Saturday, January 25, 2014

Error messages that don’t make sense

This time just an amusing observation…

As software engineers, we all struggle with the challenge of writing error messages that are meaningful and helpful, and from time to time, we all stumble into amusing blunders.  Even the king of good user interfaces, Apple, can fall victim:

I have an old iPhone 3 that I’ve been using essentially as an iPod, and I left it in my car.  One cold, sub-freezing morning recently I tried to start the iPod up, only to get the message:

Temperature
!
iPhone needs to cool down
before you can use it.

Of course, I ignored the instructions and warmed it up, and the message went away J


(I never knew the iPhone had a temperature sensor in it – apparently it’s not available to app developers…)

No comments:

Post a Comment