Making Computers Work

One of the things I love about dev teams is all the righteousness that falls out of day to day conversation; particularly around how things are supposed to work. We’re considering hiring a lobby group and “paying to play” in order to fix a few things in our modern world. We’ve been jotting down the following list of legislative items over the past few months and it’s time to float them. Ultimately, US Constitutional amendment might be in order.

• Copy-Paste operations MUST adopt surrounding destination format
• Audio is MUST NOT play by default when visiting a URL
• Application upgrades MUST NOT cause OS restarts
• Tab ordering MUST start in username field on documents that have forms
• Tabbing from password field MUST go to the submit button, and skip the “remember me” checkbox
• If a computer has a user facing camera, that camera MUST be used to visually recognize the user and auto-login the user everywhere login is required. Supersedes previous two items
• Printers MUST NOT print bogus/fragmented last page
• Selecting the “remember me” checkbox MUST actually remember me
• Email services MUST provide a new tier/folder for transactional email categorization. Said categorization is between “inbox” and “spam” and users will look for missing email there instead of spam where all the spam is
• Progress meters MUST NOT hang at the end
• Progress meters MUST NOT be used for indeterminate periods