When I read the article "Three Public Enemies: Cut, Copy, and Paste" published by Zoltán Adám Mann in the July 2006 issue of Computer, I first wondered how this topic could be of any interest to me. I decided to read it anyway, mostly because the abstract caught my attention:
"Copy-paste might seem to make life easier, but it often leads to inconsistencies. Giving users the freedom to specify semantic relationships among copied objects can help rectify this crime."
Of course, reading the article proved, again, that any prejudice-driven judgment is flawed: there is something really broken with copying and pasting (despite turning lazy developers into dirty ones: Functions? What for? I can copy/paste!).
I have experienced today what I consider the worst unexpected side effect of using this facility I have ever met so far. And it was pretty embarrassing. Read on.
I checked out of SVN a workmate's project I wanted to copy two files from into my Eclipse workspace. In fact, I was interested in these files and the particular folder hierarchy they are stored into (Maven site and APT files, for the curious). So I copied the interesting folder from this project and pasted it into my project, totally unaware of the fact that I was also copying and pasting the hidden SVN control files.
Of course when I wanted to check this back into my project, I was actually checking back into his project, while getting tons of undecipherable SVN insults in the console. Did not I say it was embarrassing? Man, what a shame.
So the lesson for GUI designers is the following: If you implement a feature that performs an operation of any kind but which ends up with a visual feedback, you should not do more than what is actually visible. Or at the very least warn the user that invisible operations will happen.
In my case, the visible feedback from the folder copy and paste operation was the addition of icons in the hierarchy representing my Java project. I should have been warned that other non-visible resources where also involved into the operation.
Well, I might not have read the warning dialog but then, that would have fully been my fault!
