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- Smart Software Should Get Out of Your WayNovember 25
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I shudder when I hear about how software needs to be “smart.” It’s not because I think today’s software is smart enough already (it’s not), but because all too often “smart” translates to “intensely annoying.”If you believe the tech pundits, “smart” software should predict what we’ll do so it can perform the next action faster. “Smart” software should automatically correct our mistakes. And “smart” software should adjust its user interface based on the features we’ve used in the past.
Sounds nice enough, but I’ve rarely seen software do these things without causing even more frustration than it attempts to solve. It ends up being less like a helpful coworker and more like that annoying braniac every office is plagued with who constantly interrupts you with advice on working smarter by doing things his way.
We all know that guy – he’s textbook smart but socially inept. Which is a good description of much of today’s software.
In the semi-perfect world I keep in my head, “smart software” is software that gets the hell out of my way. It doesn’t try to guess what I’m going to do next, doesn’t constantly offer me “helpful” tips, and doesn’t move things around on me in an attempt to suit my needs. And above all, it doesn’t try to predict what I’m going to do,
- The Increasing Importance of DiscoverabilityNovember 25
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It’s incredibly easy to try out new applications these days - especially web-based ones since they don’t even need to be installed. And the more applications that people try, the more important that discoverability becomes.People who try out an application don’t want to spend any time learning it. They want to get started with it now, see what it does now, and cast it aside now if it doesn’t fulfill their needs. If they can’t discover the features they need right away, they’ll look elsewhere. It’s not like it’s a huge investment of their time to Google for your competition.
Read the help file? Are you kidding? Nobody reads the help file these days. If someone can’t figure out your application by simply using it, you’re screwed if you think you can rely on your help file to explain it to them. Customers would rather try out your competition than read your documentation.
If you want to grab potential customers, you’ve got to make your most important features easily discoverable so that new users won’t miss them. Your next trick is to do that without creating a level of toolbutton overload that would intimidate those same new users
- Windows Vista Gets a Bad RapNovember 24
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From what I can tell, the general opinion of Windows Vista is that it sucks. And to be honest, when I first tried Vista on my Dell laptop, I also thought it sucked. It was slow, it crashed all the time, and I couldn’t see any compelling reason to upgrade my desktop system from XP.
But a couple months ago I bought a new desktop system that came pre-loaded with Vista, and much to my surprise, I like it. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not the slightest bit revolutionary, but I still like it better than XP.
Of course, getting it pre-installed on a new system with Vista-compatible hardware is a big reason it’s more reliable for me than it was. One of the things that hurt Vista out of the gate was poor driver support. In particular, buggy graphics drivers destabilized the OS, leading many people (myself included) to revert back to XP.
Now that I’m running Vista on a decent system, I find it even more reliable than XP. And now that I’ve had enough time to explore the “new” OS, I’m finding a lot of things I like.
So what’s my favorite Vista feature? It makes my software look
- Favicon Hell: Small Feature, Big CodeNovember 23
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A couple years ago, FeedDemon started displaying favicons – you know, those little 16x16 icons that web sites use to brand themselves. It was a popular addition, because it’s much easier to tell your feeds apart when they don’t all use the same generic feed icon.It seemed like such a simple feature at the time. Just check the root folder of the feed’s homepage for the favicon, download it if it exists, then display it in FeedDemon. No big deal, right?
Bah.
The first problem was web sites that lied when I requested the favicon. They’d use the wrong MIME type, so I couldn’t rely on that to determine if I was actually getting an image. And all too often they’d indicate that the favicon existed by responding with an HTTP 200, but instead of returning a favicon they’d give me an HTML document that contained a 404 error message. So that meant writing code to handle that situation.
The next problem was the sheer number of favicons that used the ICO file extension but turned out to be bitmaps. Or GIFs. Or PNGs. Or JPEGs. Or some undiscoverable format. Which meant writing code to detect the true image format, and more code to convert them to Windows icons (something I didn’t get right until last week’
- The Value of Automated Error ReportingNovember 12
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The past few releases of FeedDemon have an included an error reporting feature which captures unexpected problems and sends us detailed reports on what went wrong. If you’ve never seen this feature in action (and I hope you haven’t), it looks like this:
I’ve been going over the past few months of error reports, and much to my surprise, I discovered that the top three most common problems were never reported in our support forums. If I didn’t add error-reporting to FeedDemon, it’s possible that I’d never have known about these bugs – so if you’re a software developer and you don’t have a similar feature, perhaps that will convince you to add one!
The downside to having an error reporting feature is the dismay you’ll feel if you discover – as I did – that a huge number of problems aren’t your fault, but are instead caused by third-party software (especially anti-virus programs, buggy graphics drivers, and flaky web browsers). These are the most frustratin