A friend of mine sent me a link to liveplasma today. Liveplasma used to be called MusicPlasma and I have used that site some in the past to find new (to me) and interesting music. In short it is a search engine where you can enter the name of a band that you like and it will present you with a map (as displayed in the picture here) showing other bands that are more or less related musically. You can click on the other bands to put them in the middle and the map will update, showing bands related to that one and so on. The site also provides discography, you can listen to samples of their music (backed by amazon.com). And it also works for movies.

Programmers are not generally known to be the best UI designers. Many programmers will willingly say that "GUI design is not really my cup of tea; I want to write code" or something like that. And that's fine. This means that when a typical programmer throw together some little application for their own use, the GUI of that application might not be perfect. And that's fine too. But when you start to charge prices in the neighbourhood of €1000, then you can't do that anymore.

The screenshot provided here comes from such a software, showing the lower-right corner of two dialog boxes (the upper dialog is displayed by the lower dialog). Notice how elegantly the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons traded places. I wonder how many users (apart from myself) that happened to hit the Cancel button, get a bit surprised, opening the dialog and re-making the selections and then realizing what happened. Also notice how it says "OK" with capital letters (as it should) in one dialog, and "Ok" with lower-case "k" in the other.

In this case it didn't do any big damage: I lost a few seconds of time in an operation that is not repeated very often. But the damage that it does make, is that it damages my confidence in the company releasing the software; if they have these kinds of flaws in the UI, what is there to be found in the code?