309 words
Time for random rants or rants on rants on software again. Relax, enjoy or grind your teeth and fast forward.
Sucking is still what NatWest's online banking is best at: For ages now, said website only worked with 'safe' browsers. Safe being defined as IE or Netscape 4.0.8 through 4.7.8. This is enforced through thorough checking of the user agent. Setting Safari to pretend it's IE 6/Win, makes it crash on that site, setting it to be IE 5.2.2 works find (hooray, it used to refuse IE/Mac) and, most ironically, setting it to Netscape 4.7.9 will end in refusal as well. Finding out your bank balance can be hard at times.
Stupidity As everyone knows, hoping to be able to designate a file's type by the end of its name is a hopeless endeavour. Still, Apple consider forcing the user to do exactly this despite superior techniques being in place a good idea – as the screenshot illustrates. I got in that situation by wanting to export an image as a JPEG in Preview which swiftly suggested to finish off the name in '.jpg'. Now, I was prepared to live with a silly extension as the file was going to be on a stupid computer anyway. But as always I like that little vowel in the name and thus edited the end of the name to be '.jpeg' instead, causing the absurd message to appear. Did I mention, that – luckily – I am more of a GraphicConverter person anyway?
After getting a file called 'Zoidberg.jpeg' in the end, I tried to upload it to the stupid site and it promptly told me off for the file's name. You also got to marvel the error message's rudeness (Verboten!) and its not-so-unique but nonetheless obvious confusion of the concepts of file names and types. Small minds do think alike.
Hm…
Regarding:
Feedster: I believe the results Feedster gives for a default ‘by Relevance’ search on iTunes 4 aren’t satisfactory. I thought I could use it to keep an overview of the zillions of of posts on the topic, lazy web style.
Response:
That doesn’t 100% surprise me. Indexing of #s has always been problematic in full text engines and none of us have ever had a good solution on it. What might be better is to use a Date sorted search since it sounds like you’re more interested in currency and newer things are more likely to cover version 4.
Regarding
By the way, the “Next” link at the bottom of the search results page takes me back to the start page, probably still a consequence of Scott being too smart.
Response: I just tested this and couldn’t repeat it. What browser are you using? It could LOOK like this depending on the results but they aren’t the same. At least not when I do it.
Suggestion:
Blog more as separate posts so comments are individually addressable. Just a thought.
Best Scott
Matthew’s site is currently offline, so I can’t read the entry you’re referring to, but I can confirm that Blosxom’s simplicity was the deciding factor for me going with it instead of Movable Type. I started out with Blogger and LiveJournal, both of which shared the same basic flaws: reliance on centralized, overload servers with my content and layout information stored in databases outside of my control. I started looking into MT, but I balked at all the additional Perl modules and arcane database foo that seemed to be involved. I really like the fact that all my current blog entries are simple tagged text files. There was some talk on the Blosxom mailing list not long ago where someone was talking about the feasiblility of rendering TeX to HTML in Blosxom’s framework.
Scott:
Re: indexing #s I see, didn’t know about that. But my alternate searches were
Re: Searching by Date Sure I did that afterwards. But usually I use search engines without thinking a lot - trusting they’ll do the right thing. It might be neat to have a ‘power search’ option that lets you specify a date for the search to focus on. That way you can research past topics attached to a date. Maybe even a chronological view…
Re: Next button Actually it seems to happen with any search I do. Example URL: http://www.feedster.com/?q=iTunes%20%20store&offset=10&limit=10 Browser is Safari b2
Re: Separate posts You may be right. I may just be overdoing it. I made up my mind that I prefer longer, less frequent posts. Hm….
What Scott said. I started reading, and it went on, and on, and on, one thought to the next, and I thought, “whoa, what is this, /Ulysses/”? :-)
BTW, the “Consider forcing the user to do exactly that” link is broken.
OK I tried to fix that now, splitting the post in to several shorter bits. I may have gotten carried away.
The link worked just fine here… I cleverly linked to my local copy of Apple’s developer documentation.