I'm sure Microsoft likes to play with their new toys as much as any other, even if they do pay a lot of money to buy up another company to get said toy. Their new anti-spyware program (which they bought from GIANT) is no doubt another one that quick fingered Microsoft developers wanted to get their hands on.
I downloaded the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta version yesterday. I had read a few blog posts about it and thought that I should give my new laptop(ish) build a test.
The application installed fine and I set it off on a scan. It did a good job, or at least I hope it did because it didn't find anything (That's good right????). I did have a few issues with the interface though.
The UI is clearly not Microsoft developed as it doesn't fit their UI standards. For example, the menu system doesn't act like a normal Microsoft menu which is a bit unusual. This however isn't a major problem.
The main beef I have with it is that in the middle of the scan, I wanted to change some options like when the scheduled scan is to run. The menu system was enabled so as far as UI design is concerned, I am able to change the options while scanning. So off I go and try to access the options, only to be told that the scan has been aborted.
Excuse Me?!?!?!?!?!?
You would think, again from a UI design point of view, that the menus would have been disabled while scanning, requiring the user to cancel the running scan first, or at the very least, allow the user to use the menus and give them the option of canceling the scan if they want to continue into the menu system. The designers of the application, however, decided it was a much better idea to cut everything off at the knees. As much as I might complain about this inconvenience, it isn't a deal-breaker as the whole scan only took 10 minutes anyway, but its the principle of the thing.
Aborting the scan did also highlight another thing that was a little over the top in the UI. The developers seem to have a bit of a thing going on with the MessageBox API. It is everywhere. If you change the options and click save, it pops up a MessageBox saying the settings are saved (just in case you weren't aware that you clicked the save button). It does this type of behavior in so many places and is a little annoying.
On the plus side, I do love features like the auto-update. That will be great for set and forget style operations. Overall, I think it is a great program, but it needs some definite Microsoft UI attention.
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