I swear, some days you just want to reach into the screen and strangle the blogger on the other end. Jeff Atwood complains that his users commonly fail to read all the helpful hints on how to use their overly complicated, what you see isn’t what you get editor on Stack Overflow:

The ask question page is already dangerously close to cluttered with helpful tips, but apparently these helpful buttons, links, and text are all but invisible to a large segment of the user population. Sure, you could argue that Super User tends to attract less sophisticated users, but I see the exact same problem with programmers on Stack Overflow. As new users, a significant percentage of them can't figure out how to format code, even though there's not only a toolbar button that does it for you, but help text on the right explicitly describing how to do it manually. (Just indent 4 spaces. Spoiler alert!)

So essentially, users don’t find the editor intuitive and the solution they’ve gone with up until now is to add more and more help text to try and teach the user how to use the unintuitive editor. It’s not working. The obvious solution is to escalate the arms race:

More and more, I'm thinking we need to put the formatting help — for new users only — directly in their line of sight. That is, pre-populate the question entry area with some example formatting that is typical of the average question. Nothing complicated. But at least then it'd be in the one — and apparently the only one — place myopic users are willing to look. Right in front of their freakin' faces.

Thankfully the comments are full of people suggesting the right answer – fix the editor so you don’t need instructions to use it. You can always provide a source view for geeks who like to type in markup, but make the default something that just works.

If the mark of a poor tradesman is that they always blames their tools, the mark of a bad UI designer is that they always blame the users. It’s not them, it’s you.

I really don’t understand why companies don’t think Google has made their apps enterprise ready. I’ve been playing with the premium version of Google Apps the last few days and it shows all the important characteristics of enterprise software:

Innocent Looking Settings That Break Everything

Google has this in spades. My favorite is the fact that if you happen to disable a service such as e-mail, all the settings continue to apply, but disappear from the admin dashboard. The net result for me was that all the Google Apps suddenly failed to send any e-mail (but e-mail from every other source worked perfectly).

A Fully Integrated Service Where Nothing Works Together

Check! You’d think that the list of users in the domain would show through in applications like Chat or for sharing documents right? Nope, you have to manually type them in as if the domain users didn’t exist.

Overly Destructive User Management

Oh yes. Delete a user and all the documents they created disappear, regardless of how many other people happen to be sharing them at the time.

Ridiculous Limitations

Want to change the owner of a document? No problems, as long as they’re a member of the domain. Want to change the owner of a spreadsheet? Nope – can’t do that. Spreadsheets are special.

What’s Missing?

They managed to respond to a support case within 24 hours which is a major no-no for true enterprise software. It should take at least a week. To be fair, I made it very difficult by solving my own problem (the invisible settings I mentioned above) before they responded.

Hopefully now that Google has been enterprise ready they can start working towards actually making useful software for business…

I think this photo more than any other symbolizes stupidity. It was taken quickly on a first generation iPhone so if you can’t see clearly what’s wrong, it’s a photo of our new screw driver set. The packaging includes a clear plastic overlay which, you guessed it, is screwed down.

That would be just normal stupidity except for the fact that the package is advertised as a DIY getting started pack, containing the essentials to get you started. Except of course, now you need the DIY getting started pack, opener pack. It’s beginning to sound like an enterprise software sale…

I’ve come to the conclusion that PHP libraries are simply designed to eat up RAM and do their very best to never spit it back out. There seems to be an assumption that everything will be done in RAM and then at the last possible moment dump everything out to the browser.

Sadly, this doesn’t work if what you’re building in RAM happens to be a zip file containing a whole heap of images. There are a few zip libraries around for PHP but none of them can directly stream the created zip file back out to the browser. Most of them create the entire zip file in RAM and then tell you to just ‘echo zip->file();’ which is just plain crazy. Others can “stream” but only to disk where they have random access.

How has PHP gone this long without recreating the ever so useful ZipOutputStream from Java?

A while back a migrated my personal FeedBurner account over to using a Google account as a test run before migrating the Ephox feeds. Unfortunately, I then forgot about it and in the mean time Google added a self-serve migration tool that now requires you to set up an Adsense account to migrate to.

They have huge reams of documentation talking about how much better the monitization of your feed will be now that it’s with Google and they even suggest a few times that it’s possible to migrate to Google without adding advertising into your feed. Sadly, I’ve been unable to find a document that describes how to migrate feeds and make sure that ads don’t get inserted.

It’s really very annoying.

UPDATE: When you do convert feeds over the confirmation email tells you:

Finally, to set up AdSense for feeds, you now need to visit AdSense at http://www.google.com/adsense and choose the AdSense for feeds option under Manage Ads > Get Ads. (Ads won't appear in your feeds unless you set up new ad units for them there.)

 So it’s safe to convert feeds, even if it’s annoying to have to set up an AdSense account to do so. Seriously, why couldn’t they make that message clearer in all the posts trying to reassure people about the transition?