Thursday, July 15, 2010

Worst Microsoft Dialogs

So, I thought this dialog was pretty bad:


I mean, the only question in all that text (you know, the sentence that ends in a question mark) is not a yes/no question.  The actual question is down at the bottom and ends in a nonsensical colon.  And it has not one, but two parenthetical phrases.  And it contains a really long, unwieldy URL that isn't clickable or copyable.

But then I got this gem from Windows Live Mail (in Windows 7) today:


First of all, I had pressed ALT+F4 to close WLM having completed my business with it.  Opening a modal dialog for something only tangentially related to exiting the app is a little intrusive, but, okay.  The thing that's really bad about this is that it tells me what won't happen if I click yes, but I still have no idea what will happen if I click yes.  But I only use WLM to read mail that comes to my passport account from Microsoft lists, so if it all gets deleted I don't really care.  So I'm feeling adventurous and click yes.  Then I get this:


Really?  You didn't see that one coming WLM?

Sigh.  The fight goes on.