Some time back I installed Aptana Studio to give it a whirl. While I had mixed feelings about the product, there was something that they did that, from a usability perspective (and user-friendly perspective) is just plain wrong. After installing the product, when I right-click on a file in Windows--any file whatsoever--the popup menu shows "Edit With Aptana Studio".

Let's be realistic here. I know that when we create a software product we want to believe that our product is going to be so important and useful that it permeates every aspect of a user's life, and therefore requires its presence to be made known throughout the user's entire daily experience. But that's just not true. I don't need Aptana Studio to jump in my face as sort of a reminder it's there every single time I want to open a file, whether it's a .txt file, .doc file, .jpg file, or any of the other roughly 1200 filename extensions registered on my system.

For the longest time I just ignored this menu item, but as I've accidentally clicked the item too many times, I started to notice this one item popping up (literally) over and over. And so I did some checking.

Turns out the developers who made Aptana Studio, for whatever reason, decided to make this "edit with" item global and not specific to any particular filename extension. And so even if I have a file called harjkgfas.hruweohsfudigsdklfgs, and I right-click on it, Aptana Studio wants to remind me that it is there, ready, willing, and--apparently--able to edit this file.

To me, this is akin to popup ads on the Internet constantly reminding you to go visit some web site. Now I'm sure the developers didn't intend to be so annoying here, but to me, that's what it amounts to--it's like receiving a spam email over and over from the same company reminding you on an hourly basis that you need to go visit their site.

The way "edit to" context handlers are installed is through a registry key under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Normally you register them individually for a particular filename extension (hint: such as .js). But right at the top of the sub-keys is an entry for simply the asterisk, *, that ubiquitous wildcard character. This registers a handler for all files. And that's where Aptana Studio registered itself. Specifically the key that I found is:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell

And only two items are here (even though I've installed hundreds upon hundreds of programs on my computer)--one called "removeproperties" and the other called "edit.aptanastudio" -- at least there were two until a few moments ago. You can probably guess which one I just deleted.

Now I'm not trying to be nasty or pick on Aptana. Rather, I want to use this as an example of how usability and user-friendliness are vital to your software development. If you do something wrong (such as annoy a user), the user will likely be left with a bad taste in his or her mouth towards your software and towards your company. And this is certainly not something you want to do, especially during a tight economy when we all need as many happy customers as we can get.