2006.03.26
Here's something that was near the top of my backlog, but was more there for convenience than something I meant to post: The Designers of Diabolical Dumbth List. A bit like This Is Broken or We Hates Software, but more personal, a list maybe I'll just keep editing in place in this entry, like my Project Todo list.
I want to focus on things that just seem stupid, for which the mitigating factors are weak or non-existent, and that have made my life worse in some small fashion.
- Amazon doesn't sort by priority for other people's wishlists. This is my number one instance of online dumbth my a major web retailer. I really, really wish I knew someone highup at Amazon...like an old crank I've even written email asking about it, but never got a meaningful response. But so many people use Amazon to keep track of both stuff they really want, and stuff they'd like to remember to investigate further. "Priority" is a handy way of sorting one from the other, but if someone else views the list by default its sorted by date added. Unless the viewer is savvy and alert enough to check, they'll see everything I added lately, not just the stuff I actually want. SO DAMN DUMB!
- Why can't Windows single line text fields be smart enough to know that if I miscopied a line of text and accidentally grabbed the blank line in front of it (to make sure I got the begining of the line), that it can probably ignore the original blank line, rather than insisting on pasting it in as the sole bit of content for the field? DWIM, dummy.
- I have a pile of Post-It notes that alternates what side the glue is on. I can't just grab a pad and start writing on the top sheet because I don't know which way is up. And upsidedown notes on Post-Its just look retarded.
- Outlook follows in Window's half-assed "do searches in place" paradigm so much so that you can easily not notice you're still doing a search on your inbox...so until you realize it and clear the search, you'll only see new mail that matches the search criteria.
- My HP laptop...there's no onscreen representation or audible feedback when you use the physical volume changing commands. I guess I'm just spoiled with my Mac iBook, but given the decent feedback changing the volume from the systemtray Windows provides, it's a bad oversight.
- Firefox...unprintable characters are changed into literal ?s. Grrr. Now, I sort of see (if disagree with) their refusal to play fast and loose with character sets the way IE does, so that funny quote characters and other punctuation still show up, but changing them into a literal ? rather than showing some kind of placeholder character (I think IE uses a block) makes it much harder to get back to the correct punctuation.
- My Samsung cellphone...not only does it have 8 levels of ringer volume I need to cycle through to go from the two options I use, "vibrate" and "loudest ringer plus vibrate", but the two options use the exact same icon on the screen.