I witnessed three basic flaws in latest Android this week – all of them redolent of bad UX design on Google’s part – and surprising in an almost 10 years old OS (none of them are new features).
Google? Doh!
13 posts
Kev wrote a short Tumblr on why he no longer wants to work at Google. I am fairly sure this is a wider, expanding trend: great programmers have lost interest/faith in Google as an employer. I’ve tried (ineffectually) to explain this to some of my Googler friends – but I’ve […]
For the last couple of months, one of our dev machines has been literally incapable of opening a simple Android project. It crashes every time, on startup, while displaying the Eclipse logo: Re-installing everything had no effect. We tried everything, and the only thing that worked reliably was to keep […]
I really don’t understand this. My best guess: there’s a new Senior Manager at Google who was doing badly in their peer-reviews, and was determined to “make their mark” by changing Gmail – if necessary over the cold, dead bodies of the thousands of people pointing out that this is […]
Just lost some work because Google staff still don’t understand this idea that “the internet is a non-reliable network”. (Google Docs simply deletes your data – retroactively – if the internet connection goes away. It’s that “retroactively” part that’s the killer) Makes you wonder what calibre of engineer they’re employing […]
After trying 4 or 5 things from this several-years-old page on Firefox’s support forums, I finally hit upon one that worked: “For the heck of it tonight I clicked on Gmail in my calendar and it finally went to my gmail inbox.” In my case, I just went to Google […]
In the past, I’ve had terrible advice from brilliant people. The best way to avoid that is to be careful to research the brilliant person and tailor your questions to avoid their weaknesses. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting a bunch of people at Google London’s open day. I started by writing […]
Beware – latest version of Google Docs has the Gmail bug whereby emails (documents) randomly disappear and become completely inaccessible (this happens a few times a year with Gmail’s IMAP client). With Gmail, you can use the web interface to get around it and see the actual email – but […]
Who at Google even thought this sounded like a good idea? 1994 phoned: they want their GeoCities school of web design back. (I’ve had to switch to non-javascript Gmail because the latest “forced update” of Gmail has some JS bugs in it that make it run very slow, lose emails, […]
Noticed something new tonight… Started watching YouTube video Hit “Pause” because Google’s Flash code is dismal (crashes frequently, since the update from approx a week ago) and works badly on slow connections; you have to let it pre-load a big chunk YouTube response: the video stops, and an advert starts […]
This is from 4 years ago, courtesy of Steve Yegge. I just came across it by accident, it’s wonderfully well written, but one bit caught my attention in particular: “First, you can’t tell interviewers what’s important. Not at any company. Not unless they’re specifically asking you for advice.” Wait – […]
For the past week, my iPhone’s have been unable to use Gmail. After approximately 4 hours, gmail locks you out of IMAP completely, unless/until you force-kill Apple’s mail client. The problem is … if you force-kill the client, you lose all emails you wrote, and you lose all emails you […]
Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView. That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses. The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless […]