"Let me push Alt just in case a secret UI shows up" is up there with XKCD's famous "change the screen resolution" troubleshooting strip [1]. It should not be a thing. But here we are.

And unfortunately, while the "change the screen resolution" is becoming less common, burying features in undiscoverable places is getting worse and worse.

What I hate the most about this is that (unlike aforementioned off-screen dialog bugs) designers/developers are doing it on purpose. Please stop! Other people have to use your software!

[1] http://www.xkcd.com/1479/

In a funny coincidence, just a few minutes ago I got an email indicating that an off-screen dialog bug I reported on Windows 8 almost three years ago has been fixed. (Actually I think it was fixed early last year in a Windows Technical Preview build - two years after I reported it!)

I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match:

  +----------------+
  |                |
  |                |
  |    External    |
  |                | +--------------+
  |                | |              |
  +----------------+ |   ThinkPad   |
                     |              |
                     +--------------+

When Windows 8 introduced the new file copy/move/delete dialogs, it also introduced a bug. With this monitor arrangement, the dialog would be displayed offscreen:

  +----------------+
  |                |
  |                | [Dialog]
  |    External    |
  |                | +--------------+
  |                | |              |
  +----------------+ |   ThinkPad   |
                     |              |
                     +--------------+

Oops.

Just like in the XKCD, the modal dialog locked up the File Explorer window that had opened the dialog. After running into this many times I figured out a workaround using keyboard shortcuts to move the dialog back onscreen.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-f...

Knowing about Alt+Spacebar has been invaluable.

Can you summarize what that does for those of us who don't know?

Pops up a menu in the corner of the active window with Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close. If the window is off screen, the menu should pop up within screen bounds anyway.

Also accessible by right clicking a titlebar, for anybody who's familiar with that one.

I still use iTunes 10.7 because it was the last version before they (in my opinion) ruined the navigation and menus.

IMHO Apple's user interfaces have been getting less intuitive and more buggy with every release. I actually had to use Google to figure out how to disable shuffle on my iPhone.

Another annoyance with iTunes is that they removed the border. If it's placed over a white background, you can't tell where the iTunes window ends. Minimalism done right can be a beautiful thing. When it's done wrong (it's very difficult to get right), it's a disaster.

hiding != taking away

Or put longer: hiding functionality with out actually taking away the need to manually interact with the function is a superficial design utility improvement.