When applications go to war
I had a bizarre set of interactions between my mail client - Eudora, and my anti-virus application (Norton) this afternoon. It all started when I had Eudora trim the junk folder. This involves Eudora taking older junk and moving it to the trash folder. The trouble started when Norton noticed a virus (in an attachment) - I guess it noticed on the file copy operation. Norton wanted to delete the virus file, but Eudora had locked the trash file as it executed the copy. The upshot - neither operation could progress as they bickered. I had to turn off Norton's checks, let Eudora finish the operation, and then re-enable Norton. Goodie - I love it when applications fight, especially when they each deploy modal dialogs. Grrr...
Comments
That's all too familiar
[Jorge] September 2, 2004 10:51:30.055
That's all too familiar, but to me, it happened (with the same two programs - they seem to distaste eachother, the sensitive bastards!) when mail was being downloaded to Eudora's main inbox. It was an interesting sight: the two applications warring eachother and me trying to fight both. It only calmed down when I turned Norton off, isolated the problematic message in Eudora's mailbox and deleted it alltogether. The front has remained quiet since then.
Banning of Modal dialogs
[Peter William Lount] September 2, 2004 14:36:29.663
Modal Dialog boxes need to be banned from ALL applications! GUI systems need a new metaphor which old dialog boxes could be refactored into.
Re: When applications go to war
[ Socinian] September 2, 2004 15:08:10.585
Comment on When applications go to war by Socinian
Non-modal GUI is just one part of Jef Raskin's intended revolution of the PC interface, per his book "The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems"
Has anyone else read and/or been convinced by the new ideas in this book? Being trained in Cognitive Psychology myself, I tend to agree with a lot of his points.
My summary here
My notes here.