neorants

[ The following was originally posted on Sun, Dec 26 14:16:07 1999, LONG before the recent site overhaul, but is posted here in case you're just tuning in ]

Just yesterday I installed some software I had bought for my father on his computer, and was appalled to see what a mess his system had become. The PII- 266 with 128MB RAM that booted quickly when I had set up for him only a year ago spent easily a minute or two thrashing its hard drive after booting up and arriving at the desktop.

I watched in horror as tray icon after tray icon popped into the lower-right corner of his screen, and slowly Windows cached the icons for his many desktop shortcuts, filling his entire 800×600 desktop area. I didn’t even care to guess how many hundreds of fonts must have gotten cached as well, from the several card creation and desktop publishing programs he had installed.

The last straw came today, when I downloaded QuickTime 4 and installed it on my own machine, not having had a need for it since my last format, a few months back, up until today. Once the installation had completed, I had a program group directly under the main “Programs” branch of my start menu, an icon on my desktop, and another icon in my Quick Launch toolbar! It’s as if the designers sat back and thought, “Everyone needs to be able to launch our QuickTime viewer as quickly as possible, nobody EVER views QuickTime files by double- clicking the file and letting the player auto-open, after all. No, they much prefer to launch the QuickTime viewer first, so they can gasp in awe as the miracle of drag-and-drop does its thing.” I don’t know if that’s how Mac users think, but I can say for sure that I don’t think that way.

Things get even better if you opt to install RealNetworks’ RealPlayer or RealJukebox software, as in addition to the usual bevy of icons you get a bookmark installed in your web browser, and you are also the lucky recipient of a system tray icon! That’s right, at no extra charge you get to donate some of your precious system memory to add yet another icon to that area once reserved only for actual SYSTEM-RELATED information and functions like the current system time or sound volume level adjustment. But of course, your huge return on investment for this little gem is that instead of taking 3 seconds to launch, your player software launches in around 2 seconds, and you can easily launch it by double-clicking the icon in the systray! Just in case you can’t find any of the icons to launch RealPlayer/Jukebox that have been conveniently placed on your desktop, start menu, or Quick Launch bar, you have a backup option! How thoughtful of them.

At this point you may be thinking, “So if you don’t like those icons, just go in and remove them!” Precisely what I do, my friends, but my point all along has been this: These annoying pieces of system clutter are immediately cleaned out by those who know what they’re doing, in order to keep a tidy system. But the very people that these things are supposedly attempting to be so accessible for, the computer newbies, both actual new users and those who perpetually stay at the newbie level of computer literacy, don’t know HOW to remove them! So, their systems continually build up layer after layer of binary sludge, so to speak, until they wake up one day and realize that the same stuff that used to pop up effortlessly on their beefy system now takes forever to load up. I’ve seen systems that have three or four columns of program group listings off the main “Programs” tree on their start menus. I’ve seen systems that have mere inches for actual tasks to be displayed on their taskbar, because their system trays and Quick Launch bars were so full. Finally, I’ve seen systems, like my dad’s, that perform like a 486/DX 66 after being bogged down by so many resident programs, virus scanners, and easy-access systray icons it could make a geek cry.

Software designers: LISTEN TO ME! WE KNOW THAT YOU ARE PROUD OF YOUR SOFTWARE. WE KNOW THAT YOU WANT US TO USE IT. JUST STOP RAMMING IT DOWN OUR THROATS EVERY STEP OF THE WAY!!!