Argh, expensive software!

Why is expensive, specialised software always so annoying?

The last time this rant surfaced, I was still at uni, trying to wrap my head around the user interface for an electronics simulation package called Sabre. The back-end of Sabre was awesometastic, and did everything pretty well (from what I could tell). The UI was the problem - it was just horrible.

Now, I'm working for a living, and having to deal with quirky software yet again. This time around, it's a documentation tool by the name of DOORS. I'm not entirely sure of what it's really supposed to be, at the moment I'm using it as a word-processor until someone tells me what else I need to do with it. However, this time around, it's not just the UI that's driving me crazy - or crazier, at least. The UI does have some funky behaviours, including dreadful repaint flickering, re-defining the scrollbar to suit itself, and having some of the more essential features requiring mouse-type interaction, just to distract you from actually writing stuff. Creating tables, inserting objects, even adding numbered lists, are all proving to be incredibly awkward.

The scrollbars are particularly noteworthy. DOORS deals with "objects" - which are sections of text (or whatever else) with optional headings - instead of with text, like you would expect a document tool to. I can cope with that, but the terminology gets confusing when you insert an object in an object - the first one being an OLE object, the second being a DOORS object. Ouch. Anyway, the scrolling action is not to move the screen by X pixels or Y lines of text, but rather to align the next object with the top of the page. This makes life interesting when you try to scroll an object containing a long picture, as you essentially jump over the top of it. And to add icing to the cake, the size of the scrollbar handle is dependent upon the number of objects on screen right now, rather than the length of the document. Argh.

The spell-checker is also rather cruft-laden. Spell-checking the phrase “four seconds” produces this message:

“Format error. Consider four-seconds instead of 'four seconds'.Spelled-out fractions require a hyphen unless the numerator or the denominator already contains a hyphen: three-fourths; twenty-nine thirtieths.”

A bulleted list produced a long-winded message about the length of the sentence. I also noticed that the message the spell-checker produced was rather unusual, in that it had punctualtion errors in it. Just for fun, I ran this message through the spell-checker, only to be told that it had grammar errors in it - in this case, no space after a full-stop.

“Punctuation. Consider . Use instead of '.Use'.A space should usually follow a full stop or comma between two distinct words. Ordinarily, the word following a full stop begins a new sentence and should start with a capital letter.”

I gave up when I noticed that, apart from being a little hard to interpret, the message didn't follow the rule that it was explaining. :D