[dundee] Bad design examples...

[Robert Ladyman]

Apropos of nothing at all, other than a desire to have a moan, I'm wondering 
about your experiences of annoying small design issues with software or 
systems that you use.

The one that set me off is my accounting package: if I decide that I want to 
see (say) all customers, and don't enter a search condition, it whirs for a 
short time and then pops up a modal dialogue box warning me that I have 
selected to view (say) 260 customers, which might take a long time, do I want 
to proceed? It actually takes more time to move the mouse and click OK to 
proceed, than it does to select and display the customers (grr...). Not only 
that, I know, from checking the logs, that the software has to run a query to 
find out that there are 260 customers...and it only has to do this to populate 
the dialogue box.


Don't even start me on the implementation of a system that thinks that 200 
customers is  a lot of records. I've looked at the code for searching and that 
didn't improve my temper, either:  select * from customer, then loop through 
each record for matches, rather than SELECT * FROM CUSTOMER WHERE (some search 
condition).

...and relax...

-- 
Robert Ladyman
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