Fraught Software

Some software is what I call "Fraught". By this I mean that it is somewhat unstable, but just useful enough to make it worth living with the problems it causes. Early versions of PowerPoint were like this. They let you create great slides, but they also had a habit of crashing when you thought about saving your deck. At one point I suspected that they might have some form of mind reading ability.

Anyhoo, PowerPoint is now solid, and very good at recovering if anything bad does happen. Photoshop Elements is however fraught. It does what I want, it has a very sensible and useful range of features and it didn't cost me too much. And every now and then it tips over, the most recent one giving me the blood curdling message "Can't open the catalogue". As the catalogue is the file that ties everything else together, this could well be a bad thing as it would have meant re-importing and categorising everything. Fortunately, after a reboot and a fifteen minute repair session we are now back on the rails again, but I'll always be slightly on edge when I use the program. I hope at some point Adobe can get around to un-fraughting the code.