Bad Software
How much do I hate poorly written software. It drives me nuts.
Bigpond’s Movie Download client is complete rubbish, seriously I mean the client on my computer couldn’t keep track of how much of the movie had been downloaded. It crashed more times then I care to count, and was generally bad. It lacked any kind of indication anywhere of it’s current status and what was going on. It eventually somehow downloaded my movie, the key seems to be to NOT run the download client, and let the creepy background service do it’s own thing. The most annoying thing though is that there is no good technical need for the existence of the Movie Download software in the first place. It really is just there to stop you copying the movies, and to hold your hand. So frustrating.
Today, I have amongst other things been working on an online store using MIGS, a MasterCard gateway service. The documentation and the error messages for that system are not very nice. A weird thing that happened to me was it took hours to get an auto reply message from MasterCard. What’s the go with that?
Then take the example of a nice piece of Apple software I just used, Isync. Enable bluetooth, launch the application, click on my phone and suddenly my contacts, and calendar are synchronised. So beautiful and easy.
I really have the greatest empathy these days for people who use computers without having a good amount of experience and knowledge. Some software is just awful, and there is absolutely no need for it to be.