Greatest GUI Gaffes

Apps whose installers put

• Apps whose installers put icons on my desktop or quick launch bar without asking
• Apps whose file dialogs default to My Documents (or some other default location) each session rather than remembering the last used location

My love and hate: The Apple

My love and hate: The Apple OS X 'Dock'.

Love it because it shows what's running and lets you kill it, find it, etc...

Hate it because it's translucent and if you have a lot of things on your desktop, they invariably get behind the dock and well, sometimes clicking them is a bitch. I get the dock item half the time... How about a setting 'static dock' or something and not allow this to happen.

Another gripe: adding printers on OS X. Yea gawds, the first one that I added almost brought sweat to my brow. It took WAY TO LONG!!! Granted that it was a networked printer, but come on guys...

Hate the HP Software: 'Do you want me to update your software?' Uh, no. Run along and bug someone else, will yah...

Dreamweaver has some peculiar gui 'features'... Some get nasty...

Speaking of GUI, what about the great browser 'standards' that are violated like environmental treaties in Bush-world? Why does a page look (and function) one way on one browser and damned different on another?

Oh, one Safari bitch: Sometimes I have to click twice on a menu choice or hot link to get any action... Sometimes it works fine, other times, wait, click again, works...

Bitch bitch bitch... ;-)

The most annoying thing to

The most annoying thing to me that hasn’t been mentioned so far is the paste behavior you get in Office applications, where it tries to keep the formatting information from wherever the data came from. Since there is no way to turn this off and it is almost never what I want to happen, I end up having to take the extra steps of using the paste special functionality every time I want to paste data.

1) Not providing a means to

1) Not providing a means to quickly maximize window height/width indepently. We don't alway want to maximize to cover the whole display.
2) Allowing applications to steal input focus. Lots of text has gone to the bit bucket (or the wrong field) due to this.
3) Making ICONs more real. Adding all that shading only makes icons look MORE ALIKE and/or require more time to interpret, particulary when small icons are used.
4) Not providing a menu TOC/INDEX/Hierarchy feature to allow the user to try to determine where a feature might be located in the menu.
5) Ribbons? More Ribbons? They aren't shaped like little fish are they?

The "start"

The "start" button/menu.

"Intellimenus".

The task bar.

The elimination of text (I once worked with a graphic artist who despised the squareness of button and all text, so he devised a UI where the "click region" was indicated by the background artwork... the stylized people pointed at the "click areas". I'm glad it didn't go anywhere.)

"Helpful" automatic reorganization of icons on a desktop -- If I put an icon somewhere, I don't want the machine deciding that it should go somewhere else (such as with a screen resize). I especially despise the reorganization-into-a-grid.

Anything taking focus away from where I'm typing that isn't a result of my asking for the focus to change (e.g., tab, mouse, etc.).

Applications that are allowed to request administrator access (Yes, Apple, I'm talking about this OS X misfeature!) -- this includes installers. If I wanted my files splattered all over the system, I'll copy 'em there myself; otherwise, run with the permissions you have, and keep your files to yourself. I do not want a dialog to pop up and say "Please enter the administrative password", nor do I want a dialog to pop up and say "you must be root to do this". Say instead "I tried to do FOO and got 'permission denied'."

Just about anything "automatic" that I did not turn on or can't be quickly, easily, and obviously turned off. If a feature starts with "Auto", I probably don't like it -- AutoCorrect, AutoRun, etc. etc.

Putting caps-lock next to the A key. The caps-lock key should be near the scroll lock and the num lock keys.

The defaulting of on-screen fonts to proportional fonts. They're nice to read in hard-copy. They're a PITA to read on a computer screen, especially for small font sizes and high resolutions. Just because they look nice on a 19" monitor at 800x600 doesn't mean they'll be nice on that 19" monitor at 16000x1200, and increasing the font size enough to make it readable means I might as well run it at 800x600.

The scroll-wheel as a third button. A mouse (or trackball) should have three buttons, and the scroll-wheel should be playing the role of the third button.

I have a very hard time with

I have a very hard time with UIs that use a 2 color highlight for Yes/No buttons. You can't tell if you're selecting Yes or No without knowing if green or red means the item is selected.

Toyota made a bad decision on their GPS navigation systems in cars by disabling various menus while the car is in motion. This means that the passenger can't enter data while you're driving along. They have a passenger sensor for the airbag, why not allow it to also enable the GPS menus?

Windows Mobile is driving me

Windows Mobile is driving me crazy. I've have a PDA like device of one sort or another for years-Sharp, Psion (THE BEST!!), Palm, SideKick (Very easy and quick), BlackBerry (Worked with a Capital 'W'). MicroSoft just seems to take a pile of random software components and ALMOST weld them together in a random, aglutinative way. Ram is like money, beyond a certain amount of it, it decreases quality.

And did the world have to lose the progress of OS2 so completely?

My RULE 1:
Put a simple set of command line operations and programs with sane, predictable, regular, delimited input and output. THEN layer your GUI on top of it. Build in the direct access API's necessary so that the user interface layer does not have to screen scrape or pretend it is a command line user. This allows the outside packaging and inside functionality to remain distinct and independent. And please, ALWAYS give me a way of using just the keyboard so that I don't have to fiddle with a the mouse or stylus if I'm in a hurry or want to become very fast at a process. When I used Lotus 123 I got to the point that I could select an area and print it in less time than I can move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse in Excel. Oh, and did I mention that we used to be able to work on our own cars at a fraction of the cost it takes us get the "lighting module" fixed in a "modern" car? Devolution.

I've always thought the

I've always thought the criticism of the Newton's handwriting recognition was overly harsh and due in part to ignorance. The Newton 'learned' the user's handwriting over time; I used one for a little while and it went from about 65% recognition to 95% recognition in a week. However, reviewers and people checking out Newtons in stores picked it up, jotted something, decided its recognition was terrible and then passed it to someone else. Not only did these Newtons do poorly because they hadn't learned the current user's handwriting style, the passing it around was exposing it to a dozen conflicting styles, so of course it did poorly.

I was glad to see other aspects of the Newton UI get some praise, though. It is still one of the few PDAs that had a UI that wasn't trying to shoehorn in desktop UI paradigms.

We hav a large computer

We hav a large computer network at our school and it's funny how microsoft's "helpful" GUI features get in the way in this environment. For example, we often log into different computers, then a pop-up bubble appears saying "Want to take a tour of Microsoft XP?" or "Help make office better!" I guess the machine thinks I'm a first time user.

I think a lot of the problems with Microsoft's GUI stem from their attempts to guess what the user thinks or needs. In a way, they are treating all users the same.