Rocket Surgery

One of my favorite books on UI Design is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. While this great book is focused on Web UI design, the central theme is universal: As much as possible, software should be so self-obvious how to use it that no manual is necessary.

As I see it, at least one of three things is possible:

1. The creators of AnkhSVN should read this book
2. AnkhSVN cannot create branches
3. I’m an idiot.

Of course, while I don’t exactly refuse to consider point 3, I don’t think it’s true in this case, because some other people who are definitely not idiots also could not figure out how to use AnkhSVN to make a branch.

In case you didn’t know, AnkhSVN (aka “Ankh”) is a plugin for Visual Studio to allow you to use Subversion as your repository. Subversion is, of course, about the best source code repository you can get, and Visual SourceSafe is one of the worst (even Microsoft doesn’t use it), so we’ve begun using Subversion for our .NET code.

Unfortunately, making this switch has not been clockwork. For one, Visual Studio .NET 2005 continually gets confused and thinks that the project is still in Visual SourceSafe, even though we’ve removed the references…or at least have used the UI to do so — perhaps there is some hack that we need to do. Additionally, we discovered today that there is no way to create a branch using Ankh - at least not one we could find. We ended up having to use TortoiseSVN (the Windows Shell extensions for Subversion) to create the branch…but then found that if you use TortoiseSVN to check the working copy out after branching, Ankh complains that it is using an out of date version of Subversion.

Well, I guess we got what we paid for (that is, nothing). But I admit I have become spoiled by truly superb open source software — like Subversion — and I can’t help but wonder why the UI’s are not consistent, compatible, or complete, when they come from the same organization.

Curious.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Software development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.