One thing I noticed when running my shareware development experiment was the lure of removing thorny issues by quickly hacking the UI in some ugly way. That is, if I was having a hard time getting some Look &Feel (in Java) to work correctly on Mac OS X, I just greyed out or removed the radio buttons for selecting a Look & Feel on the UI. The UI elements were still there, just unselectable, annoying users.

Still, the sheer joy of being able to say, "Problem solved," is seduction enough that I went ahead and went the hack route. Not such a big deal in the short-run for headless issues in your back-end code (though even there you don't want to create a maintenance nightmare), and in the back-end your customer's not going to notice, but it's a real flaw to do so in your UI. This is the worst of minimum-coverage revisions/bug-"fixes".

Well, turns out I at least have company (which I might have referred to before, but didn't include pictures from our friends at Apple).



The one for AppleTV is particularly bad.



I understand that Win2k isn't the primary deployment platform for Apple, but *phew*, that's slack for the company that prides itself on simple, minimal, intuitive interfaces.