Computer Annoyances

You might love your computer, but does it always love you..?

Interruptions

Notifications, with no easy way out.

I’m a big fan of not getting interrupted (see “Being Wired In” and even “Life Without a Cell Phone” to see just how anal I am about that). I need to stay focused for at least 30 minutes-1 hour without getting interrupted to get anything meaningful done.

Now, my computer doesn’t really see it that way.

I’m on a Mac, and I’m seriously struggling with keeping all the notifications that pop up at bay.

OS X makes it easy to mute all notifications at once with “Do Not Disturb”—and I could use that—but what if I wanted some notifications to still show up (ex., “all your servers are down”)..?

So, I find myself doing is spending a lot more time that I’d like in the Notification Center, continuously changing settings for programs that I might not even remember I installed.

And that’s the thing: you might think “All right, let me spend 1 hour setting this thing up and I’ll never have to look at it again”… It’s not. Every single app that I install seems to add a bunch of new notifications without my knowledge. Even Chrome wanted to send me notifications…. “I’ve finished loading a page”?!

Thank you very much, but I don’t really care how you’re doing. Just do your thing.

IMHO, the default for apps should be that they cannot add notifications, and might ask you in some way if it’s really super-important.

Being user-friendly

Asking you instead of taking decisions for you

I think that this is a big problem, that could be easily solved by software developers if they started thinking more like the user.

Has it ever happened to you that you’re trying to save a document, and you get asked “Do you want to switch to the UTF-8 character encoding? With UTF-8, you’ll be able to use any character in any language”..? Things like this happen to me more than they should. What is UTF-8? If UTF-8 supports any character in any language, why can’t you just pick that work for me?

I personally find this to happen more often on Windows/Linux, but that might just be me.

The face is, sometimes computers make you feel stupid. In my opinion, though, it’s not really that we’re stupid, it’s that we’re being asked to solve problems/answer questions that should have already been addressed for you.

Same goes for dialogs with 10,000 different settings that I can tweak. You’re not giving me freedom, you’re just making me work. Pick what you think is best, and let me get on to creating my presentation.

In short, computers could be more user friendly if they thought more like humans: we don’t know or care what UTF-8 is, 25 items or 50 per page doesn’t matter as much as you think.

Workflow changes

I know that most people hate change, and I’m not saying that we should’ve stayed with Windows 1.0—I’m not advocating that we should eliminate progress at all.

However, your workflow is a result of hours and hours of tweaking your computer, figuring out what software to use, and how you want it configured. If I counted how many hours I’ve spent in the Eclipse preference panel, or trying out Safari vs. Chrome for development, or Open Office vs. Word, Pages, or whatever…

Now, whenever there’s a big change, this might disrupt your workflow, and might even force you to start figuring it out all over again.

I’m talking about a feature you counted on that that gets changed or (even worse) removed, a whole program that is discontinued, etc. etc.

I don’t know how this particular problem could be solved, but for sure it’s a pain (to say the least).

Getting in the way

Now, this might seem like interruptions, but I don’t really mean that you’re in the middle of doing something, and you get interrupted. I mean that your computer makes it harder to get started.

I think that lately there’s been a trend where app developers are trying to improve on this, but sometimes your computer does still get in your way.

For instance, you have 20 minutes to get on the road or you’ll be late for a meeting, you try shutting down your computer, but there are updates to install on quit!

Or, you’re turning your computer on, but the computer has to check the disk because last time it wasn’t shut down properly.

Get me where I need to get started, don’t make me wait. Chrome OS made it a main feature: a few seconds from pressing the power button to getting on the Internet. That’s what I’m talking about!

Hardware catastrophes

It happens.

It was my fault, because I allowed a single point of failure, but at one time I kept a few somewhat-important files on an external drive: I would just connect it to my desktop, work on the files, and attach it to my laptop to work on the same files on the go. Obviously, I lost all my files (although I was luckily able to retrieve by going to a computer shop.

Even with cloud computing, backups etc., one still has to make sure to have a solid, redundant strategy not to lose all your stuff and waste time and work/money.

Software crashes

This is probably not really a problem as it used to be in the past.

You’re backed up in case of hardware problems (see above), many apps have auto-saving, there are automatic backups etc. It’s pretty rare to lose an important document.

However, it still happens where your computer just dies while you’re right in the middle of someth

My name is Niccolò Brogi, I’m a web developer/consultant from Florence, Italy. You can learn more about me on my website.