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If Bad Software Developers Built Houses...
Richo99 writes "The editor at UI Hall of Shame takes us for a walk through a house designed by bad software developers. It appears Ed is getting a bit tired of really bad software designs in popular shareware titles. It is interesting because how much of a crime these apps perpetrate isn't obvious until you apply the same logic to everyday things, like the design of a house. I especially love the access to the garden. "
The first thing I thought of was how this house is the opposite of Dilberts house, which is designed by good software engineers.
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/duh/
http://www.rha.com/ui_hall_of_shame.htm
http://www.pixelcentric.net/x-shame/
http://www.raizlabs.com/interface/hall-of-shame/de fault.asp
These sites all appear to have similar concepts. Don't worry, folks, I'm sure the Meatloafers will be busy guffawing in mulish fashion as they forward the house/UI anology to your inbox for the next ten years after it's no longer funnny.
"Herbert unlocks the door and the damn thing swings OUTWARDS knocking you back a step or two."
Wtf... Where I live, all doors open outwards. It's much more convenient*. Interesting assumption coming from a UI critic, who should know better than to accept what he has been given as the best alternative.
*-The door swings into the yard, instead of creating an obstruction in the foyer.
-You can close the door immediately, instead of having to take off your shoes and get out of the way first.
-If a fire breaks out, and a bunch of panicing morons are pushing you from behind, you can still open it.
My Sig: SEGV
"This makes locks on doors absolutely pointless because you can just remove the pins on the hinges and the door will just fall down."
Doors can be designed to avoid that. I'm not sure what the standard way is, but my apartment's front door, for example, has metal rods embedded next to the hinges. They are virtually unnoticeable to the user, and automatically slide into the wall when the door is closed. This is probably more secure anyway.
My Sig: SEGV
Because engineers in other industries and professions spend orders of magnitude more time estimating than they do actually building. (Once the estimating is done, the building is usually fairly straightforward, relatively speaking). We could probably accurately estimate the time taken to build software... but then they'd ask us to estimate how long the estimate would take... and then how long the estimate of the estimate... Or, we could just take a reasonable guess and just build the damned thing.
And, by the way, no industry or profession can accurately estimate and deliver product. Road construction, satellite design, new home construction, movie production, etc. etc. are always complaining about running over budget. Software is exponentially more complex than any of those.
In summary, bite us.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Some C library functions that operate on strings with checking lengths should also not be used:
strncpy - does not guarantee the terminating NULL and fills the dest string with zeroes if it is short (bad performance)
strncat - does not guarantee the terminating NULL and the 'n' argument is very confusing and encourages buggy calls.
Use strlcpy/strlcat instead (oh wait, the GNU libc maintainer refuses to put them in...)