Arne Handt comments on a John Gruber piece about software that tries to be too smart and thereby becomes unpredictable and annoying.
My favourite example of this is Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrection feature. It often changes my double quotes into some completely unappropriate quote style, and insists on “fixing” my “errors” by randomly jumbling letters around or changing their case.
Another annoying example is the unfortunate practice of automatically turning everything that looks like a URL into something clickable. This is a good thing in principle, but is sometimes totally inappropriate. Having all URLs blue and underlined on an otherwise black-on-white piece of paper is not exactly helpful or visually appealing. And I don’t exactly appreciate clickable links inside chunks of RDF/XML.
(While trying to come up with a good title for this post, I remembered this: Between all the AutoCorrection and AutoSummarize and AutoFormat features of Microsoft Office, I believe I’ve also seen an AutoContent feature. I never dared find out what it does.)
(On second thought, I believe I’ve seen PowerPoint presentations that made heavy use of AutoContent. They also had lots of cliparts.)