by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/11/03, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/11/03/9029684.aspx
At this point, I am convinced that people are afraid of the Suggestion Box.
Because even if the question would completely make sense to be there, people still send it to me via the Contact link and thus become part of a big file of potentiasl questions that I may or may not get to at some point that no one else never sees.
I think I am going to have to reword my text meant to dissuade people from doing that or something....
Anyway, one of the sent-via-the-Contact-link-but-shoulda-been-put-in-the-Suggestion-Box question I got was:
Is there a way to (manually) rearrange the order of input languages in the language bar (and also possibly the different keyboard layouts under each of those languages)?
Excellent question!
Well, actually I'll say excellent questions since there are two in there.
These days it does seem like the two subject areas I do the most
advisory work in are still keyboards and collation, despite the fact
that my actual job is so very different now. So it is interesting to get a question involving changing the order of lists of keyboards, the same way it presumably would be interesting to get a question on how one would type in a sort. :-)
Unfortunately, the answer to the first question is no; there is no documented or supported way to change the order of the languages in the Language Bar.
Also, just as unfortunately, the answer to the second question is also no; the keyboard layouts underneath each language also have no documented/supported way to be re-ordered.
For both questions, the intent was to ask if there was a way to do them manually, but there is also no programmatic way, either.
As features go, this is one that in my opinion would make some sense to provide, if not programmatically then at least manually. Because if you have two or more layouts then being able to control not just the default for each new input queue but also the ordering of the various lists when lists exist would make some real sense, for the sake of usability.
You know, handled in a way similar to the whole "lock the taskbar" type functionality where if you turn off the checkbox you are free to drag stuff around a bit. I could get behind that kind of a feature. Especially in my case where I am constantly adding and removing random keyboards for various reasons, but even users who have a more static list might want a simple re-ordering they could do once and then not have to worry about again....
Though surprising as it may be, Windows features are not always triaged according to what I personally thinks might make sense. :-)
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