It wasn’t so long ago that nearly every software product we used was the result of a company paying for programmers to build a product they could sell, however recently times have changed, and with movements like open source and the FSF (Free Software Foundation) we have a choice between proprietary and open source software. I recently reviewed the kind of software I use frequently to see how well I was adopting open source software, and it turns out that recently I have begun to switch back to proprietary. Here are the results: Proprietary Open Source App Store No Open … Continue »

A while ago I was planning to bug on how buggy the operating system OSX Lion was when it came out. Programs like Xcode had particular difficulty staying stable, which made it hard for developers to work, almost to the point where entire hours would be eaten up trying to make Xcode stable enough to work on. Now its worth noting that this happened when Lion came out, now I find the system rock solid, I haven’t had a single system crash for at least 6 months. However my colleague who has been using Mac’s ever since OS 9 has … Continue »

Error messages occur in a program in order to inform users about something going wrong with a program, they are sometimes cryptic about what the actual problem is (for example error numbers that correspond to specific points in code that a software engineer would be able to track down) and other times they are overly transparent (relaying technical jargon to a user doesn’t help them). Having said that, it is vitally important for error messages to occur, users should really have a right to know if something goes wrong in the software they are using. An ideal error message should … Continue »