Maybe it'll make the next edition of my Macintosh Tips and Trick page. Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention that little fact. This happened on Mac OS X, which is supposed to the shining example of how to take open source software and make it usable. The fact the even Apple's reknowned engineering team had trouble making this easy signals a real problem. Most of the open source community has less experience making things easy than the folks at Apple.

I can't count the number of hours that I've wasted over arcane setups for applications on either Windows or Linux/UNIX. I've lost count of the number of my friends who think that they are stupid because they can't get a computer to work properly. It's a disgrace. Computer software may have saved people an enormous amount of work and unleashed a tremendous amount of productivity, but its also been responsible for wasting an incredible amount of people's time on problems that should never have been there in the first place. If the "open source community" really wants to make an impact, then we are going to need to learn how to make software easy to use. This is true for every interface in software, user interfaces, and programming API's. Life is too short to waste time on stuff like this.