A double negative makes... a confusing user experience

We all learned in school that a double negative makes a positive. "I don't have nothing" is really just a more confusing way to say "I have something". George Carlin once had a bit where he says that, when asked how you are doing, he sometimes replies "I'm not unwell, thank you". In both of these examples, the double negative version is somewhat confusing and unclear, especially to a non-native speaker of English.

I've critiqued Troels Bay's Google Reader Notifier here before. And again, I have to stress: It's a wonderful program that I use daily. It just has some UI quirks that sometimes give me a spark for a blog posting.

Reader Notifier uses a few double-negative based options in its preferences:
For example, I have unchecked the "Don't show tooltips" checkbox, because I want to see the tooltips. This is essentially telling the program "Don't not display tooltips". Confusing, right? Sure, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the preferences, but it's still not as intuitive as it could be. A clearer option would be "Show tooltips". Of course, then the semantics of the checkbox would have to be reversed in the application logic.

By changing the "Don't display items", "Don't show tooltips" and "Don't play sound" checkboxes to "Display items", "Show tooltips" and "Play sound" respectively, the UI will also be consistent. In its current state, it's inconsistent - there are three "negative" checkboxes ("Don't display items", "Don't show tooltips", "Don't play sound") and two positive checkboxes ("Show count in menu bar", "Check for updates on startup"). A consistent UI would use all positive (recommended!) checkboxes or all negative (bad idea!) checkboxes.

Again, though, let me say - Google Reader Notifier is a great, useful app. If you are running Mac OS X and use Google Reader, you should check it out at http://troelsbay.eu/software/reader.