I just had something quite good happen, and I thought I’d mention it here. Whenever I’ve had a virus crop up previously, anti-virus software like AVG have tried to make it as jarring an experience as possible: sirens and massive exclamation marks on yellow backgrounds, that kind of thing. I guess maybe it’s the equivalent of hitting a dog on the nose with a newspaper. “Bad boy! Don’t bring viruses in here!”

So it was a very pleasant experience just now when instead of frightening the life out of me, my background AV scanner, Panda Cloud, just popped up a big green tick and a message saying ’1 virus neutralised’, and disappeared again after a few seconds. I didn’t even know there was one, yet it had already been dealt with and I had the all clear! It felt like my computer was being protected by a guardian angel, instead of the usual gruff bouncer.

Basically, I’m very impressed, and I think this would be a good direction for computing and pc-human interaction generally. We should move away from the formality and strictness that has been traditional since computers were only in the hands of businesses, and move towards friendly and helpful ways of presenting information for everyone. It’s so fiddly trying to write error messages in the most formal way possible, when a more colloquial way would be more useful to the user and more natural to write for the programmer.

It’ll take a gradual shift, but I’d like to see computing become genuinely friendly, not just ‘user-friendly’.