerning of the “e” and the “m” above.  I tried the same text in Photoshop (wondering if it was a bitmap from a common image generation tool):

But, it looks fine in every aliasing option.

It wasn’t GDI, or GDI+:

And not WPF:

There are probably a handful of toolkits that it could be, but I don’t have the patience to try a match anymore.

I’m just not sure why they’d take the time to not use a standard Windows provided text / graphics engine? I’m not opposed to an architecture that minimizes HWND usage to increase efficiency or allow for some unique user experiences (like skinning), but why go this far? What’s the gain? When the quality of text isn’t near perfect, why wouldn’t you abandon the technique? Anyone know?

From Smashing Magazine: 9 Common Usability Mistakes in Web Design.

Some great tips.

For #1, I definitely appreciate web sites that use actual decent clickable areas for page navigation. These aren’t too bad for example (from MSDN):

But there’s still too many web sites like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 … 31 32

The clickable area for each page is no wider than the width of the character! Don’t forget that not everyone has the mouse dexterity of a 14 year-old avid game player! :)