antikoan

 |::| Friday, April 26, 2002

 |::| Radio Ironyland  7:39:10 AM 

From Scripting News

A NY Times reporter discovers that, with software, it's often even worse than it appears. |::| [NY Times]

Here's the gist: Workarounds are bad, solutions are good. Software companies prefer to "write [a bug] into the manual" [Jakob Nielsen] over fixing it (presumably because it's cheaper). Honest tech support people have always known that.

And here's another one, on the virtues of using personae in web development projects:

Meg Hourihan: My experience using personas. |::|

The gist is that personae help you to separate your own biases from your requirements, thus allowing you to produce applications that genuinely service your customers -- instead of genuinely servicing the people who develop them. (Well, they do if you do them right. But they're real, real easy to do wrong. But I digress.)

Not that these things don't need to be be said again (and again, and again, and again, until somebody gets them). But I find it ironic that Userland, of all companies, should be preaching these parables as though it were a steadfast public example of one who'd learned from them.

From my perspective, as someone who's trying to use Radio at a moderately sophisticated level and was hoping to get some others up to speed at a slightly more than newbie level, Userland seems to positively glory in having created a piece of software that only reveals its true usefulness to pure geeks. And yet, they seem to want to believe that it's a genuinely useable piece of software that's friendly to grandpas and soccer moms.

It's not.

I'll repeat that, on the off chance that somebody actually reads me: It's not friendly. Because it doesn't work. Not reliably. Many things break, frequently, and in large part that's because of the "fix it on the fly" attitude that goes alogn with the nightly .root updates. Of course, they sell that as a virtue, too. There's no way that I could recommend Radio, in good conscience, to the people I want to set up websites for. No way in hell.

There are some really interesting ideas, and some really powerful stuff, lurking under the surface of Radio. But the slope between installing the software and using a stock Userland template, to actually doing any of the Kewl Stuff that Dave et al. talk about, is about 80 degrees for most of the way. (Um, guys: "write a script" is just, in no conceivable way, an acceptable answer when someone asks "how do I import my Radio posts from a previous installation." Nor is "it works for me." I've done level two tech support, and I've done end-user support. Trust me -- those are just wrong answers.)