How to make users hate you

Create software that supposedly enhances your users’ convenience by enabling them to do web-based things more efficiently and offline. Require them to download extensive software framework that locks their registry files. Make sure said framework is a slow, painful download, disables the cancel button, continues to log all the scary things it’s doing for maximum effect, and then crashes the computer. Give completion messages with dingbat characters and typos, and then format it incorrectly. On restart, make sure your user knows his performance lags by at least 100% now.

Then, make sure your program hangs on startup. Work on 2nd or third try, with bugs and prompts for serial numbers that you don’t know if you have or why you would need, and make him think, WTF? Let your user figure out a way to get past that.

Be completely non-intuitive on first use to a new user trying to use it to blog, and who has invested so much time and pain in trying you that he is desperately hoping there’s some fantastic payoff. Have some cool features, like Flickr integration, that seem really promising, then totally blow one of the easiest API’s to get right.

Thanks, Ecto! This will be the first and last post I’ll write using you, because I’m going to have to log in on the web interface anyway in order to include the photos of your sucktardedness that I’m going to upload to my flickr account.

Then I get to spend another hour uninstalling everything and hoping it doesn’t smoke my machine.

Please get yourself a copy of Getting Real, kthxbai!

N.b. - As is probably obvious from the above, this refers to the Windows version. . . .