Betalogue

What is wrong with this picture?

Obviously, I do not need to spell it out for you. But obviously someone needs to spell it out for Apple’s engineers. So here goes: Apple, the phrase “hours before” is fine when the number of hours is greater than one. But when the number of hours is one, then the phrase should read “hour before.”

Ahem.

After all these years, with all this computing power that we have in our hands, I really find it quite remarkable that we still do not have software applications that are smart enough to use the singular form when the value is “1.”

It is quite obviously not that our computers are not powerful enough or cannot be made smart enough to deal with such situations. It is obviously that no one at Apple can be bothered to get such problems fixed. I am going to assume here that at least some people at Apple have noticed this problem. So what is their reasoning here? Do they simply figure that no one really cares? that everyone is so used to computers being “dumb” that they accept such behaviours and don’t really feel that it’s necessary to fix them?

Well, I for one won’t accept it. I can live with such details not being fixed in version 1.0 of a software title. But after all these years? iCal is a mature product. Is there really no one at Apple that uses iCal on a regular basis and is actually bothered by the fact that iCal is not smart enough to change “hours before” to “hour before” when the number of hours is one?

Yeah, I know, it’s a detail. It’s not a bug. It doesn’t cause iCal to crash. It doesn’t cause iCal to fail to sound the alarm one hour before the event. So the problem is not high on anyone’s to-do list. But surely it is still somewhere on someone‘s to-do list? And one day it will be fixed, right?

Surely?

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 9:50 am and is filed under Macintosh. 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.