Steve Fenton

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Thursday, 30th August 2012

Writing an application that runs in a square box can be terribly bland, which is why developers are always looking for a way to spice it up. Sometimes using a different shape can make it feel way cool, other times it involves making the application see-through.

The problem with making windows transparent is, rather obviously, that you can see through them. This can result in some rather confusing situations, such as this screenshot from a connection manager application.

At first, all looks well - except the information about "Offline status" and "Offline availability" don't actually belong to this application at all. They are actually properties of a folder that is open underneath the application.

In this instance, they don't make a great deal of sense but you can imagine scenarios where this could actually be quite misleading.

Perhaps our windows applications shouldn't be see-through after all.