I will admit... it is easier to be snarky against something anonymous such as faceless development teams... I tend to forget that there are real people working hard to develop something other people hopefully will like.
I got an email from one of the UI developers/testers. Someone I may know. Not sure, he gave only his first name. But it did bring home to me that my criticisms could have been couched in more sympathetic terms. I owe the team an apology. Snark is something that comes too easily to me... I want to like Doc Buddy... I know that it does achieve its fundamental goal, and that a lot of good work must have gone into it to make that happen. But if the worlds of Apples, PCs, iPhones, and Androids has show us anything at all, it has shown us that skins matter, and that UIs matter. I want to like Doc Buddy... But it has usability issues that need to be work before I can do so. IBM has a decades long history of releasing unpolished products and then polishing them up over the next several releases. "Making it pretty" was always an afterthought. I think that's a mistake that used to be tolerable in the closed world of expert customers of decades gone by. But even experts want nice things too. I think that "making it pretty" should be just as important an objective as "making it work". Didn't OS/2 losing the desktop wars of the '90s prove that? Didn't Steve Jobs prove that? I do think that I hilighted some significant shortcomings in Doc Buddy. I do hope that someone will take them into consideration before the next iteration. I do regret the snark. Dave ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
