Sure, remove this if too far off-topic. But maybe developers need a little break once in a while - a thread to share a smile that only (mostly) developers would understand.
For example, before the days of MS perfecting the art of using their customers and beta testers, a developer might pull volunteers from the street, sit them down in front of the new program, and watch how well they could interface with it. Here’s and video of what that was like - the developer watching the user navigate through the application:
Click “What it’s like watching User” link below. I don’t know how to embed the video itself.
Initially, I had the wrong URL. There are several versions of this video. How ironic that I didn’t watch the video on my first post all the way through to thoroughly test it.
When I worked with Gabreal at a CD authoring company, their Mac programmer insisted that, because the user started at the desktop, when the CD writing was done, the application should just return the user directly to the desktop.
Gabreal and I, along with a few others, tried to tell convince the programmer that if the program just returned the user to the desktop, they would think the program had crashed. They should at least get a “Good Bye” message that stays on the screen - “I am done now. Do you want to Quit or create another CD?”
Considering how flaky the CD authoring software was at the time - in fairness, mostly because HD’s of the era would periodically do a self-calibration, allowing a data streaming buffer to run out - without any success/failure notice, you wouldn’t know if the process crashed or what. The company’s product was always rated near the bottom of any “Review” list I saw for that type of software.
