Find and Undo
After playing with my recent app purchase – iThoughtsHD – for an hour or so, I once more stop to reflect on the backwards nature of software development and user experience and useful – as opposed to checklist feature-creep – functionality.
Where does the useful stuff go?
Why do folks think it’s ok to stop doing the few basic things that UI and faster CPUs sweat blood on during the 80s, 90s and lost in the 2000s?
I’m talking:
- copy and paste – hello iPhone, and ummm hello windows phone 7?
- in-app find – hello web 2.0, browser search is not find, is not incremental search, is not find and replace
- in-app find – hello APPLE! Didn’t you learn from the previous bullet? I want to find things in mail and safari and now you have an absolute gazillion apps hanging out on your AppStore all copying your piss poor example!
- undo – I mean, really. Emacs had it. We made fun of web 2.0 apps. And now the whole barmy mobile world thinks it’s a good idea to treat delete like an atom bomb unless they hide it in some stupid ass gesture like shake. I’m sorry, I reserve shake for when I’m shouting at my technical gadgets while threatening to throw them out the window for not having bl**dy undo.
I didn’t just lose a whole branch of my first iThoughts mindmap by using delete and discovering there was no undo.
Ok, I did. B*gger. It’s still wrong.



