I'm increasingly seeing applications which assume that I have a persistent network connection.

Flash 10 (aka Flash CS4) is one of the worst offenders. I hit the help frame for it yesterday, and my browser popped open. In Flash 9 there was a considerable user manual stored locally, but as of Flash 10 apparently they keep it on their servers, and you get into it through your persistent network connection.

And good luck to you if you don't have one.

Of course, Adobe is legendary for being user surly, and doing things for their convenience, not yours.

I didn't like the new one. The one for Flash 9 you could search for keywords, and navigate easily through the pages, but the online one wasn't so nice.

Anyway, it looks as if Windows Mobile plus the HP goodies all assume something like a persistent connection, too. They didn't give me a user manual with the product, and I can't find one installed on my computer either. I think maybe if I want to find stuff out I have to get to HP's web server, but I'm not sure about that yet.

Auto-update is another plague. For testing purposes earlier, I used Windows Media Player for the first time on Alcyone earlier this afternoon. You have to go through an ungodly  amount of setup before you can play a file for the first time, and most of it amounts to saying, No I don't want WMP to act like iStore thank you not very much. No, I don't want to make an account in the Microsoft media store. No, I don't want to set up playlists. No, I don't want...

One of the choices was how often WMP would phone home to see if there were updates. I think the choices were once a day, once a week, and once a month. There wasn't any "don't do it" choice.

Another app I use quite a lot (Sothink SWF Decompiler) is set to check for updates weekly. Fortunately, when the timer expires it doesn't directly get online. It just pops a nag, which if I say "yes", then phones home. But it's still annoying; I can't turn it off, and the longest duration I can choose is weekly.

Hey, guys, whose computer is this, anyway? Stop shoving things in my face! Stop phoning home without my permission! And stop hosting essential pieces of my apps on your computers instead of on mine!

UPDATE: I was wrong: the iPaq documentation is on the CD.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 03:20 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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