Monday, June 25, 2007
Opera on the Wii
I am writing this from Opera on the Wii. Pretty cool for a game console. Can't use the WYSIWYG editor though. Opera doesn't recognize the editing area as an input box and doesn't let type in it. Multitap works really well and I can type faster than on the virtual keyboard.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Poor application design (and bad data)
What is the deal with all the crappy data on web sites these days? I don't know if it's because I develop web applications for a living, generally have too-high expectations, or just because I am super picky and pedantic (most would vote for the last, I suspect), but I have become really frustrated lately with web sites that don't "just work" the way I think they should.
Some examples from the past couple of days: I wanted to find out more about Ryobi lawn equipment because I have one of their gas-powered string trimmers and I wanted to see if they have an edger attachment that you can use with it (it has interchangeable heads to do different things). So, I get to their web site and start the painful process of locating the product I have, figuring that's a good place to begin finding attachments for it. In spite of the pain of the menus not expanding as I scrolled over them, and having to decide whether I wanted "power tools" or "outdoor tools" (it's both, right?) I was able to locate the product page for the particular model of trimmer we have (ooh, check out the spiffy AJAX-Y grayed out window/image popup when you click the image). My hopes rise as I see they have a "features" tab that tells me the trimmer has a heavy duty coupler for use with Expand-It attachments, which confirms that I am looking at the right product. But, do you think they have a "here is all the cool stuff that attaches to your trimmer using the heavy duty coupler" section on the page? Heck no! What they *do* have is a link to Home Depot, where evidently I am supposed to go foraging myself for the attachments, so I click the link aaaaaannnnndd the page I have requested cannot be found (I requested? I didn't write the stupid broken link!). No sweat, thinks I, because I am resourceful and they have a handy-dandy search box on the page. Type in "ryobi" and voila: nothing. I don't mean "sorry, no items match your search request" type of nothing, I mean a blank page, no message, nothing but white screen and nothing to see in the source behind it either that might clue me in. Being the extremely patient person I am, I click the big Home Depot logo to get to their main landing page and try the search again, and success awaits me on the search results page. They have the attachment I want, the price is about what I expected, and I am ready to go buy that sucker (better yet, let me pay online, right now, and go will-call pickup that thing (OK, maybe that is asking too much)).
So, hmm, it's 6:30 on a Sunday evening, I wonder how late they are open, and more importantly, if they even have one in stock at my local store. Check it out: there's a "Check Your Local Store" link that looks perfect for what I need to know, so I follow it, type in my zip code (that seems reasonable), click "make this my store" and it happily tells me that they do in fact sell that attachment and my local money pit. But wait, do they actually have any in stock? And what about that closing time? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Got sidetracked and all giddy finding out I now have a Home Depot that is mine. OK, found another link labeled "Store Finder." Thought I just did that, but OK, I click it, and WTF? again; it wants to know my zip code that I just typed in 45 seconds ago. See "my" store listed again and the phone number I must have missed before, but still am curious about whether they can just tell me the hours on the page, because I really don't like calling places like that to ask if they are open. So, I click the "more details" link, hoping for a nice list of store hours, but, and this is what got me, they don't show the store hours. They do say that store hours vary by season, but they aren't getting any more specific than that. Drat, if only there was some way to centrally locate that information so that it could easily be updated by someone as the seasons change. If only there were some way to predict when the days and months were going to change so that the application could automatically make the changes for you; imagine it!
That's an example from just one relatively small project; I could rant for days about all the stupid stuff that is out there (like how the blogger site warned me just now that I had unsaved data on the page, even though they have this handy-dandy autosave feature that keeps telling me, annoyingly, that it automatically saves my work as I go; so did it or not?).
So what's the deal? Has the quality of data on the web gotten worse in the past couple of years, or am I just noticing it more now for some reason and being much less forgiving than I used to be?
Some examples from the past couple of days: I wanted to find out more about Ryobi lawn equipment because I have one of their gas-powered string trimmers and I wanted to see if they have an edger attachment that you can use with it (it has interchangeable heads to do different things). So, I get to their web site and start the painful process of locating the product I have, figuring that's a good place to begin finding attachments for it. In spite of the pain of the menus not expanding as I scrolled over them, and having to decide whether I wanted "power tools" or "outdoor tools" (it's both, right?) I was able to locate the product page for the particular model of trimmer we have (ooh, check out the spiffy AJAX-Y grayed out window/image popup when you click the image). My hopes rise as I see they have a "features" tab that tells me the trimmer has a heavy duty coupler for use with Expand-It attachments, which confirms that I am looking at the right product. But, do you think they have a "here is all the cool stuff that attaches to your trimmer using the heavy duty coupler" section on the page? Heck no! What they *do* have is a link to Home Depot, where evidently I am supposed to go foraging myself for the attachments, so I click the link aaaaaannnnndd the page I have requested cannot be found (I requested? I didn't write the stupid broken link!). No sweat, thinks I, because I am resourceful and they have a handy-dandy search box on the page. Type in "ryobi" and voila: nothing. I don't mean "sorry, no items match your search request" type of nothing, I mean a blank page, no message, nothing but white screen and nothing to see in the source behind it either that might clue me in. Being the extremely patient person I am, I click the big Home Depot logo to get to their main landing page and try the search again, and success awaits me on the search results page. They have the attachment I want, the price is about what I expected, and I am ready to go buy that sucker (better yet, let me pay online, right now, and go will-call pickup that thing (OK, maybe that is asking too much)).
So, hmm, it's 6:30 on a Sunday evening, I wonder how late they are open, and more importantly, if they even have one in stock at my local store. Check it out: there's a "Check Your Local Store" link that looks perfect for what I need to know, so I follow it, type in my zip code (that seems reasonable), click "make this my store" and it happily tells me that they do in fact sell that attachment and my local money pit. But wait, do they actually have any in stock? And what about that closing time? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Got sidetracked and all giddy finding out I now have a Home Depot that is mine. OK, found another link labeled "Store Finder." Thought I just did that, but OK, I click it, and WTF? again; it wants to know my zip code that I just typed in 45 seconds ago. See "my" store listed again and the phone number I must have missed before, but still am curious about whether they can just tell me the hours on the page, because I really don't like calling places like that to ask if they are open. So, I click the "more details" link, hoping for a nice list of store hours, but, and this is what got me, they don't show the store hours. They do say that store hours vary by season, but they aren't getting any more specific than that. Drat, if only there was some way to centrally locate that information so that it could easily be updated by someone as the seasons change. If only there were some way to predict when the days and months were going to change so that the application could automatically make the changes for you; imagine it!
That's an example from just one relatively small project; I could rant for days about all the stupid stuff that is out there (like how the blogger site warned me just now that I had unsaved data on the page, even though they have this handy-dandy autosave feature that keeps telling me, annoyingly, that it automatically saves my work as I go; so did it or not?).
So what's the deal? Has the quality of data on the web gotten worse in the past couple of years, or am I just noticing it more now for some reason and being much less forgiving than I used to be?
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Blogger classic templates
Back when I first heard about blogger beta I thought it was going to be cool using it because of the new features it offered, such as comment feeds. It *is* cool, but there is one major problem with the new version: you can't post via FTP to your own host the way you can with the classic templates. You can forward your site or point your domain at the blogger site, but I don't want to do that, so I am stuck using the old templates.
I have spent a lot of time getting things set back up the way they were before, hassling with the paths and filenames in blogger to get the FTP publishing working properly, and to get the RSS feed links pointing into the correct locations. It all is working well now, except for one thing: my blog does not see my old archives that I still have on my site. I can force the links to the archives into the site template, which works well enough, but it made me curious about how blogger knows about the archive files that are there when it generates the template pages in the first place. Looking at the template, you can see it is doing an expansion to pull in the archive links, but I don't know enough about it to know where it is pulling that list from.
Maybe it's good to make a clean break from the past, but I like having links to the old stuff around, and at any rate it seems like it ought to be possible to do what I am trying to do. Will post more if/when I get it sorted out.
[update] I thought I had it figured out after doing a little poking around the blogger help area and examining the expansion variables a little more closely. It looks like blogger just takes the path and filename as you configure it and anything in that path will get added to the automatically generated list, but I'm not seeing it. No matter, I guess, but it is bugging me.
I have spent a lot of time getting things set back up the way they were before, hassling with the paths and filenames in blogger to get the FTP publishing working properly, and to get the RSS feed links pointing into the correct locations. It all is working well now, except for one thing: my blog does not see my old archives that I still have on my site. I can force the links to the archives into the site template, which works well enough, but it made me curious about how blogger knows about the archive files that are there when it generates the template pages in the first place. Looking at the template, you can see it is doing an expansion to pull in the archive links, but I don't know enough about it to know where it is pulling that list from.
Maybe it's good to make a clean break from the past, but I like having links to the old stuff around, and at any rate it seems like it ought to be possible to do what I am trying to do. Will post more if/when I get it sorted out.
[update] I thought I had it figured out after doing a little poking around the blogger help area and examining the expansion variables a little more closely. It looks like blogger just takes the path and filename as you configure it and anything in that path will get added to the automatically generated list, but I'm not seeing it. No matter, I guess, but it is bugging me.
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