While we’re on the subject of interface stupidities, here’s another one from the otherwise excellent freeware FTP client SmartFTP:

Here’s a screenshot of the Tools menu from SmartFTP. Quick quiz: What key do you press to get to the Settings dialogue once you’ve opened the menu? “S”, right? Nope. You have to hit the up arrow and then Enter, because the “S” shortcut also belongs to the Smart Update menu item, which happens to be listed first.

This can be quite aggravating even for us experienced users. I needed to adjust some FTP settings tonight (thanks to a really horrid connection) and kept hitting Alt+T+S, but the blasted update wizard kept coming up each time. For a few minutes I couldn’t quite work out what was going on, but eventually I happened to notice the mnemonic for “Smart Update”– and the rest is history…

So please, programmers, do not ever assign the same mnemonic to two menu items; even if you’ve got 26 items in a menu, you’ve still got numbers and punctuation left over to be used…