Just under a month ago, an iPhone developer from Australia — one who’s previously defended Apple’s approval process — had his own app suddenly dis-approved by Apple. According to his blog post about the sudden revocation of approval, “I had convinced my company to take a gamble and make some apps for Apple’s Store. Tennis Stats had […]
Tag Archives: bad ideas
Common Flash UI Mistakes
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 – 8:42 am
One of the biggest problems with Flash isn’t Flash itself. It’s Flash designers. More particularly, it’s Flash designers’ basic failure to understand why certain UI elements are the way they are. This leads to one of the most common Flash designer diseases: The drive to reinvent basic UI elements. Poorly. Page Transitions When a user […]
Silly Coding Tricks: “Inverted” String Match
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 – 4:20 pm
First things first: Never actually do this. This is just a fun curiosity, for amusement value only. Because of the way JavaScript’s search() method works, you can do: var my_url = 'http://kai.mactane.org'; if (! my_url.search(/http:\/\/kai.mactane.org/)) { alert("Your URL is http://kai.mactane.org"); } else { alert("Nope, your URL isn't http://kai.mactane.org"); } Try running this, and it will […]
How Many Ways Is Your Imitation Scrollbar Broken?
Sunday, December 13th, 2009 – 1:25 pm
If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, you should at least make sure your new version is somehow better than the previous kind. Reimplementing standard UI and OS widgets is one of the most common ways developers reinvent the wheel these days — it started with Flash developers building their own controls, and has now spread […]
A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 – 11:42 am
The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums: I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw: Signed Out You are no longer signed in to your Palm […]
Palm Is Lying, Not Just Spying
Friday, August 14th, 2009 – 12:48 pm
So, Palm was recently caught spying on its users. Major kudos, by the way, to Joey Hess, who initially broke this story. For those who haven’t kept up, various other news outlets and blogs have also been reporting on it. Palm’s response to this problem is a single paragraph of corporate PR-speak: Palm takes privacy […]
A World Where People Regularly Discard Knowledge After 9 Years
Monday, July 27th, 2009 – 7:55 pm
In his latest entry on Coding Horror, “Windows 7: The Best Vista Service Pack Ever”, Jeff Atwood says: I want the world to get the hell off Windows XP. A world where people regularly use 9 year old operating systems is not a healthy computing ecosystem. I find this terribly, painfully wrong. The unintended consequence […]
Don’t Waste My Time With Email Confirmation Fields
Sunday, June 7th, 2009 – 5:58 pm
I just ran into yet another form on a web page that looked like this: First Name Last Name Email Address Confirm Email Address Address Line 1 … and so on These things drive me nuts. Once I’ve typed my email address in the first time, I just type Shift-Home to highlight the entire field, […]