Pete said: Well thats unnecesarily hostile, dont you think? You know how to use most applications right out of the box, good for you, but heres a funny thing, you know how to uncheck a bloody checkbox as well, and if someone DOES need to read a readme, that person might very well fall into the "doesnt know how to find the readme file" group as well! I think it's very necessarily hostile, because I've encountered lots and lots and lots of bad programs that countered horrible UI design with a bloated readme. I don't think readme files are useless (there are plenty of things that can't always be obvious, like command-line options or possible values for config file settings), but if your program can't be used at all without reading the readme first... well, either your program is a command-line utility (and you can't be bothered to print out the list of arguments when run without them, like every command-line utility worth its salt) or some other obvious exception, or it was poorly designed.
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