Since I was expounding on what I thought made good and bad software, I got to thinking about the best and worst software I’ve ever used.
On the best side, the best computer game I ever played was Pinball Construction Set. To my mind that game is still as close to perfection as I’ve seen. The beauty was that pinball is a pretty limited game but within that basic board and balls domain you could do anything. I remember creating a game once where the gravity was set to zero, there was one hole in the middle of the board for the ball to go into, and then bumpers, flippers and other stuff on the outside — called the game The Black Hole. You could do that sort of thing very easily and it was fun to play around with.
The worst software is a shoe-in — pretty much any Windows word processor. WordPerfect stinks, and MS Word somehow manages to be even worse. I spend much of my time at work editing documents in those two programs and they drive me bonkers. Most of my co-workers like WordPerfect because of the “Reveal Codes” feature, but I routinely run into documents where what I see on screen has nothing to do with the codes. Word is pretty much unuseable; I really have no idea how people get work done with it.