In software design and usability, it’s the little things that make a difference. (For example, see this post on two secrets of Mac design.) Sometimes the little things aren’t good, however, as I discovered with GMail today.
I was processing through my contacts and deleting those I don’t want. I spent a while selecting all 123 contacts to delete and hit the delete key, only to receive this message:
When writing this function of the GMail interface, the developers should have considered that people would probably want to batch delete their contacts. I specifically selected all of them to save time, rather than going through in little groups like I evidently should have.
It might seem picky, but this is the sort of thing that differentiates good software from great software.
Yesterday I got an error from my buddies at microsoft that said “An unknown Error has occurred -170.” If they have time to number their errors they should have time to give a short explanation of them.
Then in fixing that error I had to setup my proxy/intranet profile using a demonic webapp known as Oracle Information Manager. If you used Safari it would log you out every time you click the next button (after you entered all your data of course). Then if you used Firefox it would log you out twice then work on the 3rd time. Then of course, when you get to the end, it would say you were logged out, but it did actually work. So congrats Oracle on making the worst web app I’ve ever seen in my life.