Saturday, April 01, 2006

Display Setting Nag Window Annoyance

In the Doyle's Room software client, there is a very annoying nag screen that comes up several times per day. For this software, there is nothing unusual about me clicking 'OK' and canceling a dozen of the nag screens in one morning.

Display Setting

A display setting of 1024 x 768 or higher resolution recommended for best user experience.</

A display setting of 1024 x 768 or higher resolution recommended for best user experience.

I've not figured out how this is triggered. But somewhere in the program during the middle of running it, the program decides to popup this message and keep it there. As it turns out, I have a two monitor system, so I have a lot more screen real estate than most people do. I can easily show both the lobby and a table at the same time without overlap. But the software demands to inform me that I need a screen with a lower resolution than what I actually have.

Even if it were true that I needed this screen size, this is not the way to provide this information to the user. Off all the annoyances the programmers have built into this product, it makes me wonder how anyone can conceive of the idea of having a dialog box appear every hour suggesting the user change the screen resolution. The premise is not correct, I do not need to be informed of this even if it were correct, and I certainly don't need to be informed of it every hour.

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