Small Annoyances

What do VMWare Workstation, Windows Media Player and the Windows Volume Control have in common?
They each annoy me on a daily basis.

I use VMWare on a daily basis, it’s a top notch product that saves me a lot of grief whether I’m writing applications, testing programs for release or playing with services/daemons such as Apache or Postfix and conducting what-ifs but I’ve recently noticed a small glitch that is driving me nuts. When ever I open a new VMWare instance and I’m listening to music the volume goes up by a fair amount, I’ve never noticed this before so it may be new or it maybe I’ve just never noticed over the hum of the servers and the whine of the project managers.

Next up in my list of small annoyances is WMP, why does this application ALWAYS try and ‘help’ me by changing the window size? It either maximises the window if it’s a newly opened instance or it almost maximises if the window was already open anything under a full screen.

Lastly in this little rant is the Windows Volume Control applet, when you open this the widget that gets the focus, by default, is the volume control balance. Now this may not seem like an annoyance but if i hit the scroll wheel on my mouse, and I always have a scroll mouse, then its setting changes and not the more logical volume. Lets look at usage patterns for a second, what is more likely in day to day use, you need to alter the setup so the right speaker is a little quieter or that you actually want to change the volume?

None of these are really show-stopping bugs or stop me from using the programs but the really annoying part is that if they were open source I could change the code and make it all better, even if only for myself.