Webmail systems

By far the most common request we got was 'how do i use my web mail', most of the web mail sites out there are pretty user hostile, having sub 10x10 pixel triangles for next and previous email just doesn't cut it for people with poor mouse skills and/or arthritis, similarly the 'printable view' option needs to be obvious, preferably with a picture of a printer for non-english speakers.

Firefox

The 'Do you want to remember the password for this site' dialog box slides down from the title bar. If someone is focused on the username and password entry box at the bottom of the page they can miss it, and since it's modal, any more mouse clicks do nothing, There where a few people who where very confused by this.

Printing if you change the print preferences and then hit preview, there is no way to go back to the print preferences without starting from scratch, so if you're modifying multiple print options you have to remember then and re-enter them each time.

iPhoto

There needs to be a way to set it to delete photo's that are deleted rather than dumping them in the trash, a few times we had people download pictures from there camera, delete them, and then the next person to use the computer went through the trash looking for interesting ones...

secondly - burning cd's from iphoto - we had many people with full 1Gb memory cards, they would transfer them to iPhoto and then try to burn a cd, which was, of course, too small...

There is no easy way to split a set of photo's into cd sized chunks, espicially since the main photo library view has different sort options from the photo collection views.

Other OS X bits

It would be nice if OS X automaticly turned the sound input/output to the usb headset you just plugged in, rather than having to dig around in system prefs each time.

Flash drives - the only advanced thing i had to do was trying to recover data from flash drives with mangled file systems. It's a bit much to expect people to remember to eject them before hauling them out of machines, and then there's camera's with low batterys shutting down in the middle of a write.

This was a real pain - why are we still stuck on FAT with all it's problems and hacks on top of 8.3 these days? It's not beyond the wit of man to write a simple log structured file system what should be damage prof, sure you might lose the file you where writing when you ripped it out, but just about every os out there has a 'copying in progress' indicator which should discourage people.

We also twice had a wierd problem where OS X would insist that someone's flash drive was out of space when it definatly had enough space left.

I managed to fix one of these by copying all the files off, reformatting, and copying the files back again. The second time it happened the copying /reformat/copy back trick didn't work for more than a few additional files, so i've no idea what it was thinking.

(Apparently it's something to do with the total space used by files in the trash (across all drives) being greater than the free space on the flash drive).

As well as the wifi in the internet cafe there was a wep-encrypted wifi net in a nearby building that was used by the conference organisers, so we had to get people machines set up with the wep key. This was easy enough on XP, but there dosn't seem to be a way to tell OS X about the key for a network that it cannot see, which resulted in a certain amount of pain for everyone.

UAC

I was happily withholding judgement on Vista until I came across UAC.

One of my long term frustrations with windows is the amount of information hideing that the OS does, which makes it really easy for malware to hide from a machines owner (compare and contrast the sysinternals tools with Task Manager for example), so when I saw the 'more details' option of UAC I leapt at it, my heart full of hope, only to have it cruelly dashed on the rock of microsofts incompetence. You get either: a GUUID, or a truncated path name. You can't select either, so you can't paste it into your favorite search engine to see if you can work out what it actually is.

No details on what the program is doing, no ip's, ports, files, security context info (SID's etc), registery keys, in fact what it does give you is so useless that there might as well not be a 'more details' option at all.

I can imagine that there was some kind of struggle at microsoft to get some, any, useful info into that box, any info at all that might help the owner make some kind of informed choice, but the minions of information hideing got the better of it, and we are stuck with owners who have no idea what there computer is doing, and no way to find out, even if they wanted to.

(aside: does Vista checksum programs icons to stop malware pretending to be something it's not? (i appreciate that that's not trivial, but i'm curious)).

and finally - many people just double click on everything...