[vogonj]

Steve Jobs certainly looks like a great boss, calling the entire MobileMe team into an all-hands and asking them point blank why the fuck their software doesn't work.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Steve-Jobs-Not-Shy-of-Using-t...

we can both play this game all day.

user experience is indeed a part of good engineering, but it's not the be-all and end-all, and eventually you will /always/ run into a place where you must compromise between a system which is well-engineered and one that behaves in accordance with user expectation.

this is why OS X doesn't have full ASLR and DEP, because it can cause applications to start crashing at random because they were poorly written in a way that used to be invisible.

this is why UAC on Windows Vista is a terrible experience, because even trusted applications need to prompt the user to make sure they approve of them executing on an administrator token.

this is why our operating systems still have to reboot while applying security updates, because long-running services and the kernel have to be replaced and there's no good way to do it seamlessly yet.

[xtreegold]

About the rest, I wasn't praising Jobs as a great boss, just noting your equivalent isn't something to be proud of.

And I disagree that you will always need to compromise between good engineering and good UX, for example you can certainly have ASLR and DEP with the same UX OS X currently has, they don't add any burden on the user.

Of course sometimes you need to compromise, but it's not everytime.

[ugh]

Having something take over your PC is terrible user experience. Tradeoffs may be necessary, including some that degrade user experience if they can otherwise improve user experience.

UAC is, in principle, not at odds with equating good user experience with good engineering. It’s all about tradeoffs.

[xtreegold]

Maybe you can shed some light on this doubt I've always had:

why does the UAC need to gray/black out all the display?

It's such a mess, especially when you have more than one monitor. Is there a technical reason or is it just UX?

[jimbobimbo]

This is done to prevent malware faking the prompt and/or user consent. And it's not just "blacking out the display" - the whole thing is executed on another desktop (in OS terms, not in user terms): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uac/archive/2006/05/03/589561.aspx

[seanp2k]

>"and there's no good way to do it seamlessly yet."

Right. There are ways to do it, but not any /good/ ones. Good here meaning "while still letting the software execute efficiently and without a ton of added complexity"