Earth Error¶
235 words
When opening Google Earth recently, it couldn’t read my stored placemarks for some reason and tried to deal with that issue. Eventually it displayed this error message:
And – to me – this error message reflects many things Google:
- They are good enough to actually have error handling code that tries to restore your bookmarks.
- However they are bold engineers in a company dealing with the big picture, so their code FAILs to actually do its job. Presumably because your small little bookmarks are effectively irrelevant. In fact, seeing that they are manually collected rather than by a smart algorithm, Google probably consider your bookmarks worthless for anything but distilling personality information for ad-targeting out of them. While they love doing that, I’m sure their global surveillance is at least as effective.
- Of course Google don’t need to follow HIG on how dialogue boxes should look. They put all text in bold and use dumb quotation marks. Full Unix paths in dialogue boxes are probably rather ‘uncommon’ on the Mac as well.
- Their spacing should pass as somewhat ‘creative’ at least.
- The size of their dialogue is ridiculous: The wonders of automatic GUI layout.
- Text in the dialogue is semi-localised.
- They just let you know what’s going to happen, but you have no option to Cancel out of it.
While Google Earth FAILed there, Time Machine luckily restored my bookmarks in less than a minute.
