tripu

This morning I went running in El Retiro Park with my friend Esteban, as we often do. When I came back home, I wondered how big El Retiro is, relative to other parks I know. El Retiro is fairly big — 4 laps around its perimeter sum up ~18.7 km (~11.6 mi), and that proved a great distance when Esteban and I were training for the Madrid Half Marathon. But if El Retiro is first among all parks for madrileños, it is not because of its size but because of its perfect location, the variety and quality of the sights it offers and its lively atmosphere.

To find out how some parks compare among them, I dug up some data in Wikipedia, and when that wasn’t available, in a few other pages, mainly from city councils etc. The image compares the relative areas of twelve parks in different cities of the world. Absolute areas are also shown, in hectare (10⁴ m²). Ignore shapes, though.

Disclaimer: this selection of parks isn’t intended to be comprehensive or representative of anything. It’s just a bunch of parks I love, from cities I have lived in, or at least visited (the exception to this rule is Central Park: I haven’t been to NYC, but I included Central Park as a reference, for I guess it’s the most famous park worldwide). Finally, this isn’t to prove that Madrid can boast about owning the largest park. Casa de Campo‘s eastmost side is as close to Madrid’s official “city centre” as El Retiro, but in justice it could also be called a forest… Sometimes it’s just a matter of labels, isn’t it?

Important information crammed into a dialogue box which is tiny by default and (even worse) can’t be maximised nor resized. The user is forced to scroll so many times to work with this window, eventually assuming that Microsoft is messing them around even harder than usual.

Especially bad in this particular case, as there are two panels and the information displayed at the bottom depends on the selected item at the top. So it’s not enough to scroll the upper list to read the bottom field — you actually have to keep on jumping between the two panels, sometimes to reveal just the odd line or two that remain hidden beyond the border of the text field.

This criminal dialogue box (plus a few others like this one) has been happily living inside many flavours of Windows for years now. I reckon there must be a very good technical reason to keep things this shitty suboptimal, but I don’t know it.

Why? I mean, why?