Some validation on UI Design
Thanks to a commentator on my other rant on UI, I've discovered Jensen Harris' blog. He's one of the developers on Microsoft's Office 12. He validates some of my complaints from two years ago.
My curious grammar checker
Bizarre. The following sentence makes Microsoft Word's grammar checker go into an infinite loop. It doesn't like the hyphen in "well-orchestrated" so it suggests that I take it out. No, wait. When I take it out, it recommends that I put it back in... I'm so confused.
Quicken Online “Support” Chat is Awful
I recently started using Quicken. Unfortunately, my Wachovia accounts would not import cleanly into the system. Naively, I contact Quicken's online chat support. In 55 minutes the only thing the support moron could suggest was duplicating my problem in a new file, a bunch of crap that wasn't true about how Quicken works, clobbering my Preferences file, and restarting Quicken. I was incensed! Here's the chat transcript. "Austin" is clearly not his/her real name. There's just no way that someone born with the name "Austin" would speak English so poorly. Grrr.
CompleteHome.com is a waste of money
I signed up for www.completehome.com as part of my campaign to get a free Mac Mini. The whole completehome.com site is a thinly-veiled attempt to get you to pay for stuff you could get free at lots of other places on the Internet. Fortunately, the one-month trial only cost me a dollar, and I'm supposed to get a $20 Lowe's gift card out of it. I ought to come out ahead.
Their "Home Improvement" category offers four services:
- How-to guides.
- Coupons.
- Pre-screened Contractors.
- Decorating Secrets, Services, and
CouponsSavings.
None of these things is compelling. In fact, they're asking you to pay $9/month to have access to non-exclusive content that they pretty much recycle from free places on the web. Sigh.
Secure Programming Matters
An editorial in an IT magazine suggested that secure programming is a waste of time and money. I strongly disagree. Of course, I work for Cigital, a company that specializes in software quality. So, I have a particular axe to grind here.