Common Sense 4 Common People

Blunders from Apple? No never!

I am sick and tired of hearing all the newly enlightened Apple enthousiasts about how cool Apple and Macs are. Everything is so cute! Everything "just works"! Everything is so fast! Everything is so well designed!

Hallucinations can be really great while they last, so just beat the heck out of it man!

Anyway, while I was working late tonight trying to unravel the mysteries of SBP2 all of a sudden the Apple installation toolkit decides to give me a break and tells me that I should install something which I can't remember. It was a mere 2MB download so I said what the heck.

Next thing I know, it asks me to reboot and I kindly decline. However it seems that it couldn't make up its mind whether it was done or not with me, so it started checking again for additional software updates! So it comes up with a new window informing me that I should "update" QuickTime 7.5 and Safari, which of course I didn't have installed on the first place so how could I possibly update them. Just for the record, a mere 28MB and 22MB download each, while the Opera browser that I use is a mere 8.5MB that is if you get the international version.

One thing struck me a bit odd. What the hell is "Safari"?
Of course I do know that it is a browser, but shouldn't they at least qualify it with a subtitle, like "Safari browser"? I mean, I DON'T have it installed on my machine and still they expect me to KNOW what "Safari" is? That's some confidence I must admit, but they did go overboard this time!

Being the curious guy that I am I clicked on "Safari" in order to see the description they provided for it. And here's what expected me:

Wow wow wow!!! Safari is "WhichDescription()". Now I am enlightened too :-D

Needless to say, I unchecked Safari because I don't browse the jungle in the first place and I thought of giving QuickTime 7.5 a try. After a minute or so of downloading, I get a beautiful error message telling me that "There were installation errors".

Think about it, isn't it just so cute? It could have said "There WILL be installation errors" but they didn't want to sound almighty I guess :-D

Anyway I was too quick to dismiss that dialog so I run Apple Update once again to repro the error and show it to you. Magically enough... it installed correctly this time :-) Apple nirvana, keep trying dudes and you will get it!

Have fun!
Dimitris Staikos

P.S: I did like the folding dialog though... So cute...
P.P.S: Yeah I know, MS is to blame since I am running Winddoze in the first place so what did I think?

Fun with Vista blundly contradicting itself

Last night I came across a dialog box in Vista that I found to be incredibly funny.
Take a look (I hope the text is readable in the 30% reduced image, otherwise click on the image to view full size):

Clearly enough, under the checkbox Vista claims "Scheduled defragmentation is disabled".
Then on par with the "Defragment now..." button Vista also claims that "Scheduled defragmentation is enabled". Cute :-)

How can you reproduce this? Just open this dialog box and if "Run on a schedule" is checked then uncheck it and without closing the dialog or pressing Apply click "Defragment now...".
When defragmentation completes then Vista displays the "Scheduled defragmentation is enabled" message.

Obviously, since the unchecked checkbox has not yet been committed, the code that sets this message reads the currently stored value for the "Run of a schedule" flag from somewhere in the system and then proceeds to inform us that it is still enabled, although the same information is supposed to be already available elsewhere on the same dialog box (basically this is the real bug in the dialog).

Really it is such a silly mistake, on such a commonly used dialog (or is it not) that I would have expected their testers to notice... Makes me lose some confidence even on SP1... Maybe they get it right on SP2 with this OS.

Have fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Vista boasting about throughput

This is yet another of those "Explorer Copy Estimated Time" bugs, but not THE "Explorer Copy Estimated Time" bug that gets fixed by the KB938979 hotfix MS released (described here).

I've always found the concept of estimating the remaining time for a massive file copy/move operation rather intriguing, given the combinations of where the source and destination hard disks are physically located. Data transfer may temporarily slow down, or it may gradually slow down, or it may oscillate between slow and fast every minute or so (depending on who knows what). I think that deciding which is the most meaningful time window for doing the throughput calculation displayed to the user and deciding the remaining time can be very tricky.

Since it is a tricky issue I would have thought that the Vista team paid some more attention to the issue. Noone forgets the embarassing "17482634 minutes remaining", then "24 minutes remaining", then "10943 minutes remaining", etc, of Windows XP.

Anyway, earlier this evening I started a file copy over an Ethernet 100Mbps network between an old PIII 733 running Windows 2000 and my brand new Vista PC. At some point in the process I noticed the contents of the copy progress dialog:

Wow64, I thought! 5.76GB in "about 5 seconds"??? That's awesome! That's throughput greater than 1GByte/sec. Now that's what I call a confident OS :-)
At the very same time the current speed was being reported as 628KB/sec.

I decided there and then that this was "Funny Software" material, so I started to follow how will Vista recalculate the remaining time as the copy operation progresses.

A couple of minutes later, this was our status:

0.7GB of data later and Vista hadn't changed it's mind yet. The throughput seemed to improve, but I really could not take any of the throughput numbers seriously. 0.7GB at any speed that is indicated in KB/sec would have taken at least 10-15 minutes, but I definitely not waited that much before I got the second screenshot.

Then after a little while a file copy completed and there were less items remaining. It seems that the Vista team thought that was a proper place to update their statistics:

Now they are getting a bit more realistic I have to admit: 4.83GB in 30 seconds going at 1,04MB/sec. I don't know, maybe they used the buggy Excel engine to do their math.

Following futher on, it seems that they are not updating the statistics only on file conclusion:

Midway through the 9th file, after a mere 0.13GB, Vista decided that it should pump up its estimate to 1 min and 15 sec, given the fact that the throughput improved as well. That's some strange math...

When the 9th file concluded, there was yet another slightly more modest estimate:

I don't know about you, but I am really curious about the logic behind this. I mean, more than 1.5GB had been copied between the first and the last screenshots, but still Vista thinks it has super natural powers.
It kind of reminds me of some code a coworker once wrote, that was only compiled but never tested; it first run on the customer site. It didn't crash, but our consultants got really strange results, almost random, results that they could not "figure out" no matter how hard they tried. Of course they had no idea what an "ininitialized variable" was or what a mess it is capable of causing.
Here it seems that the (4127-10) items that were copied at the beginning of this copy operation have affected calculations so badly that the situation cannot be salvaged.

Have Fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Reinventing User Interfaces

Hey man, isn't software boring nowadays? I mean you press OK and you know what will happen, you press Cancel and you once more know what will happen. Boring boring booooring.

Thanks to the Allmighties of this world, some guys still get enough inspiration to make our user experience worth our while.

This comes from a web mailer I use. For one thing, these guys thought about reinventing date sort order. As far as I can remember, ordering my email by date-descending means "newest mail first".
Well these guys have a different opinion. They define date-ascending as "newest mail first".

Here is an excerpt from my settings page:

And here is how the date column looks in my inbox (note the UP arrow indicating ascending order):

 

In constrast, here is what Microsoft Outlook thinks about date sorting:

Anyway, I don't know, may be some other famous mailer has the same kind of date sorting and these guys decided to adopt that one. I don't know. It's too much to attribute to stupidity...

Another cool side effect of the behaviour that they have implemented is the following: When I am reading an email, there are two buttons available Previous and Next. Say I am reading an email I got on Thursday and I press Next. Can you guess what happens? In front of me I see a mail I got on Wednesday. Next moves me to an older email, and Previous moves me to newer mail. Isn't that cool? Previous and Next are extremely bad names for this purpose. That's why MS Outlook has an UP and DOWN arrow, so you know what to expect.

But date sorting is not the part where these guys excel. They also redefined timezone-sorting. When I tried to configure my timezone I got a huge drop down list that looks like this (click to enlarge):

Super Cool! Completely random sorting. Neither geographical, neither timezone, nor alphabetic sorting. And it is a HUGE list containing an entry for all major cities on the globe (not just the capitals).

After trying a bit to locate my city I paused and thought about it. Then I selected the first entry, closed the drop down and moved the keyboard focus in the list. Then I repeatedly typed E (for Europe) until I saw my city appear in the selection. Now that's what I call "Software that Makes You Think".

Have fun and Merry Christmas (where applicable)!
Dimitris Staikos

What are you talking about?

Well, sometimes software engineers can get really inventive. And when that happens usability goes down the drain.

Here is a one-of-a-kind dialog box, a monument of inventiveness:

A question on the dialog caption? On the dialog caption for heaven's shake???
People expect to see the program name on the caption, or something equivalent, and thus almost never look at what the caption says. So the average user is confronted with an answer but he can't see the question.

Needless to say this dialog box also demonstrates additional usability bugs:

• First of all it traps the user. There is no Cancel button for the poor user that is not certain about what to do.
• Second, YES/NO dialogs are the lazy programmer's way out when he needs feedback from the user. The dialog should really have a Disable and a Cancel button. However this means that the programmer must create a new dialog resource, a dialog class, etc, so most opt out and select a YES/NO question which is readily available through the Win32 MessageBox function.
  
  Still, if you insist on using MessageBox, you can put your brains to work and structure the question in a way that it has a YES/NO answer.
  
  "If you select YES such and such will happen ..." is plain silly.
  
  Almost any question can be formed as follows:
  
  The application can do blah blah...
  Do you want to do that?
  YES/NO/CANCEL

Have fun!
Dimitris Staikos

Tower of Babel

This post marks the beginning of a new category of posts: Funny Software.

I work in the software business, and I often get into weird situations when trying to do my work or simply have fun with the computer. These situations are also marked as WTF by many, and there are sites that list lots of WTFs. By the way, WTF stands for "What The F..k ?"

So here my first WTF:

Every time I clicked OK, a new line was added :-)

Have fun!

Stupid dialog boxes

To be on not to be?
To OK or to Cancel?

This dialog is shown by Visual Studio 2005.

Have fun!