Relevant to some past discussions here with Matt about options in a software product:

http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill

Heh, yeah those are definitely problems, and I'm glad he owns up to them. The article, though, seems more like a preemptive strike against the backlash they expect to see when the next version of Firefox removes all the settings he lays out (except I doubt anyone will notice).

But that's the extreme. I still firmly believe there should be options in software, but naturally you have to be judicial in how they're implemented. To say "there shouldn't be checkboxes because they may accumulate over time into a horrible mess since we don't ever plan to audit our settings panel" seems to be a bad justification to me.

As he also observes, having plugins to enable features that don't exist in the software natively is also a good workaround...but you have to allow plugins/extensions in your product.

Anyway, that article didn't change my mind, if that's what you were going for It just presented an example of bad implementation.

I agree with you here, the difference is where that line is (insert not black and white, but some number of shades of grey discussion, perhaps 50 here ). I also don't believe software should get rid of all options, nor do most of my programs/devices I use believe this either.

The article just exposes the dangers of adding many check boxes and why it happens sometimes.

Leave the options in... but follow the protocol I use: If I don't fully understand it, I leave it the hell alone! If it ain't broke, I don't fix it!

tanstaafl.

Try getting a 5 year old to understand that concept

The article did mention a great solution for Firefox. Checkboxes removed can still be options provided via addons like Matt mentioned, but this isn't fesaible for many other products.

Another solution is some sort of debug like console. The URL about:config for example in Firefox exposes tons more options. The same applies to Mac software that allows people to change stuff via a "defaults write" command. Windows works the same with it's registry. And most games do the same, though how accessible this remains to the end user varies wildly.

Yeah, I thought about the about:config menu too. I feel like that's a pretty good compromise, where the power user can do more and the person messing around in settings won't break anything.

You guys should check out my accounting software, it really is a thing to behold:







It really is the stuff of nightmares, and it makes you appreciate config files so much. This software is really quite something. It has amazing 'features' such as (tip of the iceberg) mystery numbers appearing on paperwork, inability to batch email, and a fantastic form editor which moves objects on a page by a number of pixels X where X is the number of objects you have currently selected. You have to laugh because if you do think too long about the fact that your whole business runs on this, then blood pressure can rise pretty fast.

It amazes me that it is the most popular software for electrical wholesalers in the UK.

</rant>

That..., that..., just wow.

How many technical writers have left your building in straight jackets? (I don't even want to ask about the programming team)

Oh, this is not mine as in mine. Its a piece of software we bought in. I did all the research, the demo system was impressive enough, I knew this was what a lot of the larger companies were using. I even phoned many users up and down the country and they were not scathing. It really did seem like the best option at the time, and to be fair with enough AutoHotKey, it is usable.

But that doesn't stop it being eye meltingly god awful in places. OpenERP was not great at that time we had this installed, but it looks like its improving leaps and bounds. Planning to switch to it some time in the next couple of years.

My favourite configuration page is this:



Yes, this is how it handles dates! You can have 42 days in June if you wanted to, isn't that great? Be warned of the fire pit of doom if you do not switch over February to 29 days on a leap year and back to 28 after the 29th. Also, good luck in getting through to the 'support' phone number on that day.

Obviously standard date libraries were simply not good enough.

Um...wow.

Good thing you can have 13 months!

My favorite part of all is that it's called "Intact." That just seems like a misnomer to me.

Industry specific software ours is equally shit, and funny enough also allows 13 months on the accounting side, there must be something I'm missing. I think ours has around 500 tables spread over 2 dbs, field naming is proper fun; Customer_AC_No, Customer_AC, Customer, Customer_No, Customer_A_C_No, could be anything, and the account side uses different numbers to refer to customer or supplier accounts.

Then there's all the mispelled field names; Invoce_Number, Style_Desciption, Transcation_Quantity...

And all the broken functionality that apparently NONE of their other customers have encountered, ever.

I'm crap at SQL/db admin, and even I figured out that adding some indexes might improve performance.

A similar screen to Sein's in our system would be spread over around 10 tabs, tab title having no apparent influence on the tab contents

I loved my radio station job so much that in the final 10 years I never took vacation because a vacation wouldn't be as much fun as my work. I honestly planned on staying there until they carried me out in a wooden box.

Things changed.

A new owner took over, and we had to change to their software ("Mediastar") which was marginally usable, then they updated to their all-new, written from scratch (but conceptually based on the previous Mediastar software): "Viero".

The workload increased by a factor of three, the output quality decreased substantially (objectively measurable in terms of product conflicts, spot distribution and client separation, etc.), and flexibility and ability to customize disappeared. My parting gift to the company was a 10-page single-spaced typewritten letter to their software division, outlining the first fifty most egregious problems, listed in order of severity. To give an appreciation of the tone of the letter, I append below a small sample taken from the first page.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We have been upgraded to Viero for several weeks now. My compliments to the Viero programmers.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that they would not only equal, but far surpass the unfriendly user interface, the failures to follow Windows conventions, the sheer arcanity that was MediaStar. But they did. There must have been some late nights sitting around the table, chortling with glee at the diabolical things they came up with to make a difficult job nearly impossible.

Did anybody actually test this software before shoving it out the door? And by "anybody", I mean anybody who ever actually had a job doing radio traffic at some time in their life? How is it even possible that software which has been out in the market for nearly a year now can be so filled with gross, inexcusable blunders that remain uncorrected?

There used to be two (and only two) modules in MediaStar that were actually well done and user friendly: Clockworks, and Log Editor. Words fail me (and if you knew me, you would appreciate just how extraordinary that is!) when I try to describe just how badly they have been destroyed by Viero.

Here are the first 50 complaints I have with Viero. It took me six days of actual usage to compile it, although to be fair, some of the complaints are carryovers from MediaStar that were not corrected in Viero.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I still chuckle every time I read that letter. I had enough fun writing it that it was some small compensation for the horror that was Viero. To fully appreciate the problems, you have to be familiar with the job of Radio Traffic. I managed commercial placement across a group of four radio stations, about 900 commercials total each day. The job is intensely interactive, you have to be aware of things like product separation, advertiser distribution through the dayparts, spot duration, and the arcane rules dictated by clueless corporate bigwigs about how commercial clusters are to be structured. Every program log is massaged and tweaked, hour by hour...

Ironically, at the time the Great Satan of commercial radio, aka Clear Channel Communications, purchased the radio station of which I was part owner and pulled me into their evil grasp, we were using software we had written in-house (coded in Xenix, a Unix derivative) that was incomparably superior to anything I have ever seen on the market, before or since. I've been out of the business for about six years now, maybe things have gotten better. Doubtful.

When I retired, the decision was triggered in no small part by the Viero software. I left Alaska in a 40 year old school bus purchased from a friend for one dollar, all 44 feet of it completely filled with household belongings. As I passed the city limits on the way out of town, from that moment until this morning as I write this I have never given a single thought to the job that I held for 38 years.

Ahhhh... the good old days.

tanstaafl.

They're not months; they're "periods". How many 4-week periods are there in a calendar year?

On average, 13.044375 -- you slip against the calendar by a whole period about every 22 years unless you also allow fourteen-period years.

Peter

Yep, but there is a method of accounting that has 13 4-week periods. I'm not entirely sure what they do with the spare day/days.

One example of poor performance on my software is the SOAP 'Web API'. One request takes 1 second. Two simultaneous requests take 4 seconds. Three simultaneous requests take 9 seconds. Four simultaneous requests take 16 seconds... I know it does a lot of locking, but really just WTF is going on in there?

I am completely slating the design of this software, so I will throw in one good point and that is that miraculously it doesn't really crash (much). It tends to catch most exceptions, and so far its reliability is quite okay. I'm happy that there appears to be an accounting reason for having the accounting period configuration set up the way it is.

Back to 'Too many checkboxes' - I actually have a flag which I can set on a product which is 'Is Fish?'. I have no idea what this actually does.

How about, "It scales poorly?"

If I knew what his voice sounded like, I would have heard that post in Randall Munroe's voice.

It's extremely hard to draw that line according to some generic principles, though. Field user testing conducted among significant samples of users would tell.