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: snark
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 […]
Calling Something An “Internet Meme” Is Not Complimentary
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 – 8:43 pm
Think about some of the great Internet memes: (Warning: Most of these links have auto-playing sound.) All Your Base Are Belong to Us. The Viking Kittens, and Longcat (who is looooong). The Badger Badger Badger song. “Don’t tase me, bro!”, “I kiss you!”, and “Leeeeeeeroy… Jenkins!!!” Why do we get “Internet memes”, but not “radio […]
How Failtastic Can One Phone Be? Just Ask Palm About the Prē!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010 – 5:23 pm
Here are a few things that I consider to be basic requirements for functionality in a smartphone, along with notes on how my Palm Prē fails to deliver: When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on. (Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone […]
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 […]
Cruel Rollover Trickery
Thursday, June 11th, 2009 – 1:58 pm
I found an interesting UI problem today, on a site that I will be kind enough not to actually link to. Instead, I’ll just reproduce the general concept and problem here: alpha beta gamma delta The links all just link straight to the nav bar itself, so if you scroll your browser view so that […]
Why Downloadable Documentation Is Critical
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 – 10:16 pm
PHP is a kludged-together, ugly mess of a language. But its documentation is quite superlative: practically every function has documentation written in a more-or-less standardized format, plus whatever comments users have added. In addition, they have something near and dear to my heart: Downloadable documentation. This means that if I’m developing on an airplane at […]