Prompting Problems Monday, September 18, 2023
tl;dr - SuperDuper! v3.8 B2 now available. Includes some fixes for pre-Sonoma users, and a UI enhancement.
Guidance vs. Annoyance
Designing UIs involves a certain amount of compromise. You want to give the user the freedom to do what they want...but you also want to guide them to do the right thing if they’re going to make a mistake.
Sometimes, that’s easy: you disable items, provide sensible defaults, and minimize areas where mistakes can be made. For example, we disable the “Repair Permissions” option when macOS doesn’t support it; you can’t …
Prompting Problems Monday, September 18, 2023
tl;dr - SuperDuper! v3.8 B2 now available. Includes some fixes for pre-Sonoma users, and a UI enhancement.
Guidance vs. Annoyance
Designing UIs involves a certain amount of compromise. You want to give the user the freedom to do what they want...but you also want to guide them to do the right thing if they’re going to make a mistake.
Sometimes, that’s easy: you disable items, provide sensible defaults, and minimize areas where mistakes can be made. For example, we disable the “Repair Permissions” option when macOS doesn’t support it; you can’t make a copy until you’ve selected a source and destination;
Other times, you are warning them about a bad situation. This is usually done with a confirmation prompt, such as when you’re going to run a copy. Here you just want the user to make sure they understand what they’re doing.
Of course, you don’t want to over prompt, and you don’t want to annoy the user. (Looking at you, Apple security prompts.)
The Problem
One thing I see sometimes are schedules set up with “Erase, then copy”.
Generally—as in 99+% of the time—you do not want to schedule an “Erase, then copy” backup. It’s more dangerous, it’s slower, and, on Big Sur and later, it will typically fail if the screen is asleep due to weird behavior of Apple’s replicator.
I usually want to do “what the user asks”. But here, they’re asking for something bad. And while they may know they want to do it...in my experience over the last almost-20-years (omg), they usually don’t.
But Sometimes You Need UI, Part 2
So, I finally resolved to do something about this situation.
Now, when you try to schedule an Erase, then copy backup, you’ll get a prompt that explains that you probably don’t want to do this...and a few buttons that let you schedule a Smart Update instead, schedule the Erase if you really want to, or (of course) Cancel.
It won’t be shown very often, so hopefully it won’t be annoying. We’ll have to see. I’m sure those of you who are annoyed will let me know.
Clicky click
So there you go. New beta, new fixes, a UI update. All there’s left to do is
Enjoy!