If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
devblogs.microsoft.com
If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
1–10 of 356 posts
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#2I find nothing quite as frustrating as UIs that suggest a device could exist, but it's not there right now. I then have to spend time to discover that these devices are not supported, and that screen was just some mock someone came up with.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#3I understand the logic here, and I'm aware Microsoft has a large number of convoluted backward-compatibility requirements, but this seems like drinking to solve your problems and just putting off the inevitable hangover. To be clear: what you're doing here is lying to the user and the developer. Maybe that's justified in isolation, but now this lie is one more bit of "hidden state" you have to keep track of in further development and integration testing. And just like in the real world, lies have a tendency to compound on themselves until you're completely lost in them and have no idea what reality is.
I have a feeling that "solutions" like this are part of why an increasing number of my computing problems take the form of, "I tried to take an action, nothing happened. No error, no activity, nothing.", and are impossible to debug or diagnose. UX designers made themselves terrified of ever showing an error code to a user, but they took that and replaced it with a world where your shit just doesn't work, and when you try to figure out why, all the OS does is shrug.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#4"The idea here is to have the printing functions all behave in a manner perfectly consistent with printing being fully supported, yet mysteriously there is never a printer to print to."
This must be satire. Otherwise I can't comprehend how something as infuriating as this could be presented as a good or smart thing to do UX-wise
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#5Once upon a time it was considered a great strategy for browsers to make the best effort to display a page, even if the html code had errors. Just try to guess the author's intention as well as you can, and go ahead. Errors are bad. Users don't want errors.
I thought we learned from that experience. Apparently not.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#6Your ecosystem has gone so complex that you can't test it anymore. So instead of handling errors properly you suggest to implement a convoluted user flow that offers always failing actions (install a printer when there's none available).
If that's really the suggestion of product and engineering leadership at MSFT no wonder all their products...err...work as designed.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#7And they ask why we're cynical. I'm about done with this whole "personal computing" fad.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#8I understand the logic here, and I'm aware Microsoft has a large number of convoluted backward-compatibility requirements, but this seems like drinking to solve your problems and just putting off the inevitable hangover. To be clear: what you're doing here is lying to the user and the developer. Maybe that's justified in isolation, but now this lie is one more bit of "hidden state" you have to keep track of in furthe…
This resonates with me. My computers used to crash at the app level, OS level or hardware level.
Now when something goes wrong the system just kinda gets lazy and stops working. But it won’t crash.
I’ve had my mac pinwheel on the login screen. I can still access the shell and file shares remotely, and even screen share to a logged in user.
But login.app refuses to crash so it’ll just pinwheel.
I’m glad I never forgot to turn things off and on for troubleshooting :(
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#9Once upon a time it was considered a great strategy for browsers to make the best effort to display a page, even if the html code had errors. Just try to guess the author's intention as well as you can, and go ahead. Errors are bad. Users don't want errors. I thought we learned from that experience. Apparently not.
"We" did. Microsoft didn't. Not unexpected.
Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
#10People are reacting negatively as expected, but stuff like this is exactly why you can click on a file that was written in Word '97 or a game that was compiled for MS-DOS three decades ago and it opens on your computer exactly as expected. Backwards compatibility is always messy. You either do it imperfectly or don't do it at all.