When I worked for a well-known software company, there was a period when we used a piece of software that originated in Spain. It had been translated into English. Badly. Errors like: “Access denied. Unauthorised” followed by a “yes” button weren’t uncommon, but every now and then you’d get a bit of text that they hadn’t even bothered trying to translate. Really helpful when you’re trying to figure out what’s just gone wrong.
I’ve been a developer too long - I actually know what that means.
Now I must go and shower - Unclean! Unclean!
(If anyone is curious, then a window being modal means it demands your attention and you can’t get away from it - like error messages - you have to deal with it before you can get back to work. So the error message means it’s trying to make one of the windows currently being displayed modal, but it can’t. But you either knew that, or didn’t want to know I bet.)
[...] I wrote a post a few weeks ago about an incomprehensible error message I saw recently. I also wrote a post about Google’s smart use of language to appear more trustworthy and understandable (Not the usual yada yada). [...]
John McGarvey wrote:
When I worked for a well-known software company, there was a period when we used a piece of software that originated in Spain. It had been translated into English. Badly. Errors like: “Access denied. Unauthorised” followed by a “yes” button weren’t uncommon, but every now and then you’d get a bit of text that they hadn’t even bothered trying to translate. Really helpful when you’re trying to figure out what’s just gone wrong.
Posted on 17-Aug-06 at 4:26 pm | Permalink
scott wrote:
I’ve been trying to make a visible window modal forever, it seems. Should you ever master it, please let me know your secret.s
Posted on 17-Aug-06 at 4:29 pm | Permalink
Robert Hruzek wrote:
That’s not a glitch, that’s a feature!
Posted on 17-Aug-06 at 9:28 pm | Permalink
Tom wrote:
I’ve been a developer too long - I actually know what that means.
Now I must go and shower - Unclean! Unclean!
(If anyone is curious, then a window being modal means it demands your attention and you can’t get away from it - like error messages - you have to deal with it before you can get back to work. So the error message means it’s trying to make one of the windows currently being displayed modal, but it can’t. But you either knew that, or didn’t want to know I bet.)
Posted on 18-Aug-06 at 10:02 am | Permalink
Bad Language / Why are computer dialog boxes so bad? wrote:
[...] I wrote a post a few weeks ago about an incomprehensible error message I saw recently. I also wrote a post about Google’s smart use of language to appear more trustworthy and understandable (Not the usual yada yada). [...]
Posted on 24-Aug-06 at 7:09 am | Permalink
Vardaman wrote:
Tom,
So, what does it mean if one isn’t curious?
Posted on 09-May-07 at 6:20 pm | Permalink