There's been a lot of talk about the iPhone and how it exemplifies good design, yadda yadda yadda. However, what I'd like to touch on today is a piece of design which frankly left me convinced that every person on an entire product team should be fired. I have this feeling often, but in this case it's not a feeling, it's a fact. Every single person on the Microsoft Windows Mobile team should be fired immediately. No exceptions.
How can I possibly say that? Well, given the numerous bugs, inconsistencies, and general usability nightmares that is Windows Mobile I'd think it'd be pretty clear. However I'm not going to address that. I'm not going to address companies like HTC whose, should we say, unique ideas about how to implement a keyboard leave me taking 4 times as long to write an SMS with my QWERTY keyboard as my girlfriend with her 1234 keyboard. I'm similarly not going to scoff about the idiocy that is the Mobile contact system, or even worse the stupid inconsistencies between how you address an MMS as compared to an SMS. And if that blasted dictionary suggests ONE more hugely long word when the far more common short word fails to appear in it's choices...*sob*
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Okay, I'm back. I've dried my eyes and am now prepared to recount one of the most STUPID WTF's in programming history!
Imagine some friends at a table having dinner. Imagine that one of the friends, being a complete moron, has actually been so mindbogglingly stupid as to have shelled out actual cash for the POS that is a Microsoft Windows Mobile HTC POC*1000 (Piece of Crap, new model). Let us imagine that these friends have an argument, let us further imagine that the Stupid Moronic Twit decides to settle the argument by opening the relevant Wikipedia page on his POC1000. Let us now skip past the imaginary scrolling down and down and down because the POC1000 renders wikipedia as a 5-char wide web page.
Let us now arrive at the delightful point when he starts reading the portion that proves him right: "...to its diameter in Euclidean space... huh! WTF!?!" as the phone brings up, for a split second a dialog reading something along the lines of "The storage system is short of space, please clear some space immediately".
Being a well trained monkey, used to the insane vagiaries of the POC1000 (e.g. the random requirement to align the screen before continuing, no matter that you were trying to phone the ambulance service or police) he immediately enters Settings, opens the Clear Storage application, ... and... the phone reboots. *Sigh* ah well, that's what you get for choosing a company that can't write software to save their lives, isn't it?
Not so fast. Gather round to feel the true horror...
"Wait, why is it telling me that it's setting itself up for the first time?"
"Why is it making me answer stupid Customer Improvement queries?"
The reality of course being that we don't need better customers, we need a better f****ing supplier.
"Please, please, oh dear sweet Lord, please tell me that it hasn't wiped everything on my phone because it was marginally short of space for 5 seconds?!?!?"
Surely any halfway competant engineer would know to delete the temp files and temporary internet files before moving on to contacts, emails, SMS's and system settings? Ah, there you see the problem. We're assuming that the numbnuts who coded this nighmarish piece of fly strewn horse manure were in fact competant.
So here's my question for the day: "When is it acceptable to wipe your user's data in order to ensure that your stupid program can keep on wasting resources?"
An extra 10 points if you work on the Microsoft Windows Mobile team.