Developers Know Best

I am fed up with software written by developers who know best.

Open office falls into this category. I just typed 'February 2005' into a cell in a spreadsheet, and it converted it to '01/02/05'. Did I mean 01/02/05? No, if I'd meant that, I would have typed it in - I actually meant the whole of February. So I have now spent 10 minutes looking for the option to turn it off, haven't found it, and have given up, opting for the add-random-characters-to-confuse-their-parser approach.

This is of course not a problem that open office is alone in suffering from - writing HTML tags in Microsoft and Open Office versions of Word, for example, creates major headaches. Quote marks are converted into so-called smart quotes, hyphens are converted into special characters for extra-long hypens - these characters are not 127 bit ASCII characters so I've got to run all of the documents through regular expressions to swap them to their non-smart equivalents. And for those people who are asking what am I doing writing HTML in Word anyway, please tell me an easier way to convert a badly formatted word document into decent HTML. No, please, you would halve my workload.

It's not just odd users with obscure tasks that run into these problems either. Ooh, it looks like you're writing a letter. You've put a number at the start of that line - you must be writing a list. The software has been written with the assumption that people are going to use it in a certain way, and it just can't cope if you move away from that, even slightly. A lot of my software suffers from the same sort of problem; SmartFTP assumes you want your windows tiled horizontally, Outlook Express thinks you only ever recieve new e-mails in your Inbox, and as for Flash... well, lets not get started.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have exciting new features. I can see that smart quotes would be a very good idea if I was producing a document for print, or that I would want '1st February 2005' converted into a numerical date if I was rubbish at remembering that February is the second month of the year. But please, I beg anyone reading this who writes software - give us the option to turn the fancy things off. Or even better, ship your product with them turned off by default, and offer a quick and easy way to show us the features you think we will want. I can't believe I'm about to say this, but Macromedia had a good idea - when you fire up Flash for the first time, they ask you if you are a designer or developer, and tune your IDE experience to that.

I just wish software developers would stop thinking they know what their users want to do - you really don't have a clue. There are clearly some people out there who are capable of writing extremely good software, but by forcing features on us that we don't want, it makes it virtually unusable.

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