I mean, that’s really a software design issue. Like, the system should be set up to have a system log of those.
Most visual novel video game systems provide a history to review messages, if one accidentally skipped through something important.
Many traditional roguelikes have a message log to review for the same reason.
Many systems have a “show a modal alert dialog” API call, but don’t send it to a log, which frankly is a little bit bonkers; instead, they have separate alert and logging systems. I guess maybe you could make a privacy argument for that, not spreading state all over even the local system, but I’d think that it wouldn’t be that hard to make it more-obvious to the user how to clear the log.
Well, it might be a ‘software design issue’, but it’s really more of a branching point that was made long ago and reflects the world we live in. It could be fixed, but the point is that error messages are often not logged but people tend to act like they must be, and that their vague description of an issue should be enough to track it down like ‘something flashed on my screen last week’.
Hell people can’t even describe useful parts of an error that’s correctly happening…‘it’s not doing ANYTHING!’ can often mean anything from not booting, to the mouse not moving, to ‘it’s working perfectly but icons are snapping into place instead of staying exactly where I’m dragging them’.
I mean, that’s really a software design issue. Like, the system should be set up to have a system log of those.
Most visual novel video game systems provide a history to review messages, if one accidentally skipped through something important.
Many traditional roguelikes have a message log to review for the same reason.
Many systems have a “show a modal alert dialog” API call, but don’t send it to a log, which frankly is a little bit bonkers; instead, they have separate alert and logging systems. I guess maybe you could make a privacy argument for that, not spreading state all over even the local system, but I’d think that it wouldn’t be that hard to make it more-obvious to the user how to clear the log.
Well, it might be a ‘software design issue’, but it’s really more of a branching point that was made long ago and reflects the world we live in. It could be fixed, but the point is that error messages are often not logged but people tend to act like they must be, and that their vague description of an issue should be enough to track it down like ‘something flashed on my screen last week’.
Hell people can’t even describe useful parts of an error that’s correctly happening…‘it’s not doing ANYTHING!’ can often mean anything from not booting, to the mouse not moving, to ‘it’s working perfectly but icons are snapping into place instead of staying exactly where I’m dragging them’.