Gripe #3: no way back

One issue that graphical user interfaces often suffer from is a lack of scalability. Whilst a GUI can make a single operation trivial - think renaming a file in Windows Explorer, for example - it can, at the same time, make a larger number of operations excruciatingly painful - say, renaming a thousand files using Windows Explorer.

At least in your file manager, you can perform more basic operations on a number of files: think deleting them, for example. Imagine if you were forced to delete files one-by-one, selecting each one individually, waiting for a small delay, then moving your mouse over a menu item, and selecting 'delete'. Also imagine that it's very easy to accidentally copy an entire set of files that then need to be deleted.

Yes, RedDot enables you to get into this situation very easily. Thousands of unwanted 'pages', thousands of individual operations to get rid of them. A more powerful command-line interface, or even a more sensible GUI, could prevent this situation from arising but, unfortunately, neither appears to be offered as part of the package. Oh well, I guess that's the price of keeping things 'simple'.

RedDot Users forum

For those wishing to discuss RedDot issues, there's a forum frequented by some helpful folk. I'm not sure quite how active it is at the moment, but it's certainly provided significant feedback to my original post.

Needless to say, I shall be responding to some of those comments over the coming weeks, and will be interested to see the responses this series of gripes elicits.

Gripe #2: popups

RedDot CMS makes extensive use of popup windows. By extensive, I mean that certain operations can leave as many as 4 separate browser windows open at one time. Now, I'm not claiming here that all popups are evil, but their use in RedDot certainly leads to usability issues.

One very common action whilst working on a site is the switching of windows: for browsing the web, checking email, reloading a live site, and so on. RedDot's popups continually force themselves to the front of the window stacking order, causing an awful lot of frustrating 'ALT-TAB-ing'.

Another frustration is that switching back to a 'lower' window (most often, the main interface) and selecting something will cause a popup to disappear. This causes a lot of repeat behaviour at best, and the potential loss of work at worst.

Finally, possibly the most hilarious (if it weren't so annoying) bug regarding the popup windows is their size: time and time again, certain popups will open just that little bit too small. Too small to actually show a popup dialog's buttons. Every time certain windows popup, they have to be resized to action. This is a recipe for keyboard/mouse switching and a whole host of associated frustration and RSI. It's also really quite unprofessional.

Gripe #1: invalid markup

Introduction

Kicking off the series of RedDot gripes, here's number 1. Please note: the series is not in any kind of 'preference order', merely a big list of things as and when I find them.

The RedDot Text Editor

By default, RedDot creates invalid markup. This is purely down to the terrible 'WYSIWYG' text editor, that is neither WYSIWYG, nor standards-compliant, begging the question "why the heck have it in the first place?" Of course, to novices, it looks quite impressive ("Wow, I can write web pages without needing to know HTML! WOO-HOO!") but, as is often the case with attempts to dumb things down, this only hurts the expert editors who now cannot take advantage of their actual knowledge and experience.

This editor also annoys the novices, much in the same way Word, Outlook, and other poorly-implemented WYSIWYG editors do, in that it can make it extremely difficult to do things like cancel a list, unindent an indent, etc. I've seen real HTML editors that actually do a good job of this, so it's not like it's impossible.

It's almost comical the extent to which the editor screws things up. Inserting span tags everywhere, the proliferation of ' ' (note to RedDot programmers: the character represented by ' ' is NOT the same as a space!), and unquoting attribute values.

And RedDot's solution to this problem? "Use tidy". While I'm all for the use of separate, small, specific tools to get the job done, this is just not an option because tidy can only be used at the point of publication, so any problems caused by RedDot spewing out invalid markup will still be evident in preview / smartedit modes.

There are so many clean, reliable, open-source HTML text editors out there that do a really good job. There are also powerful, full-featured text-editors for those of us who like to do things by hand. By rolling their own tool - and doing a really bad job of it in the process - RedDot have managed to satisfy none of their audience.