Today, I downloaded the mac app for my fresh Amazon Cloud Drive space. No synced folder, drag and drop to send a file. Anyway. Happy enough to see my files listed on the web interface, I deleted the files from my laptop (knowing I may have a backup somewhere). Let's give a try to the downloading experience. Click... (Download in progress from the mac app)... Finished! Hurray --wait. No file in my Downloads folder that shows up. No panic, just log out from the mac app and do a regular download from the web -- I said to myself. "In order to download your files, you have to use the mac application" ......
I don't think the average user would enjoy not to figure out why he can't get back his files, even not knowing they are somewhere around in the Halloween-freaking limbo.
Now, I am not a Mac developer and I usually don't rant about technologies I know nothing about but gosh this is a very fundamental topic that you have to deal with when designing any software. How can an engineer from a major company like Amazon fail miserably at getting it right?
Joel Spolsky, even consider this as the minimum thing that you, as a developer, must know about (no excuse!) http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Today, I downloaded the mac app for my fresh Amazon Cloud Drive space.
No synced folder, drag and drop to send a file. Anyway.
Happy enough to see my files listed on the web interface, I deleted the files from my laptop (knowing I may have a backup somewhere).
Let's give a try to the downloading experience.
Click... (Download in progress from the mac app)... Finished!
Hurray --wait. No file in my Downloads folder that shows up.
No panic, just log out from the mac app and do a regular download from the web -- I said to myself.
"In order to download your files, you have to use the mac application"
......
It turned out (I sent a bug report) that the destination folder of incoming downloads was set to "Téléchargements" instead of "Téléchargements", the french localised alias for the "Downloads" folder.
Oddly enough. When I click on "Download completed" in the app, it opened the right folder.
I don't think the average user would enjoy not to figure out why he can't get back his files, even not knowing they are somewhere around in the Halloween-freaking limbo.
Now, I am not a Mac developer and I usually don't rant about technologies I know nothing about but gosh this is a very fundamental topic that you have to deal with when designing any software. How can an engineer from a major company like Amazon fail miserably at getting it right?
Joel Spolsky, even consider this as the minimum thing that you, as a developer, must know about (no excuse!)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html