This is beginning to sound like I’m picking on Adobe. Photoshop is one of my favourite tools (although it has some strange wrinkles - hiding masses of functionality behind strange keyboard modifiers?) and generally I think it’s fairly usable
This means that the remaining bits of cruft in the interface stick out like a sore thumb.
So. modal dialog boxes. The ones that pop up to tell you something and block you doing other things until you click OK.
What they are popping up to tell you had better be important as they disrupt your train of thought. When you are working fast on something repetitive you find your self clicking on another area of the screen, getting that annoying ‘ding’ noise until another part of your brain manages to notice that one of the little buggers has popped up and is blocking what you are trying to do.
This is fine if the message is ‘Warning! Doing this will kill all your friends. Please turn on the ‘Allow application to kill all my friends’ preference if you wish to allow this.’
Anything less urgent than this should be communicating with you in a way that doesn’t make you stop what you are doing. A status bar message or an informational popup somewhere away from your cursor.
My favourite Photoshop rage moment is when you are
There use was rampant in the past but they happily went the way of human sacrifice and coin-operated electricity meters.
There are still some left.
(note to reader. I started writing this. Got distracted and now can’t remember where I saw the modal dialog that annoyed me in the first place. I thought I’d post this anyway as I need to up my average and someone might come along and find it for me…)
