elisedance
Active Member
me thinks we have the battle of the visual (icons) vs the verbal (system error #x) vs the kinesthetic learners (throw it accross the room) on this thread too.
The worst invention in computer science ...
- Thread starter PretzelsAndBeer
- Start date
Indiana_Jay
Active Member
My all-time favorite was, while in college, seeing the pop-up still displayed on my roommate's totally frozen Mac, bearing only the legend:
"Uh oh. Something bad happened."
cornutt
Forum Master
I read a paper about ten years ago from a researcher who thought the basic concept of icons was sound, but that the actual implementation in products had gone far afield of the original intent. Of the things he mentioned, the two that stuck with me were:
1. Icons were intended to be shortcuts for frequently-used items. Instead, software makers decided that everything had to be represented by an icon. Pictographic memory does not work like alphabetic memory -- that's the reason we have alphabets in the first place. You can read an English word that you've never seen before, and likely not only pronounce it correctly, but if you recognize the roots and antecedents, you may even realize what it means without looking it up. On the other hand, once you are presented with thousands of arbitrary icons, it's "roll the cursor over it and see what the tool tip says" time. On this very DF reply page that I'm typing on right now, there's an icon above the text window that I have no clue what it means; it appears to be an octothorp (a '#' symbol) inside of a light colored circle. Let me now go see what the tool tip says... oh, it wraps CODE tags around the selected text. How on earth was an octothorp in a circle supposed to suggest that?
2. Icons were meant to represent the function of the software that they linked to. However, early on, software vendors perverted this to using icons to instead brand their software. What kind of icon should Microsoft Project have? Well, since it's a project scheduling application, one might suspect that the icon would in some way suggest a schedule, or some scheduling-related business concept like a Gantt chart. Instead, Microsoft Project's icon resembles a roll of toilet paper. (Which, come to think of it... )
1. Icons were intended to be shortcuts for frequently-used items. Instead, software makers decided that everything had to be represented by an icon. Pictographic memory does not work like alphabetic memory -- that's the reason we have alphabets in the first place. You can read an English word that you've never seen before, and likely not only pronounce it correctly, but if you recognize the roots and antecedents, you may even realize what it means without looking it up. On the other hand, once you are presented with thousands of arbitrary icons, it's "roll the cursor over it and see what the tool tip says" time. On this very DF reply page that I'm typing on right now, there's an icon above the text window that I have no clue what it means; it appears to be an octothorp (a '#' symbol) inside of a light colored circle. Let me now go see what the tool tip says... oh, it wraps CODE tags around the selected text. How on earth was an octothorp in a circle supposed to suggest that?
2. Icons were meant to represent the function of the software that they linked to. However, early on, software vendors perverted this to using icons to instead brand their software. What kind of icon should Microsoft Project have? Well, since it's a project scheduling application, one might suspect that the icon would in some way suggest a schedule, or some scheduling-related business concept like a Gantt chart. Instead, Microsoft Project's icon resembles a roll of toilet paper. (Which, come to think of it... )
elisedance
Active Member
brilliant - I think I remember when that one came out... gave me the total jellies
flashdance
Active Member
I think I've found a winner... not sure why I didn't think of this originally... but it almost brought the world to Nuclear melt down 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOPR
tanya_the_dancer
Well-Known Member
I read an article about color blue in airline magazine and they mentioned blue screen of death. One interesting fact about it that supposedly Bill Gates himself had that happen to him during Windows 95 DEMO somewhere.
That was famous in its day.
Of more recent notoriety was the BSOD on one of the main projectors at the Beijing Olympics during the opening ceremony.
http://gizmodo.com/5035456/blue-scr...nest-during-opening-ceremonies-torch-lighting
cornutt
Forum Master
PretzelsAndBeer
Member
Cornutt, this I agree with a hundred percent. Judicious use of meaningful icons would be a useful tool. But a marketing whiz got ahold of it somewhere along the line, and that's how good ideas turn as bad as week-old eggnog.
Okay, sorry to be such a buzzkill today. It just frustrates me that such a lean, powerful machine as the modern PC has become encumbered with such monstrously obese software. It offends me as an engineer, and you know how sensitive we engineers can be.
That said, there are those who's opinion on this matter differs from mine and I would never presume to criticize them on that point. On their choice of necktie, maybe, but not on their computer interface preferences.
Okay, sorry to be such a buzzkill today. It just frustrates me that such a lean, powerful machine as the modern PC has become encumbered with such monstrously obese software. It offends me as an engineer, and you know how sensitive we engineers can be.
That said, there are those who's opinion on this matter differs from mine and I would never presume to criticize them on that point. On their choice of necktie, maybe, but not on their computer interface preferences.
cornutt
Forum Master
I hear you. And believe me, you do not want to get me started on operating system rants. If I had my way, the whole world would be running Linux, with Apple's Aqua on top of it.
The general state of software development in most parts of the industry is very, very poor. One of the reasons I like being in aerospace is because the customers know how important software quality is, and they refuse to compromise on it.
Please don't make all us software engineers learn objective-c. I started to dip my toe into it once, but it looks hard to love.
My favorite university course was a grad-level computer security course. It's where I learned the term, "shelfware."
So we were told, in the government aerospace industry, there are very strict rules about software quality. Indeed, all critical software needs formal (nearly mathematical) specifications, and there is a requirement that the software be formally proven to meet the formal specification. Happily, there are software packages out there to help with the specification language, and with verifying the proofs.
Of course, it's quite expensive to develop such a detailed formal specification *and* implement it. Once upon a time, some anonymous project manager was asked about the software tools that help with this; he said, "oh we buy that; it's shelfware."
Shelfware?
The software packages that take the spec, code, and proof as input, and verify the proof have a handy feature. They'll take the program and reverse-engineer a specification that the program can be proven to meet.
So when the government inspector asks for the spec plus the proof, they take the software package off the shelf, reverse engineer the spec from their code, generate the proof, hand the spec, code and proof to the inspector, and put the package back on the shelf. Done!
--
Anyway, I agree that in the famous time-features-quality triangle, quality usually gets short shrift, and it can sap away job satisfaction. It stinks to be required to do a lousy job. (Incidentally, I suspect that dance professionals are not totally without frustrations of this sort.)
--
Finally, to be on topic: P&B -- how do you feel about (international!) road signs?
DWise1
Well-Known Member
On Linux, one of the screensavers scrolls through the "blue screen of death" for a half-dozen different operating systems.
Lioness
Forum Master
But once you know what the icons mean, it's much easier to search for a picture as opposed to some text. For a start you know what colour you're after, so that immediately narrows down the pool of icons to choose from, and then from that small pool you know the shape that you want as well. It's much easier than going through a list thinking, 'I'm looking for something starting with the letter P...'
