From Our Inner Depths

The biggest problem with the World Wide Web is that it is just too hard to find anything "unique" anymore. In an instant, you can gather together at least fifty hits for just about anything. Are there any two word phrases left that don't at least get one hit? It is hard to imagine.

Despite the existence of many other published uses, I'm still going to proposed a new definition for a pair of old words. Sometimes you can't let prior history hold you back, particularly when the terminology is so appropriate.

If you've been using software for a while, you've probably been there. It is version X of the program; some function you relied upon, while still in the system no longer works correctly. Sometimes it a bug, sometimes it is a legacy problem, but often it is just because the new programmers maintaining the code were clueless. They had no idea how the system is really used in the real world, so they removed or broke something vital. They get so busy adding new crappy features and ignoring the existing bugs that they don't realize how much they are diminishing the code base.

Software -- we know -- starts out needing a lot of features. In its life, often the big programs have many, perhaps hundreds of developers pouring over the code and enhancing it. As the development grows, the quality and functionality get better and better, until at some point it reaches its maximum. Never a good thing. It is an inverted curve, going up often quite quickly, but after the high there is no where else to go but down. Down, down and down.

Now you'd think in this day and age we'd know when not to mess with a good thing, but the horrible little side-effect of capitalism is that nothing can ever remain static. Ever. If it ain't growing, then it must be dying. Or at least not living up to its full revenue generating potential; often the same thing in business school.

And so, all of our favorite software packages 'arc'. Reaching their highs in some early release, only to be followed by a long slow steady decline into the abyss. If you've hung around long enough, you know this to be true. What goes up; as they like to say...

Back to my career in creative terminology.

You should always honor those that paved the way, it is only fitting. As we take in consideration the above issue about the lifespan of software we need to fall back a bit and consider the user's perspective. Each of us who have aged a bit, has had the misfortune of being bitten by some new dis-functionality in the software. While that may be interesting -- often depending on how pressed we are for time -- our reaction to finding this out is less than amiable. Like automotive drivers completely losing it on a busy highway, I've seen many instances of software users succumbing to "Word Rage" in my day. When the user shakes their fist at the screen, curses the maker of the product and vows to set forth as much negative karma as possible on those responsible for the atrocity, you know you are seeing a genuine instance.

Word Rage. Hits when that #$%$% auto-formating stuff re-arranges a perfectly good document. It hits when you try to turn off those brain-dead auto typing crapifiers. When the menus are truncated. When that hyperlink nonsense doesn't work. Any of it. When the backup copies are no longer saved, or the save files are no longer readable. When the documentation tells you nothing, and there are fifty million stupid meaningless options that are choking up the dialog; obscuring that one stupid thing that needs to be unset; again. Whenever that program carelessly wastes hours and hours of your time, while you were only trying to do something both obvious and practical that any decent minded programmer should have though necessary. Word Rage!

But alas, while I coined the term after the masters of inciting it, many many other software packages produce equally dramatic effects. Just recently, I found that the plugin I used in a well know photo manipulation program wouldn't work with the built-in batch capabilities. I couldn't create an action for changing either the height or width that depended on the orientation and that the plugin I used for saving wouldn't work in batch either. Of the four simple things I needed to automate, three of them concealed bugs, or at very least serious weaknesses. The coders allowed the necessary capabilities to be divested into the plugin facility, but failed to integrate that into the batch capabilities; making batch useless. At least we get nice spiffy plugins; that are only partly useless. Way to go guys!

I could spend all day ranting about this sort of stuff; there is enough for perhaps years and years worth of blogging. I just doubt anyone would read it; it gets old, fast.

Our software is full of inconsistencies, bad ideas, stupid mistakes and poorly thought out designs that make it all rather irritating to try and get anything done. I find I don't have any Word Rage if and only if I'm not actually trying to get anything accomplished. The stupid machines work fine, just so long as you don't touch em. In them good ole days we didn't have a lot of functionality, but at least if it existed you could probably trust it. Now we have the world, but we waste more time fiddling with silly problems. The tools often bite their masters.

Lately I've been swearing off technology; insisting that I'm going to switch to woodworking instead. I need to rely on something that works properly. When you get to the point were you think being a Luddite would actually help make "better" tools, you know you've been enraged once too often.