The week before Akademy I attended to a course about a Civil Engineering tool called Istram Ispol. It tries to be a killer-app for road and railway projects. It really has a very interesting lot of features, but I really was dissapointed in the second hour of the course, and I was progressively getting angry to the end.
It’s not (only) a problem it’s not free software, I knew it before registration. The GUI is absolutely horrific. Istram was developed originally in the princpilpe of 90′s for Unix platform, then they jumped to Windows (and they are proud of this action ¿?). So it has now a GUI built mainly in VisualBasic with important wreckage of something similar to X/Motif. Different menus behave in different way with the same actions on them, even there are buttons that behave in different way depending on the point where you press on with the mouse. And the documentation is so poor it’s near imposible to the mean user doing something useful without a training course.
AkademyEs recovered me from the trauma and brought me back the faith in the existence of people capable of build good GUI’s for daily human tasks. That week I didn’t get tired of repeating the same phrase: “this UI seems programmed by drunken with cheap vodka monkeys”.