Error messages have gotten a lot of flack over the years for unintuitive wording or programatic creation (causing odd succesions of phrases to the effect of ‘there was an error’) to which all you can reply is ‘okay’ implying that somehow it is acceptable for the computer to erase all your data. Today, however, a new level of brilliance was achieved by a success message; a friend of mine is building a download manager that reports:

“All of the downloads you were downloading have been downloaded”. It just rings excellence doesn’t it!? Admittedly this is in beta and will now be fixed before a release however the very fact that someone sat down and wrote that definitely highlights a general problem in the way engineers think in comparison to the thought processes of the average user (or human being).

Chris