I consider this to be a common problem.

My phone will notify me when it loses its wifi signal.

That's fine.

But if it somehow manages to reconnect to the network, the notification remains.

That's annoying.

Rule of the week: 
If information is out of date, don't show it.

I consider this to be a common problem.

Most devices we carry with us and use are good at repetitive, boring tasks. This should always be leveraged fully. One thing I think we should look more into is having applications retry when a task fails.

I have never understood why things like re-attempting a download or similar things require user interation. Clearly the user wants this thing to be downloaded, can you not just make it so? The most common reason that causes annoyance for me if it's because the network is down temporarily. In this case I would like to only get a message on the screen saying it can't reach the network right now.

Facebook Messenger, for example, is implemented wrong: if a message doesn't to through instantly (from either the mobile app or the web interface), it will just give up and make the user click retry again and again until it works. I understand that people don't necessarily to have their instant messages delivered three days later, but at least don't give up right away. At least give me the option to have it retry without any further interaction (either for a while, or indefinitely). The message that's on the very top when I'm merely inside the app doing nothing would have been more than sufficient for me. 

Gmail's web interface, on the other hand, does not require any user interaction what-so-ever. When there are problems, it's clear that the network is down. It's retrying, with a countdown timer and something that I can click manually if I want it to retry now. I like it a lot.

While each particular scenario where it would make sense to retry something could have more functionality, the general rule of the week is:

If your application can retry, it should do so without any user interaction a reasonable amount of times.

I consider this to be an extremely common problem.

There is a cooling tower on my room. It's big, and it's cool. However, it makes a high-frequency beeping noise every time I press a button on it. Does it need to do that? Not at all. I can clearly see on the display that it is doing as intended, and, believe it or not, I can also feel the air out of it!

My microwave also makes a noise for every time I press a button. So does the stove. One of my alarm clocks make a clicking sound when I press buttons on that. The washing machine makes a long and ugly beeping sound before it does its thing.

There is no way of disabling the sound short of opening up the entire thing and cut the wire for the speaker (which I have done for my desktop countdown timer - it is now actually perfect). And most if this doesn't even make sense at all. It's just insane.

When developing things that make noise, please make sure it needs to make a noise, and/or provide a way to disable it.

I have to give a special mention to Skype here: whenever there is a problem with the current call, it makes an extremely annoying sound periodically (with maybe a two second delay). Please remove this. I use Skype for gaming, and if there is a problem with the call I'm already annoyed enough as it is - no sounds, thank you. And there isn't even a way of disabling this! It's absolutely insane.

Before adding any sort of sound to anything: is it really necessary? I mean, really really necessary? And, more importantly, can it be disabled? If it's really really really necessary and/or it can be disabled easily, then it's fine.

The rule of today is:
All sounds should be optional.

I consider this to be a somewhat common problem.

Have you ever opened a document, not done any changes, closed it and gotten the

Do you want to save?

From a technical perspective, it is typically really easy to detect if a file has changed. 


So, here is the rule for today:


Programs should detect if something changed, and not ask the user to save if nothing has changed. And for the duration of time I have the file open, indicate somewhere that it is currently different from the original.