EDIT: I just think the featured should be allowed if someone makes implements it. It just seemed Thomas thought it shouldn't be included at all.
It just seemed that Thomas would remove that other annoying messagebox too, along with a dozen others.
But the world is not a perfect place, we have to live with compromises, we can't have everything the way we want it.
While for me, there are far too many dialog boxes that annoy the hell out of me (things like
"the file was created successfully" or
"do you really want to rebuild?" make me say
"yeah, what else, that's just what I asked for!"), I do see that a novice user might need one or the other of them (maybe).
It is because of this why I wrote both AnnoyingDialog and InfoWindow, to stop the IDE from hampering your work while still being able to display some chatter that is either unobstrusively placed int the bottom right corner or can be turned off. The problem with turning off messages is that you have to do it over again for every new installation (or profile), which quickly gets almost as annoying as the original thing...
Think of the typical installer app (the kind of installer that 100,000 programs use) as a negative example of what I am talking about:
You start the installer and it tells you "this will install program xxx, click OK to continue". As if you did not know, what did you start the installer for? Then, you are shown a license that no sane person can understand and you are asked if you accept that license (which you really cannot because it is 20 pages in fine print, and 18 of these pages are unintellegible to anyone not having a degree in law). If you don't accept the license, you are asked whether you really want to quit the installer. Why "really"? That's not what you said. You never said you wanted to quit.
If you accept the license, it asks you 3 or 4 things, one thing per page, as if you were unable to memorise more than 15 words at a time. If you click on "Cancel" it gives out a massive warning that this will terminate the installer (as if this was a major catastrophe). And finally, as the very last thing, it opens the Readme which you do not want to read.
If the user is not an outright retard (which you should assume for a programmer!), then I think the program should not treat him that way.
I generally think that not everything must be configurable, not everything must be automatic, a program does not need to tell you everything over and over again, and not every additional feature is a good feature. Many choices are bad choices. Most automatisms are bad (the more "smart", the worse).
And while my attitude towards new features is generally cautious (to avoid saying "negative"), history has proven me right a few times. Many feature requests (particularly the ones from two specific users) that were implemented against my objection in the past have caused quite a few problems that were not foreseen and have cost many weeks of development time (and user time).
People complain that RC3 is delayed and delayed, we are being compared to "Duke Nukem Forever", and we're being told that features should not be added to a RC, but at the same time, new features are asked for every day.
I am not saying that I know everything or that I am unfailable as the Pope does.
However, I am positive about two things: more message boxes with yet more choices do not make the application better, and neither does making one more thing that you might not want automatic.
