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devs do not always understand their users


bartvbl

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Some developers of applications do not always understand their costumers/users, making their software behave like they own the place, or come with useless stuff.

A few examples:

Let's start with the newsletter.

You give your e-mail and get "weekly updates and special offers" [yeah right]. Signing up for a news letter is probably pretty much the same as going to a supermarket, and asking if they can send you commercial folders every week. Normally you put that kind of things in your paper bin, so why would you sign up for something like that? Strange that so many companies have something like this on their website...

...and not to mention that when you signed up, there often misses a "unsubscribe" button.

The toolbar

I installed a program a little while ago, and clicked the next button a bit too fast. Before I knew it my homepage was set to ask.com, and I had an ask.com toolbar installed. Now if there is something wasting screen area, and will probably never ever be of use, it must be a toolbar. For some reason many of the larger websites do not understand this, and offer their own toolbar for download.

Services, and other ways for filling your pc with

As usual, there came some programs with my new computer. Of course you install those when you set up your new pc. Now one of the programs had its own updater. No big deal: a lot of programs have those. This one, however, thought it needed its own service to operate. And whaddyaknow: it suddenly appeared in the startup list as well. If that wasn't enough: it had a tray icon.

I don't think this kind of programs need elaboration about why I hate them. Seriously: why do developeras think that users would like it running on startup, having a managing service, and being accessible from the taskbar?

Seriously: _it_is_an_updater_

The problem with these kind of selfish programs is that they appear everywhere. One creates a service, the other one comes with a toolbar or a tray icon, and often these things dont really have any use at all.

Seriously developers of this kind of software:

Get to know your users, and exclude these things if they aren't needed.

Unless I am surrounded by idiots that actually like these kind of things, of course...

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I'm definitely with you on those points. Even some of the good programs are starting to come with toolbars and other crap. What they need to understand is: the user chooses to download THE PROGRAM, not the toolbars not the adware and not the "we can help you operate your computer because you don't know much about them" type software.

I wish there was some sort of tool that could wrap around installers so you can see which files it's tried to install and manually accept the files you want.

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Exactly. It is REALLY annoying. I download the software because I want to use it, not have it run my computer. Applications can be worse than viruses!

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Ok, since I'm developing a computer game I'll try and keep this stuff in mind. But, since I am using the Halo Engine, I won't really have to worry about changing to much.

Oh, and I am in agreeance. I am sick and tired of the stupid dev's who can't be bothered actually think of the consumer, and instead think of ways they can piss us off more.

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A nice example was my physics teacher:

he showed us some computer simulations now and then in class. Being a "regular" windows user, he was using IE.

And of course, he had toolbars installed. 2 of them. Since the pc was rather old, the screen wasn't so large either.

The result:

only half of the size of the screen was left to show the website, the rest was used by 2 toolbars, and an additional bar from the google toolbar that asked if you wanted to translate the current page.

You bet we tried to convince him to close those annoying things, but he never did; "the computer wasn't his own".. >_>

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TheEPICtrainrider

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My Father installs... every... damn... toolbar... One day I just opened up Mozilla and got rid of all of them. Left only Navigation. He never uses Firefox ether. He's been bitten by the Aol and Internet Explorer. Can you even download Aol Browsers anymore? One day I'm going to sneek on and delete both of them. Then change his home page to Aol so he can stop yelling how his computer is full of viruses and how Aol keeps crashing.

When I instal a program, I MAKE SURE to uncheck the "Install Blah Blah Blah tool bar" and "Add blah blah blah to your startup" and the other crap. I made it so Aim doesn't do anything without me deliberately opening it up.

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w00t..

PLEASE give him a quick course in "how do you NOT ruin a computer with crapware"

..

crapware soumds like a good name for that kind of stuff, doesnt it? :P

http://browser.cdn.aol.com/customie8/aol/download.html <= here you go: IE for AOL ;)

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Sandboxie doesn't really wrap around installers, it is a isolated box in which all installed programs go. Handy anyways.

Another good example is Nero. It started as a good standalone burning program, and after it became world-wide popular it became a whole multimedia suit.

Of course the lazy people give in, but the techs and power-users want stand-alone programs for the simple reason that they are usually specialized and therefore better than a whole program suit.

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