Oh, how tired I am of software always being made either for idiots or for über-elite hackers. Or half for one and half for the other.
We’ve started using a new Microsoft gizmo at work—OneNote, included with Office 2007. It’s a program for taking notes and collaborating on documents.
I decided to use it at home as well. So, in the New section there’s an Explain this choises item with a link to the help. That’s for morons, right? As if a person wouldn’t figure out that New Notebook creates a new “notebook.” New Section creates a section. And so on. How much of an idiot do you have to be not to understand from the interface that there are hierarchically organized notebooks, section groups, sections, pages, and subpages when it’s written there in large letters?
At the same time, they didn’t think of implementing something as simple and useful as letting you right-click a menu item to customize it. Or rather, they didn’t want to, because of the terrible danger—the user might click a menu item with the wrong mouse button and not know what to do! The horror!
Next. The interface designers decided they know better than everyone else and that the focus should always remain on the page containing the text. God forbid it should move to the list of sections—the user might not be able to find it there! And would suffer terribly—where did my focus go?! Of course they’d never think to click the page containing the text, how could they? As a result, the Del key doesn’t work in section lists—you have to right-click and select “Remove.”
I could also write about how it refuses to open its own notes from ftp, while slowing down and throwing strange errors. Or about how selecting an entire text box is inconvenient because you either have to press Ctrl+A or click it precisely with the mouse. But I think what’s already here is enough.
Despite all this, OneNote is an excellent tool. Recommended for those who can no longer organize themselves using simple means but want to try doing it with complicated ones.