The Iron Yuppie

On one of the file download sites that I check on a semi-regular basis, there was an update to a tool I use quite a bit: Foldershare. I find it somewhat fundamentally weird that this isn't part of Windows to begin with. Why is it such a pain in all software applications to actually understand what's going on? Here's a hint, developers, when you're sitting their debugging with a thousand break points and wondering what's going on at each stage of your application, at some point, it's pretty likely that your users are going to want to know that as well. No, they're not going to want to figure out that the ttl is too short for the app you're building using the standard MS TCP library, but they WILL want to know "ok, it's not connecting because of a, b & c". You have to figure it out when you debug the problem. All I'm saying is that your users are the exact same way, they just don't have the source. They run into an error and want to know how to fix it. Oh, and as an aside, exposing that information should be turned off by default. Don't overload them and, at the same time, don't bury information they'll want to know. Yes it's a fine line, but use your mom as your proxy, and you should be ok.

One other thing... PLEASE don't tell me something is wrong and then give me no clue on how to fix it. It's so painful. You know how to fix it, or whether or not it can't be fixed. I saw the worst dialog box the other day. "Outlook could not save the meeting request." GEE THANKS. I proceeded to do half a dozen different things, and none of it was any help. Not even the log file, which theoretically should be every bit of information available, was of no use what so ever. This means actually spending some time to catch and split up the errors that get thrown. It's more work, but we appreciate it.

D