Anticipatory Software Design
Pierre Igot writes about “tendency to design software for which the optimal running environment is a computer that does not exist yet.” It’s a real problem, although I disagree with one part of his article:
It is clear that Apple is quite aware that this is an issue. Otherwise, they would not have provided users with the option to turn drop shadows off in iPhoto 2. They would not have introduced the option to turn the Preview display off by default in Columns view in the Finder.
I turned off shadows in iPhoto because I don’t like the way they look, and I turned off previews in the Finder because of the way they interfere with scrolling and keyboard navigation.
