Warning: principled rant against sloppy design and bad coding about to start; kids these days! Get off my lawn! There’s a terrible disease affecting modern web developers – Twitter.com has just fallen ill with it, and it could be a long time before they cure themselves. Deleting all images, and […]
Web 0.1
34 posts
This: (blocking me from doing any work – I need that spreadsheet, and thanks to Cloud, it’s impossible. Any other system – source / revision control, local files, file servers, etc – would have a quick, easy way for me to get at it. It’s only Cloud that fails … […]
Windows 8 It’s great, it’s beautifully presented, and the best OS I’ve used in the last 20 years or so. It makes OS X look clunky (which, let’s face it – for Microsoft – is one hell of an achievement) The upgrade My primary windows machine (used to) run XP. […]
Why does the login URL for internet banking: http://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/marketing/businessinternetbanking …redirect to the newsletter for global investors: https://investments.hsbc.co.uk/article/world-selection-newsletter ? Do you *want* people to think your website has been hacked? Or do you just not know what a cool URI is? I think your VP Marketing / Marketing Director needs a […]
Screenshot taken straight from the official blog post: You see, they wanted to add a feature where you could “watch” a repository. Only … due to some weak design (or perhaps: technology-led) decisions in the past, they already had a feature with this name, which didn’t really do what it […]
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, […]
Almost a year after Apple’s disastrous “force consumers to download Lion, instead of installing from DVD”, apparently it still doesn’t work. It’s hard to recommend OS X to anyone after this experience. UPDATE 2: Apple’s “download a file from the internet” code is so bad it’s causing the MacBook to […]
If you follow links in linkedin emails today, from an iPhone, you get kicked off the linkedin.com site, and every page redirects to: Https://touch.www.linkedin.com Even if you type in the front page URL directly, you are *not allowed* to visit the website. Classy.
And repeat after me: “novice web developers should NOT override the Enter key on the keyboard” (autocomplete fails – when you hit enter to accept browser-autocomplete, the idiotic untested, badly-written javascript kicks in and deletes the form data)
…as in: after 5 odd years, on OS X the official uploader still “requires” you to either lose all your data every time it stumbles, or … force-crash it. Which, paradoxically, keeps your data intact. Confused? You should be. e.g. you get 50% through uploading a few hundred photos, and […]
I think it is a fantastic and wonderful thing that the complete, detailed, maps of the UK are now free for all commercial and non-commercial use. This is a long way ahead of any other country – these maps are many times more detailed and accurate than e.g. the Google […]
We’re starting a new client project, and the client uses Mercurial exclusively, all through BitBucket. BitBucket has a stupid user-accounts system, that demands you invent a globally-unique username. Oh dear lord – how amateurish are you guys? Aha! BUT! … they have a (very subtle) link to let you use […]
FAIL #1: Website denies existence of products, broken cookie-“cleverness” Canon recently (last few months) launched a new “prosumer” DSLR – the EOS 550D, a.k.a. Rebel T2i (because Americans need to feel “cool” and “rebellious”, apparently. Hmm. Marketing fail there too, perhaps?). According to Canon’s website, this does not exist. Try […]
Given how badly Flash is getting smacked-down at the moment, I find this hilarious. Right now, Adobe.com’s store page (where you get redirected if you google for Adobe products) doesn’t work in a mainstream desktop browser (Firefox). I go to the page, and suddenly my keyboard stops working, and the […]
I just tried to create a free wiki on Wikia, to help the developer commuity with Entity Systems. This has no benefit to me, it’s purely for other people. I figured a system like Wikia would welcome such a wiki. Wikia hasn’t yet implemented any of the common username systems, […]
As an iPhone developer, I often encounter companies that try to save a lot of money by making a mobile website and then claiming (to their partners / customers / advertisers) that it’s an iPhone app. In some cases, I believe this is a good idea – they don’t have […]
Do you use Skype? Are you WEIRD enough to own MORE THAN ONE computer? (or gullible enough to want to download the LATEST version of Skype?) Well … f***-off! Skype is desperate to prevent you using their service. Download … FAIL Try to download skype today, and you’ll get: It’s […]
The Wicks Group is a private-equity firm routinely buying and selling companies for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Here’s their web page: Yes, really. At first I thought it was some small spam-using firm with crappy webskills, that had managed to buy the domain name of a bigger […]
I saw an article recently that described this attitude nicely: certain weak marketing executives believe that the purpose of a “conversation” is for them to have more ways of telling the customer what to do; they are seemingly incapable of understanding the idea that a “conversation” involves listening to the […]
I’m trying to download the 3.0 OS update for iPhone…and being denied by Apple’s own software – that cannot even download a single file from a website (!) It’s a 1GB download that you “must” download via iTunes, because … well … because … um … Apple hates web browsers? […]