Video: System Commander: Paying $60 For GRUB

This one took me an astonishing length of time to create since I just kept having to reshoot things, partly because I kept finding new dimensions to this program's limitations. I hope you enjoy it. Below is an essay about why I haven't done more videos on software.

Every time someone tells me I should do more videos on software,  I want to tell them "you wouldn't watch them if I did" and, well, here's a great example. I'm not dunking on myself here; I think I did a great job. The problem is that software is incredibly complicated. You can take any given "device" and explain pretty much everything it does in 15 minutes, because things only have so many buttons and levers and knobs. Software on the other hand can have unlimited complexity, and enormous amounts of hidden behavior that you can't easily discover.

I absolutely did not intend for this video to be an hour and ten minutes long, but - as I always say - if it was any shorter, I'd have had to leave something out. I put it all in there because I thought it was important. On my second editing pass, I really tried to delete some of the first 25 minutes, during which you never actually see the program, because I didn't want to turn people off, but... something like this, in the context of its time, is just as much about the box, the manual, the installer, and the struggle, as it is about the program itself.

As will hopefully be apparent in the video, there's a lot of stuff that would have gone a lot better for me if I'd read and digested the entire manual. And nobody designs software like that anymore, because it doesn't work. Software devs have learned that nobody reads manuals, and if they do, it's only to learn one thing that they've already decided they want to do, and then they close the book in disgust. Your program has to loudly announce what its available functions are so the user can either just poke around and find them, or grudgingly read just that one section of the manual. And it has to be brief. No context, no details, just "if you want to do this, press these buttons in this order." The manual for this one is... the opposite of that.

I approached this the way I think any user would - certainly how I would have in 1999 - and it basically just trashed my machine over and over. If I had done this on a real PC it would have taken me two weeks as I installed software, found it didn't work, wiped the drive, installed it again, and so on. Except not, because I'd have returned it four hours later.

I think the fact that this program basically doesn't work whatsoever if you simply follow the prompts on screen is a breathtaking failure of user interface design, for the reasons I cite in the video: I think a couple engineers programmed it, then wrote the instructions themselves, and I think this because I've seen it done many times before and this is exactly what it looked like - reams of exhausting words to describe simple features.

After I shot and edited the video, I looked at it and thought, "well, I could cut out all the false starts and rhetorical questions, and just list off what it says it'll do followed by clips of what it actually does, and it'd probably be 20 minutes long and far more watchable." And then I decided that it wouldn't actually tell you what this was like to use; if you don't feel bewildered and lost, you aren't understanding it.

And that's why I'll probably never be known for my videos about software.