Richard's Braindump: Problems with the new MSDN Download Manager

I agree with Richard, the new MSDN download manager is worse than horrid. I've ran into every one of the problems reported but these in particular really chap my ass:

• Close IE and the download manager closes. It asks you if you really want to close it, but it doesn't matter what you say... it will close anyway. When you re-open it, your download will be corrupt and you'll have to start over again from the beginning.
    
• It'll just randomly tell you it can't download because of persistent network problems... and you can't resume because your file is corrupt.
   
• If you have pop-up blocking on in IE 7 (which is the default) you might never get the download manager installed. It pops up a new browser window, which IE blocks, then the main page refreshes so fast you never see the notification that there was a blocked pop-up.

I have additional complaints too.

• Adding additional files to the download manager sometimes (and by "sometimes" I mean "nearly always") closes the download manager... which as we discussed already, corrupts any files it was already downloading.
   
• Manually pausing a download also usually corrupts it.
    
• When it asks if you want to start the download all over again, and you say yes, it usually can't... so you have to remove the file from the manager, go back to the MSDN page then re-click the link.... which will close your download manger and corrupt the rest of your files!

And even if they fix these major technical problems, there are other issues I have with it:

• Files are either downloading, or paused. There isn't a way to put them in any particular order in the queue and download them sequentially... so if you want to pull in 5 files, but you want 1 file immediately, then the rest to finish up whenever you have to pause all the downloads except the one, wait on it to finish, then manually resume the others.
   
• There doesn't appear to be any mechanisms in place to allow you to throttle how much bandwidth it uses.
   
• It allocates the disk space before the download starts. I HATE that. If you only have 1gig downloaded so far, it should not be taking up 4gig on my hard drive. When I'm low on disk space I can't start the download and have it coming down while I go and clean up some drive space. I have to clean up the space before I can start downloading. Minor issue, but still annoying.

Seriously, this thing is a total piece of shit... Why can't you just give me a damned link?

I have a download manager than works really good. I can control what files come down, in what order, how much bandwidth to use, and how many files to work on at a time (I use ReGet for those of you that may be curious).

Come on, just give me a regular old hyperlink or put it up on an FTP or something.

Considering that an MSDN Premium Team Suite subscription costs $10,000 up-front and around $3500/year for renewal fees,  it isn't too much to ask for is it?

The world of personal finance software is one of my least favorite. Anyone developing in this market has a tough job. People are idiots, and personal finance itself is especially designed to cleverly imitate real accounting yet completely fail to make any logical sense at all.

So I am never surprised at the crazy junk I see in personal finance software. The system it targets is moronic in the extreme, and the target user is assumed to equal that standard.  

But I'm a special idiot... one that uses Microsoft Money. I have tried Quicken, but I find their junk just a tad more annoying than MS Money but for different reasons. I also detest Qicken's license terms and marketing strategies. In contrast, Microsoft's lack of strategy in the personal finance market is quite refreshing. So I keep using MS Money even though I hate it.

The most annoying thing about MS Money is that they somehow makes it mandatory to upgrade to the new version every year. Somehow the old version just ends up "breaking" over time until you eventually get pissed enough to upgrade. I have no idea how they manage this, but eventually my old copy just sorta stops working right. Last time it was the fact that it wouldn't work after a patch for IE came out (and no fix available for the old version naturally). This time it just stopped being able to talk to my bank one day.

Every time I upgrade, I end up being amazed at how little was actually improved, or even changed from the previous version and equally amazed at just how many annoying "features" are still exactly as annoying as before. There always seem to be a couple of things I really like that manage to disappear from each version, and one or two new features show up that I don't care about at all. So each time I curse myself for forking over yet another $50 instead of just taking the time to put together my own spreadsheet in Excel... but I still I upgrade anyway.

Among my biggest complaints is the default "basic" checking account register. It completely lacks seriously important features, features I'd consider quite "basic"...  like the fact that it is missing the entire right-click menu and has no obvious alternatives for useful things like creating a reoccurring bill from an entry in the register, or marking transaction as reconciled, etc. It is also not obvious that you are even in a "basic" mode, nor that there an "advanced" mode that you could be using instead. Sure, there is a "Basic Register" icon, complete with text label at the top of the page, but it blends in so well that I never even noticed it until someone pointed it out to me. The "basic" mode just make the application feel like a piece of crap that doesn't do much of anything.

Fortunately, I do know about advanced mode, despite not having noticed the icon. I know this because I had used older versions where the advanced features were enabled by default. When I first upgraded to a version with the "basic" register and saw that those features had gone missing, I located how to enable them again via the online help. But the "advanced" register isn't exactly "advanced".  It just adds a few minor details to the list of transactions, turns on the right-click menu, and that's about it. But getting advanced mode enabled sure does requires an hell of an advanced level of skill. That icon at the top of the page isn't even clickable to toggle the mode! Instead, enabling the advanced register remains something that I have to look up in the online "help" feature each time because it is cleverly hidden deep within the not-so-fun "options" section of the program. Fortunately the online "help" is one of the few really well done parts of the application, and provides clear instructions for how to enable the missing functionality.

Then MS Money has the "basic" bills tracking system as the default too. In a misguided fit of "simplification", the developers of the default bills tracker helpfully allow you to choose to pay a bill using automatic payment (a.k.a. Bill Pay), electronic payment (e-pay), or by writing a check... But they thought that a "direct draft" bill was just too fucking complicated for the "basic" user, so that option isn't available unless you turn on the advanced bill tracking system. It's almost like they missed the fact that nearly every utility company on the planet pushes direct draft payment options like it was high-grade cocaine... Even people like me that prefer a push payment system over a pull payment system often end up with one or two drafts each month. In my case, some of my utilities actually give a discount if you agree to let them draft your payment. But, according to the crack MS Money development team I now know that only "advanced" users would need direct draft as a bill payment option. Thanks guys.

Then you have odd shit. Like the fact that, even in basic mode, MS Money encourages you to track your gross pay, taxes, withholdings, etc. from your paycheck. Most average joe home-users are obviously people that need to track the exact amount of their 401K deductions, but they would never need anything as advanced as fucking direct draft!

Anyway..

I find this "basic" vs. "advanced" thing to be a very obvious sign of poor UI design. After-all, it isn't as if there are THAT many "advanced" things you can do. Seems to be there should be just one account register, and just one bill tracking system. Then, by using good UI design, the software can helpfully arrange commands in a way that isn't confusing. The saddest thing is, the "advanced" register and bill tracking systems are actually quite easy to use once you figure out how to enable them. But most average joe home-users will never even learn that there is an advanced mode at all, much less get it turned on. Instead, most people would just think MS Money sucks and would not bother to use it... and, after asking around, this seems to be exactly what most people really do think.

I have many friends and acquaintances that "hate Starbucks". Hating Starbucks might even be more popular than hating Paris Hilton.

They all have their pet complains, usually about some isolated unfair trade practices or injustice carried out by some mid-level area manager or something. The argument always trends to wrap up with how local coffee shops suffer when Starbucks comes to town (the Wal-Mart argument).

But the sad fact of it is that any company that size will have ass-hats that occasionally do bad things. I try not to hold that against a company unless that kind of behavior becomes the executive policy of the company as a whole (which is why I don't hate Wal-Mart or Starbucks but do hate Disney and Apple).

Anyway...

Let me tell you why Starbucks kicks ass... aside from the fact that they actually serve a decent enough cup of coffee.

The reason Starbucks kicks ass is because they understand this that you can't stir a 20oz cup of hot liquid with a fucking 4 inch tall plastic stick! 

Starbucks has big sticks that fit down into the cup all the way to the bottom without burning your fingers! Out of dozens of local shops I've been to in dozens of towns, maybe one or two have had sticks that are appropriate for their larger size cups.

You'd think that if your fucking business IS coffee, then you'd take the time to notice that 4 inches of stick does NOT-the-fuck fit into 10 inches of cup!

How god-damned hard is it to understand ?!?!

See, Starbucks pays attention to those little details.

They provide this level of service in EVERY store.

So... I don't have to wonder if I'll have a way to stir my shit when I get to Starbucks because ALL of their shops have good sticks.

I don't have to wonder if I'll be stuck trying to open half a dozen tiny little packets of sugar (which is always messy) because Starbucks has both packets AND a free-pour canister of sugar on the counter (I know... almost unbelievable!)

That is why Starbucks is killing your local coffee shop.   

I fucking hate your wiki! I'm serious. It makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a cheese grater.

The basic idea of Wiki is that you can slap up a site devoted to some topic, and then anyone interested in the site can post content. Users are encouraged to edit other user's content to make corrections, expand on the subject, ask questions, or whatever. The result of a well implemented wiki should be a living library of constantly evolving data with a community of people working together to maintain and grow it.

Technologically, a wiki is just a simple content management and publication system. It combines etiquette guidelines with simple text formatting rules to make authoring content as simple as possible. The concept is based on the idea of implementing "the simplest thing that can still work”, a design principle from extreme programming. The etiquette rules are easy to follow for any reasonably mature person. And most wiki systems maintain a version history of each page so you can see what has been changed (and sometimes even who made the changes).

There are many different wiki sites on all kinds of topics (including a massive encyclopedia project), but in actual practice most wiki sites are devoted to software projects. Wiki is especially popular with open source projects where the wiki acts as open source documentation. It is expected that the people that write code for the app will add to the wiki too. Users of the software are also asked to contribute to the wiki if they have insights that other users may find useful. Since I'm a developer, this is where I personally run into wiki sites most frequently.

The geek in me loves the simple elegance of wiki, and I'm a big fan of collaborative works and online communities too. But I have come to loath all things Wiki. The phrase "have you checked the Wiki?" makes me want to vomit.

No, I didn't check the fucking wiki!

The reason I didn't check the wiki is because the wiki sucks! It is a giant garbage heap of trivial shit that anyone who can spell "wiki" already knows. The answer to my question, if one of your lazy wikizens even bothered to add it to the wiki, is buried so deep in the tangled mess of irrelevant and obvious junk that it'd take me longer to find my answer than it would take me to correct every spelling error on the entire site. If I do find something vaguely like what I am looking for, it'll be based on a version of the software so old that the information will not be useful to anyone still alive. Of course, there will be a note by one of the developers related to the new version, but the note will be in indecipherable indian-pseudo-engrish. In an act of desperation, I'll try to follow one of the links to an external site only to find that the site was recently bought out by pumpkinfuckers.com where someone wants to hook me up with some horny house-wives and sell me Russian vioxx.

It's about this time that I reach for the cheese grater.

There seems to be one overriding (unwritten) rule in wiki-land. Every useful piece of content in the wiki must have an evil twin page. It works like this. I'll be snooping the wiki for information about some aspect of some software. I'll come across a page with good info. This page will have nothing to do with my immediate question. Two days later, I'll have a new problem and need to find that good page again. I KNOW the answer is on the wiki because I've seen it before. But a search, no matter how carefully crafted, will only turn up the evil twin page. The evil twin will have a simple bullet list of summary trivia almost but not quite related to my investigation. It'll also have 900 links to other pages in the wiki and a few vioxx-sponcered external links. But NOT ONE of those links will lead to the good page I'm looking for. Every other page in the wiki that references the topic will link to the evil twin page... except ONE... and that one page with the magic link will be the page in the wiki most unrelated to my question.

It is also a rule that every wiki has to devote 1/2 or more of the links to other sites that explain what a wiki is about. These sites are written by permanent residents of wonderland, who write prettily yet manage to miserably fail to explain the concept of wiki. These "about wiki" pages will all make wiki sound like some sort of deity, and that any involvement in wiki is a religious cult affair (this may be true). No where in these pages will anything about wiki actually make coherent sense.

There are a few other unpublished wiki rules:

• The most well documented topics on the wiki must be devoted to explaining the most obvious and mundane aspect.
   
• Any commonly asked about topic must have no less than 10 different pages explaining the topic in great detail, but every single one of them must provide completely contradictory information or be so outdated as to simply be misleading or confusing. You should also throw in a couple of pages on the topic that provide no useful information at all. This can be achieved by visiting a Denny’s about 5am on Friday night and collecting napkins with drunken scribbles all over them. Just post the contents of the napkins and make sure as many pages as possible sneak in a link to the drunken-dumb-dumb page.
   
• You must link to the same page every time the name of the page is used, the author of the page is mentioned, or the content of that page is even hinted at. That way a page containing only five different links will appear to be an index for the library of congress. This will scare off most people before they truly comprehend just how damned useless your wiki is.
   
• You must avoid useful navigation at all costs.
   
• You must make sure that anyone moderating the site removes all content that is relevant within 1 day of posting. This is to make sure that any helpful contributor feels unwelcome and never posts again. Be sure you email the contributor and explain how their post was inappropriate (make up a reason). This is especially important for software wikis since it will spare the pride of your programmers by ensuring that they remain the most informative of your site's contributors even though they stopped updating the wiki 5 minutes after it was put online and have long since forgotten it was there.
   
• You must enlist the aid of at least one user who always posts something that starts like this: "I disagree with this because...” This user must update every page in the wiki, several times if necessary, so as to argue against any point previously made by another user. This user's posts must be condescending, irrelevant, and argue the most minute and irrelevant detail possible. This user should, if possible, be completely ignorant of the topic under discussion and constantly refer to open source, Linux, and must refer to Microsoft as M$.
     
• It is most useful to have a very pretty front page on the wiki with a nice clean and professional layout and design, but completely random layouts and color schemes on the rest of the pages in the site.
   
• You must make absolutely sure that you have a completely different menu and navigation system from any other wiki ever made. If your navigation fails to resemble any previously encountered anywhere on the internet then you get bonus points. Also, make sure the words and phrases used in any navigation system are the most obscure synonyms possible.
   
• Any search feature of the wiki must omit all of the useful content pages. It must also omit at least 30% of the evil twin pages just in case one of them accidentally links to a page someone would want to read. Don't worry about Google... Google's spiders will get so frustrated trying to navigate around your twisted redundant-link infested wiki that it'll give up long before it actually makes it to a page with useful content.

And that is why I hate, hate, HATE  your piece-of-shit wiki!

Where is my cheese grater?