Irritating product design

[NickFitz]

A couple of memories:

• the ex-PC programmer who was programming on a multiuser system. When the screen was whizzing past too quickly, instead of putting in a "Hit any key to continue" he put in a GOTO loop for a thousand or so iterations (weel that's what it said to do in the BBC BASIC manual innit?). Small wonder the rest of the system's users were complaining that system performance was "lumpy".

No it didn't. The Beeb supported "paged mode", and the manual explained how to enable and disable it both from the keyboard and programatically:

VDU drivers

14 - This code makes the screen display wait at the bottom of each page. It is mainly used when listing long programs to prevent the listing going past so fast that it is impossible to read. The computer will wait until a SHIFT key is pressed before continuing. This mode is called "Paged mode". Paged mode is turned on with the CTRL N and off with CTRL O. When the computer is waiting at the bottom of a page both the Shift lock and Caps lock lights will be illuminated.

Maybe you're thinking of the Spectrum manual?

[Drewster]

Early versions of Lotus would allow the user to save a file with spaces in the file name but couldn't open it again. Remember PC Tools? Xtree? Invaluable utils.

Was that the same Lotus where "Licence Protection" was a Directory holding a couple of files all with DOS Attribs set to R/O, Hidden & System...... which "normal" PC users didn't even know existed.... So when running Lotus it did a sort of IF EXIST RUN LOTUS.... ELSE FAIL logic.....

I sort of remember PC Tools and XTree.... and didn't Lotus also have a tool Magellan? Where you could do all sorts of "clever" stuff...

and (real) Norton Utilities..... before Virus protection stuff......

[Cliphead]

Was that the same Lotus where "Licence Protection" was a Directory holding a couple of files all with DOS Attribs set to R/O, Hidden & System...... which "normal" PC users didn't even know existed.... So when running Lotus it did a sort of IF EXIST RUN LOTUS.... ELSE FAIL logic.....

I sort of remember PC Tools and XTree.... and didn't Lotus also have a tool Magellan? Where you could do all sorts of "clever" stuff...

and (real) Norton Utilities..... before Virus protection stuff......

Yep all correct if I remember rightly. Norton Utils was great but to do some serious work all three tools were essential on any DOS system - NU, PCT and Xtree. The best money I ever spent on any piece software ever was Xtree Gold.

[Sysman]

No it didn't. The Beeb supported "paged mode", and the manual explained how to enable and disable it both from the keyboard and programatically:

VDU drivers

14 - This code makes the screen display wait at the bottom of each page. It is mainly used when listing long programs to prevent the listing going past so fast that it is impossible to read. The computer will wait until a SHIFT key is pressed before continuing. This mode is called "Paged mode". Paged mode is turned on with the CTRL N and off with CTRL O. When the computer is waiting at the bottom of a page both the Shift lock and Caps lock lights will be illuminated.

Maybe you're thinking of the Spectrum manual?

Apologies, bad phrasing on my part. What I meant to say was that instead of using some form of screen paging system, the programmer sought to slow down the display, and did it via a counted loop.

I always thought that was tacky even in a single user machine, but early versions of BASIC (BBC BASIC included?) didn't have the equivalent of a sleep or wait statement.

[fullyautomatix]

Woot! You can add pictures to a thread!.

I thought I would demonstrate this extra special feature I was talking about in my OP.

[fullyautomatix]

Another irritating design.

IE blocks images if you open an email which has images embedded in it.

If you then ask IE to show content ( like images that are blocked) it presents you with this dialog box.



Instead of telling me that this could contain content that was not delivered securely and then asking if I still want to view it, in which case its easy to just click "Yes", it says do you want to view only content that was delivered securely ? How annoying. In order to answer the question I need to read the bloody message twice to understand what it means.