Tuesday, October 12, 1999, 3:42:17 PM, Kevin wrote:
> Huh? Software is definitely there to keep us from making mistakes.
Only mistakes which cause severe problems. Not putting in a subject line
is an inconvenience if even that much.
> While you certainly don't want to go to the extreme where it makes the
> user unproductive, any software developer wouldn't last long if they
> didn't include some code to help the user avoid mistakes.
This is extreme as there is no technical reason to do the check. It makes
the user unproductive because it causes them to jump through one more hoop to
do what they want.
Before someone jumps on that statement notice that I am not making any
pretensions of what a user *may* want or what a user *aught* to do. Whether
or not you (general case) agree with the base subject, the point is that there
are users and instances where no subject line is perfectly acceptable.
Let's equate that to my favorite example, "rm -rf *" in unix. That is
delete everything in the directory, recursively and forced. The "forced" is
there to delete directories since rm doesn't normally do that. Is it
destructive? Yes. Can a user enter it by mistake? Easily. Do most shells
or implementations of rm ask you "Are you sure?" about a million times? No.
I'd rather lose the files the one time I screw up than to have to confirm
the few thousand+ times I don't.
I'd rather send out one message without a subject and didn't mean it than
to have to confirm the few hundred or thousand times I do.
Mistakes happen, deal with it, don't dumb it down to where it causes extra
work.
> I agree with you here, but you are stating an extreme case, where they
> went to the point of making things unproductive IMO. Software should
> be flexible and provide options.
It is not an extreme case. Let's put checks on emptying the trash, on
parked messages in the trash, on deleting messages, on exiting existing
messages, on deleting addresses from the to line, the cc line, the bcc line,
deleting the subject, changing the templates, changing the quick templates,
stopping a search. What other button presses haven't I mentioned yet? Now,
let's make them all optional. I just named 11 options so far off the top of
my head which all fall in the same "idiot-proof" catagory and if I decided to
sit here and really go through TB and catalog all that I could think of I
could fill 2-3 pages on a normal tabbed option display.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
ICQ: 5107343 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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