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If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#71

Post by Arainach »

thimp wrote: post #35

It's a crap analogy. Why would you expose a printing API on a device without printing support? Just ifdef it out on the build.

When you have a platform, apps aren't always being rebuilt for it.

There is no "build" because the source code was lost when all of the company's assets were sold off in 2002.

There is no "build" because the developer made a game, put it on your app store, moved on to the next game and has no interest in supporting this game that isn't providing any significant new revenue.

There is no "build" because this is FooManager 6.0, the company that makes FooManger wants everyone to buy FooManager 7.0 and isn't making any further changes to 6.0.

etc. etc. etc.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#72

Post by Arainach »

alpaca128 wrote: post #70
gruez wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about an app originally designed for iPhone but is running on an iPad? iPhones can make calls, but iPads can't. Sure, a properly designed iPad app wouldn't try to use the phone functionality, but what if the developer is too lazy to develop a dedicated iPad app? Surely a crappy iPhone app running on iPad is better than no app at all?

Wouldn't that be part of Apple's app reviews?

There are plenty of apps already in the store. Apple wants to launch their new device and have tons of apps available. The best way to do that is for the apps to just run, not to require millions of developers (plenty of which no longer exist) to rebuild.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#73

Post by eastbound »

lucianbr wrote: post #25
subarctic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you think we learned?

That every single behavior that attempts to guess the users's intent becomes a relied upon part of the software, and this over time grows to an impossible amount of cruft. See this, hilariously hosted also by microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/funny-sto... > And then Google built Chrome, and Chrome used Webkit, and it was like Safari, and wanted pages built for Safari, and so pretended to b…

In 2024, so we still have websites that are served differently depending on the User Agent?

Could we possibly do away with the User-Agent header, or reset it to a simple “Chrome 150.01”?

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#74

Post by kentonv »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53
tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, a better solution would be for the system to pop up a notification informing the user that printing is not supported on this platform, and then whatever other solution is OK.

> To me, a better solution would be for the system to pop up a notification informing the user that printing is not supported on this platform That's the whole point of this article - when you can't control the various platforms that your application is run on, you want to try to do the "least bad" thing, even if that platform didn't anticipate the situation of, in this case, telling people that printing isn't suppor…

The article is the other way around -- it's written from the perspective of a platform developer trying to deal with apps that didn't anticipate the situation.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#75

Post by bitwize »

happytoexplain wrote: post #23

The specific thing the author is suggesting is correct (components should suffer before users do), but I take great offense to their framing. "There may be times where you need to make an API do nothing." "The wrong thing to do is to have the printing functions throw a Not­Supported­Exception." No, no, absolutely no - what the author is describing is a hack to support a shitty client. Yes, you have to do this sometim…

> No, no, absolutely no - what the author is describing is a hack to support a shitty client.

If you were on the Windows team and I was your manager, I might fire you for that.

This is Windows. You do not break applications that users depend on. Ever, ever, ever. If you have a "shitty" or misbehaving client application, you use whatever workarounds, shims, and compatibility hacks it takes to make the application work as expected. Even if it means having special memory management code for SimCity so it will work.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#77

Post by nearbuy »

thimp wrote: post #35

It's a crap analogy. Why would you expose a printing API on a device without printing support? Just ifdef it out on the build.

It's an option, but it has its own downsides. It's a cross-platform API.

Someone wants to show some guests some of their photos and videos on their TV through their Xbox. Unfortunately they can't because their app (eg Samsung Gallery or iCloud or whatever) included a print button somewhere.

And with these inert functions, if Microsoft one day adds printing support to the Xbox, it'll just work in the photo app without any update.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#78

Post by Contortion »

toss1 wrote: post #59
Jabrov wrote: post #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

Perhaps you missed the context in which it was made clear that this imperfect solution was still less bad than all other options. It seems the point resembled: 'this device doesn't support printing, don't return obscure, unhelpful or crashing errors; return something that makes sense so that the user can figure out and move on'. I.e.: Fail gracefully.

I wouldn't call creating mystery failing gracefully. As a user I would prefer a full crash to the application gas lighting me by suggesting there's something wrong with my setup (we can't find your printer vs you're not allowed to print).

If anything creating mystery about what the app is doing is the direct opposite of good UX.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#79

Post by bastawhiz »

Jabrov wrote: post #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

So what, you crash the app? What if there's no API to say "there's no printing on this device"? What is the difference between a device where printing isn't supported and a device where a printer isn't set up yet? Showing an empty list of printers isn't a bad solution, frankly.

Re: If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly

#80

Post by imperfectsoft »

paxys wrote: post #10

People 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.

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