Olivestrike!

The big story in IT right now is Crowdstrike's unfortunate update that prompted millions of Windows machines to BSOD and caused chaos in critical infrastructure around the world.

Actually, that's not just big, it's BIG or B. I. G. or maybe B! I! G! and it's provoked loads of speculation about the hows and whys and what-should-haves and what-didn'ts.

But even on a week without that scale of fail, even on a week where nothing untoward happened on any computer anywhere, the observation I'm sharing here probably wouldn't merit much coverage.

This is it:

Do you see? Just under the orange bar, the word OLIVE. Why?

Don't get me wrong, I like olives. I just don't expect to see them on the BBC Sounds player while I'm setting myself up to listen to England win the cricket at the weekend.

Of course, if you look a bit closer and wait a second or two, you'll see that there's a slight vertical alignment difference between the O and LIVE and the thing that turns out not to be an O at all pulses between empty and filled:

It there a problem here? Functionally, I didn't see one.

But is there a problem here? Well, on an app that otherwise appears well-designed with an intuitive UX (disclaimer: I'm only a very occasional user) this oddity stands out, and I found that I couldn't stop glancing at it.

But does it really look like OLIVE? ... wait a second ... Yes, it still really does look like OLIVE.

With so many different possibilities for representing liveness, it feels odd that one with this distracting incongruity would be chosen. But if I've learned anything in software over the years it's that the surface appearance is often not the full inside story.

Just like when you bite into a juicy-looking olive and crack your teeth on the hard stone at the centre.
Image: Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

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