My computer hosts two operating systems, one from Apple and one from Microsoft; and they are both more than adequate at what they designed to do. I also have many useful applications, all of which work without crashing and serve my purposes.
And this is to be expected. If you are in the business of providing software, then you better make sure it works well or else you will not be in business for long (although Microsoft managed to get away with it with Vista).
But if your business is other than software, then any old shit will make do to support your product. I have a Canon printer, and the program they provide to allow printing on disks looks like it was designed in the DOS age by an intern with a twisted sense of humour. She who must be obeyed has a back-up drive which refuses to work unless a completely redundant utility program is installed and is allowed to pop up and announce that is alive every time she turns on her machine. My router offers monitoring software that doesn’t. And don’t get me started on the “utility” provided with the UPS which crashes everything if you try to load it.
Pretty much anything you want to plug into your computer arrives with crap supporting software. But that’s not all. This week I have been struggling with software that apparently should be helping me design a photo book.
My client is a reader of this site so I will be careful what I say. But I would not be lying if I said his photos feature finely toned legs, firm buttocks and sometimes surprising genitals. And that’s just the horses he rides. Yes, it’s a book of polo photos.
Photo books seem to be big business, but it is hard to find a supplier that will print large size, hardback books at the level of quality that my photos and my most excellent client deserve. And when you do find one, then the software they provide for the design of the book turns out to be a piece of crap. At least, that has been my experience.
I finally settled on MyPublisher. Their books are well regarded and they offered an A3 size leather-bound monster which is just what we needed (never mind the content, smell the cover). So I downloaded their software and away I went.
The design part of it is quite good. Each page has a wide choice of layouts, allowing to place photos exactly where you want them. The problem comes when you want to choose a photo. You place photos from your hard drive into the software where they appear in a long horizontal line. Except sometimes they don’t. Once you have added them to the book, they disappear from the horizontal line. Except sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they won’t add to a page. Sometimes the whole thing seems to give up and it crashes. Sometimes the whole thing seems to give up and you have to restart it.
It’s pathetic. This company is in the business of selling photobooks and their printing service is apparently excellent. But the software they provide is rubbish.
And then I updated to OSX Lion. Apple has had Lion available to developers for months, so they can test their software and update it to make it Lion compatible. MyPublisher didn’t have time to do this, they have been too busy sending out daily spam telling me I will get a free wheelbarrow if I order four books in the next three hours.
So when I fired up MyPublisher after installing Lion, it was even more crap than usual. Scroll bars wouldn’t scroll and the application disappeared into the ether every time I edited text. I could complain, but I would just get an off-topic reply from some poor uninformed schmuck in India, so what’s the point?
The point is, why can’t companies on the periphery of the software business make an effort to provide useable software? Because they can’t be arsed.
Still, in spite of all the hassle, 91MB of book was uploaded to the printers this morning and many pages of leather bound goodness will soon be rolling off the presses. The bad news is that I still have another book to design. I predict I am going to be grumpy.
Comments 🔗
2011-07-28| Billy the Brush saysYou should get the Windows version, bloody excellent :=)