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Oh God the RUBBER on my SHAFT has gone wrong and is STICKING to things

Hellp meee

Something for the Weekend, Sir? My stiff rubbery shaft is sticky. I have tried applying water, gentle detergents and even screen wipes but the stickiness of my rubber remains. It is sticky along its full length from tip to end and even my wife, who has tried to peel off the rubber, agrees that the shaft feels unpleasant in her hands.

The next time I buy a graphics tablet, I will choose a stylus that has a removable rubberised grip sleeve. That way, when its surface gets sticky, I ought to be able to replace it.

I have hacked my way through many graphics tablets over the years and I am under no illusion that any of them will last forever – at least, not the way I treat them. I have variously crushed, snapped and drowned graphics tablets and their styli and only ever had myself to blame.

However, I am definitely not responsible for making the rubber coating on my old entry-level Wacom stylus stickier than a glazed fruit bun.

On a whim yesterday, I pressed it against the wall. It was still hanging there this morning. If I can’t fix it with Maplin cleaning solution or rubbing alcohol, I am going to use the stylus to remove cat hairs from the sofa.

Whenever other owners have complained in user forums about this problem, some smart-arse usually responds by saying that all rubberised material disintegrates over time “if you allow it to be exposed to air”. By this, I am led to understand that it’s partly my own stupid fault for not storing it overnight in a vacuum cylinder and failing to insist on using the stylus exclusively in outer fucking space.

A casual trawl across the interwebs reveals that the rubber that Wacom happened to be using for this particular model doesn’t dry up and split so much as spontaneously transmute its own surface into what feels like a coating of caster sugar dissolved in PVA glue and jizz.

Why would anyone design a product that does this? Well, you know, it’s easy to scoff.

Anyone who has ever been involved in developing a product will appreciate that it’s bad enough trying to deal with things going wrong now without trying to anticipate what utterly unexpected horrors lie in wait before spontaneously waving their metaphoric willies in your customers’ faces in three years' time.

Some companies would rather trash an imperfect project than set it loose on an unsuspecting public. According to the strict non-disclosure agreements I signed with Adobe, I could be shot for what I’m about to tell you – in fact, the small print also says they can burn down my house, sow salt into the flower beds and claim my first-born child unless I can guess the first name of Adobe’s head of HR – but the company has a secret reputation for holding good stuff back if it’s not entirely happy with it. We beta-testers wail and whine about some fab new but incomplete feature not making it into the release product, but Adobe deserves respect for its caution.

So it’s amusing to see the reaction to Apple hurriedly pulling third-party apps that use iOS8’s Healthkit API because of concerns over something or other. Normally, Apple’s reputation is almost the opposite of Adobe’s in that the initial release of any Apple software product is effectively a public beta that falls to bits within hours and eventually gets fixed a week or so later with an update.

This happens every time, and every time there is a howl of complaint.

Yet when Apple notices that Healthkit-based apps are going tits up before their (frankly overblown) launch and yanks them off (ooh missus) the App Store, there is another howl of complaint.

Rush the plasticky iPhone 5c to market? --> Howl of complaint.

Delay the announcement of Apple Watch until we can get a prototype that isn’t entirely crap? --> Howl of complaint.

Ah, give them a free U2 album, that’ll cheer them up. --> Howl of complaint.

Honestly, users can be a bunch of inconsistent, ungrateful, sad, sorry bastards at times. To be precise: at all times. I bet some of them even play golf, which of course is the saddest, sorriest and bastardest thing that can possibly be blamed on anything close to sentient life anywhere in the universe.

Well, that and the existence of Justin Bieber, although admittedly I’m stretching the definition of "sentient life".

At the other extreme, it’s amusing to see how daft things slip through the development net when people are focused on "getting it to work" rather than "getting it right" or indeed "making any sense whatsoever".

While running through test scenarios on a dev project a while ago, I found myself staring at a user confirmation alert comprising a whole paragraph of text rendered as a single line in a two-foot-wide dialog window across the screen. When I raised a ticket, no-one understood what my problem was and even directed me to the documentation. Sure enough, the manual showed a screenshot of this bizarre ‘skinny’ dialog as if nothing was amiss.

In another project, someone with responsibility for designing the user interface icons and buttons must have been abusing prescription drugs. Perhaps predictably enough, tools, preferences and options were represented by a baffling array of cogs, nuts and spanners, looking like the bargain bin at B&Q. I was surprised not to see a bathroom tap and a broken lightbulb in there too. But that was just the start.

Things quickly took a turn for the worse – much worse. I began by being mildy annoyed that the search function was illustrated by a magnifying glass (surely you use one of these to zoom, not search?), only to find that the zoom button looked like a tiny blob of something impossible to describe accompanied by a pair of parallel arrows reminiscent of the old British Rail Intercity logo.

A button to call up an import list looked incongruously like a satellite dish while an upload function was illustrated by a cloud with an arrow jabbing through it like something you’d see engraved over the entrance of a masonic lodge.

Further investigation revealed an incomprehensible button graphic for a file browser tool comprising a mishmash of random clipart objects including more arrows, more magnifying glasses and a funnel. Archived material was represented by a filing cabinet – fair enough, you say – but to send a file to the archive, you had to drag and drop it onto an icon labelled with a skull and crossbones.

It looked not so much like a graphical user interface as a shop window at a tattoo parlour. I bet there was a button in there featuring a snake-entwined dagger piercing a heart circled with roses and "Mum" scrawled underneath.

Is this because the developer doesn’t care? Hardly.

In my limited experience, the moment a project kicks off, a wayward gang of obnoxious louts – newly appointed IT directors, mid-management bosses and "oh-I-have-an-idea" types – pull it to pieces while the marketing bods who sold the idea to the clients in the first place without caring about dreary matters such as reality and possibility tell the poor programming sods to get on with it or they’ll get the blame.

Usually within a few weeks, the project parameters have altered so much they are unrecognisable. Delay creep sets in and the developers get the blame regardless of their efforts. The marketeers and salesmen leave the company for better jobs, bosses who needlessly interfered with the project get promoted, project managers have nervous breakdowns and programmers go on holiday. And the whole machine grinds its inevitable way to becoming unstuck.

Except, of course, in the case of my stylus, which is still on the wall. Now, where’s that cat? ®

Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Rubber sleeves aside, he is a long-time fan and proponent of Wacom tablets. He pays for his Wacom purchases rather than blagging them, which gives him moral superiority and the right to be as kind or as rude as he likes about his purchases.

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