A surprisingly great feature

Maintaining bug vigilance and keeping a software-quality mindset more generally tends to make you look like a grump. There are just so many software flaws to notice. Sometimes, though, this sort of vigilance works the other way, and you're the one noticing something great while everyone else is grumbling. At one of my big-company jobs, we used document software (Google Docs-style) that was widely disliked, and understandably so: it was slow, buggy, confusing, and ugly. But it had a wonderful feature: you could comment on a image and connect the resulting comment thread with a specific point in the image, not the whole image. This granularity is wonderful, especially when you're reviewing an architecture diagram. It's a subtler feature than it might first seem to be: It requires a richer ontology of things that can be the anchor of a comment. It needs to keep working if a user resizes the image. The user needs to understand the relationship between the point in the image and the…

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