Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Frustration of the Day
Yes. I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated with computer software that tries to make everything easier for people and in the process simply makes everything more difficult. There are so many people using computers today that simply have no idea what they are doing. Mostly through the use of "Wizards", computers ask a few simple questions and then do all the real work for the user. Sometimes this is a real nice thing. How often do you reload the OS on to a computer? Unless you are using a version of the MacOS prior to X, probably not often. This is a good time to use a wizard because the computer is going through some setup procedures that you are not going to have to change any time soon. However, there are other things that do need to be changed from time to time and because these Wizards do the work for people, they don't know how to do it themselves.
What if you need to change some dial-up settings? Perhaps the phone number, or the login and password. Maybe you are staying at a hotel and need to add an 8 or 9 before the number. Most computer users don't know how. What if you need to change some settings in your email program? What if, what if, what if. If you could just go run the wizard again it wouldn't, perhaps, be so bad but finding the wizard in many instances can be a challenge in itself.
Or, the thing that really got me going on this today, is the Adobe Acrobat PDF Plug-In. There was a time when Adobe viewed PDF files as being an easy way to create websites. They had visions that people would create the content with tools, like pagemaker, that they already knew and then export the site to PDF. If the browser could move into and out of the PDF as though it were a web page it would be both a win for the content creator/designer and the viewer. But this isn't how PDFs have come to be used. They have been used to make available those documents that have to look correct and print as expected. In this time of year, the best example is the IRS and all of the tax forms that they keep posted. I had a teacher come to me the other day and tell me how he was posting homework as PDFs and students were actually downloading the assignments and handing worksheets in on different kinds of paper. So, if this is how PDFs have come to be used, do we really need the file opening up in the browser. Many would say yes. But I have to say, "No." Internet users do not realize the difference between viewing a web page and a PDF document when the PDF is beign opened via the PDF plug-in from Adobe. If the user has the full version of Acrobat and is going to be expected to edit and save the document they are being faced with so many levels of menus and navigations on the screen that they have no idea what is the browser and what is acrobat. There needs to be a way to insist that files be downloaded rather than viewed. For the time being, I seem to be forced to explain to users that they need to right-click PDF links to download the file so that they know where the file is and which application it is being viewed with.
As so many parts of the computer get easier and easier to use I think developers need to watch that they do so with the intent of making things understandable rather than simply taking the attitude of so many support techs: "Let me sit in the chair and do it for you..."
4:12:45 PM 
No One Asked Why He Wanted to Die
A month to the day before he killed himself, Michael Benjamins posted the following message on an Internet newsgroup:
"PLEASE help me," wrote Benjamins, a 24-year-old computer programmer from Ohio. "I am looking for a fast, reliable way to kill myself. I don't want to screw it up." [Wired News]
This is so sad. People looking for "community" when they feel they have none and when they find it, it encourages and helps them kill themselves. Yuck.
3:55:47 PM
To the Moon in a Space Elevator?
The Columbia disaster could spur faster development of a radically different approach to reaching outer space: the space elevator.
Long imagined by science-fiction writers but seen by others as hopelessly far-fetched, the space-elevator concept has advanced dramatically in recent years along with leaps forward in the design of carbon nanotubes. Using the lightweight, strong carbon material, it's feasible to talk of building a meter-wide "ribbon" that would start on a mobile ocean platform at the equator, west of Ecuador, and extend 62,000 miles up into space. [Wired News]
This is a super cool idea and it looks like it's much less crazy than it sounds.
3:47:06 PM
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