Gotta love those brain-dead software "designers"...

[alexpgp]

Nothing is guaranteed to make one's day like having one's browser (yeah, mea culpa, I'm using IE) designed so as to pop a window into the foreground (with focus, of course) telling you that the 54-MB file you started downloading is now being copied from temporary storage to your disk and giving you the opportunity to cancel the whole operation. This, while you are blithely minding your own business, touch-typing in your word processor and you come to the end of a paragraph.

Pressing "Enter" cancels the download... after it is complete. While I am sure there were fine and dandy reasons for such a truly rectocranial design, I cannot help but think the designers were morons, or incredibly arrogant ("No, users shouldn't do anything else while waiting for our program to download files for them! They should, instead, contemplate our god-like skills as software craftsmen and tremble.").

I probably would not have mentioned this, except, that the same kind of idiotic design has made itself apparent three times this past week. This morning, I was editing a document that is part of our POS system when the poor thing suddenly popped up a screen noting that it had just downloaded an urgent update from the Web and was quitting immediately to install it. All my changes were lost, of course.

The other instance escapes my recall, for the moment, but I could not help but notice that it, too, was an example of the computer-be-boss, you-be-insignificant-dirt school of software design.

Scroom.

Cheers...

Comments

[egofood.livejournal.com]

Star Downloader (http://www.stardownloader.com) is a freeware that integrates nicely into IE and lets you pause and resume your downloads. The only drawback is it's hosted at a pair of download sites that like popups so have your blocker on. (Also, their ftp servers aren't that responsive. One of the mirrors of the second site is an http server though. Sure it's in Australia, but it worked while the stateside ftp servers wouldn't.)

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

I use Gozilla, but I'd never use the free version without "registration". As I recall, it's spyware. But once "registered", it works great. I can controll multiple downloads and have include several alternate sites if one site starts having trouble.

[egofood.livejournal.com]

Star Downloader pretty much does all that without the registration or the spyware. The only hassle is getting the program in the first place.