Using WPF for Good and Not Evil

I've just written a major post entitled Using WPF for Good and Not Evil. It examines the Family.Show sample application often used as an example of the great things that the power of WPF allows you to do. It is that, and it's also an example of the awful things that the power of WPF allows you to inflict on a user if you're not careful with it. As with a chain saw, power used with careful thought can accomplish great things, but without that careful thought hurts more than it helps. These developers use the exact same features to delight and also infuriate the user in the same application. Read the full article at this link.

What Do Microsoft.com and Tampax.com Have in Common?

They both inflict physical pain on their viewers through the deliberate choices of their designers. My take on these sites is too large to fit in a blog entry, so I've written in more detail on my newsletter at http://www.rollthunder.com/Newsletter/newslv10n2.htm . Looking at these sites caused my to coin Plattski's Law of Minimum Chiropractic. It states simply that forcing a user to visit a chiropractor will not make him happy, so you want to do that as little as possible. These sites violate it.

World's Most Useless Dialog Box

I was trying recently to uninstall a Microsoft program from the Windows Control Panel. After selecting the app and clicking Uninstall, I got the usual progress dialog box showing a progress bar. After reaching about 50% progress, the uninstallation stopped and I received the following dialog box, after which the progress receded and the app did not uninstall. I have to consider this box stunningly uninformative, even by Microsoft standards:


Not only does this box fail to provide any useful information whatsoever, it goes further by deliberately insulting the user, thusly: The image on the screen in the icon sure looks like that of the Earth's natural satellite. The dialog box is mooning its user.

I call upon the designer and implementer of this box to step forward, publicly own up to their sins.

"Why Software Sucks" Keynote Speech at Dev Days in Amsterdam May 22-23

Ladies and gentlemen, I am please to announce that I'll be giving the keynote talk, "Why Software Sucks"at Microsoft Dev Days in Amsterdam this coming May 22-23. If you're in that corner of the world and fancy a lively talk, why don't you come on in? Information is online at http://www.microsoft.nl/devdays . I'm also giving breakouts on "Using WPF for Good Rather Than Evil" and "Instrumenting the UI: Knowing Thy User." Hope I'll see you there.

Dave