I’ve been thinking about the issue of feedback in operating systems, games and applications. I’m the type of person that likes a lot of feedback. If the app seems to be sitting and thinking for some reason, I’d like some sign that it’s alive, at least, and hasn’t hung or crashed for some reason.
But how much feedback is enough? When does it become too much? Then there’s the problem of feedback accuracy. What if what you’re being told is just wrong?
One of the quirks of Windows – and this seems to be true of all versions I’ve used, going back to at least Windows 95, is the highly annoying “your application is not responding.” The app window will then gray out, and you can’t click on it or do anything useful with it.
But the application often is still working. Sometimes it’s in some kind of deadlock state, sometimes it’s just frozen, but mostly, it’s just grinding away on… something. Or it’s waiting for… something. I’ve noticed this happen most often when some heavy duty I/O is occurring, but it can also happen when the system seems completely quiescent.
I’ve often killed an application or process that’s in this state without realizing it was still doing actual work. Lately, whenever that message pops up, I just click the “wait for the app to respond” choice.
Another type of feedback are error messages. Lately, I’ve run into an odd issue with Firefox 3.5.2. It won’t completely quit when I tell it to. All the windows close, but the Firefox*32 process is still running. When I try to launch Firefox again, it tells me “Firefox is still running, you need to quit Firefox before starting.”
Uh, no, Firefox is not running, the kernel process is somehow still stuck in memory. I have to manually kill the process before I can launch Firefox again. It’s almost enough to make me shift to Google Chrome, except that Chrome is so minimalist that making it do what I want it to do creates its own set of annoyances.
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7 comments
Jason says:
August 31, 2009 at 11:54 am (UTC -7 )
Well, your first annoyance is bad software engineering.. That “Application is not responding” stuff comes from when the program is looping and not responding to windows messages.
Basically, it’s processing and the programmers are not running the message pump. It’s just sloppiness. If they’d just pump messages every once in a while, it’d all work just fine and never grey out.
The Firefox thing, ya, that happens to me occasionally. It’s doing something in the background, or maybe a plugin is, and in that case it’s not responding to the close message. Very annoying.
tlmck says:
August 31, 2009 at 1:44 pm (UTC -7 )
I have had the same issue with Firefox 3.5x running on the Win 7 RC. I also had trouble with it restarting after installing an add-on. It would just disappear and not come back. I could click the icon and bring it up again, but it would ask me to restart again… I finally gave up and reverted to 3.012, and now 3.013. No issues there.
3.5x does seem to work fine in Vista and Ubuntu.
Derek says:
August 31, 2009 at 5:24 pm (UTC -7 )
Oh man, there are quite a few similar annoyances. Let’s see, just from today I have:
1) Any game that like to run an updater needs to run in Administrator mode. Why do I have to tell it every day this it is OK to run it in Administrator mode?
2) I keep several archive folders in my ‘work’ Outlook, one for each year. So I have a file for 2009, another for 2008, etc. They are each almost 2GB in size. But even though the 2008 and 2007 files haven’t changes in months, Outlook insists on ‘updating’ them every time I open Outlook. The date/time change and the contents are different (I did a hex compare once). So SyncToy inissts on backing up those files every day, seriously slowing things down.
3) Picasa allows you to edit pictures, but stores those edits in a location different from the original. So once I start using Picasa I ALWAYS have to use Picasa or I lose the edits.
4) My Facebook games stopped working in Firefox 2-3 days ago. Still work in Chrome and IE, but not FF. What’s up with that? And no, a reboot doesn’t fix it.
Mot Eugaet says:
September 1, 2009 at 8:42 am (UTC -7 )
Some years ago I was burning some DVD’s and like a good boy I had Windows set to automatically download and install updates. I can’t remember if it was XP or Vista. Well … during the burn stage of one of my DVD’s, Windows said, Hi, I just downloaded updates and installed them, isn’t that great, and I am now going to reboot your system if you like it or not ( my version of the message, grrr). I tried to stop it and failed. I just sat there and cussed and fumed, trying to stop it from rebooting. Needless to say, I made a nice coaster, but fortunately, I saved the files and was able to attempt a new DVD. After that frustration, I now have it set to automatically download, but I will choose when to install.
YS says:
September 2, 2009 at 5:11 am (UTC -7 )
Any program that steals focus from you. One of my top most pet peeves! Should not happen with recent OSes but somehow some programs manage to do that!
FH says:
September 2, 2009 at 6:44 am (UTC -7 )
Good to see some meat on this blog’s bones, Loyd.
Peeves? Which one? How about SQLlite’s touchiness, need for frequent defrag and reindexing, propensity to totally clot unless you exclude most tables from your antivirus and its ability to totally freeze a one-core machine while consuming 8% of CPU. Pure magic.
Brandon Champion says:
September 4, 2009 at 1:46 pm (UTC -7 )
I have an app at work that grinds away for an hour with the “App not responding” message… but it’s really working. The funny thing is, it has a progress bar, but it’s never updated. It’s gray until the app is done, then it’s solid blue for a second until it goes back to gray.
But what really bugs me is UAC in Vista when it doesn’t pop up immediately… you open something that should pop up a UAC box and instead, it slows the system down for 20-30 seconds… then finally shows up. The computer is in no way slow and CPU utilization is low, so I don’t know what the holdup is.