isemann

... in more than 140 characters.

Adobe's halcyon days are over.

So I saw this retweet in my tweet stream this morning:

Adobe Shadow is here! A free, new tool to improve mobile workflows: sync devices, inspect & preview designs.  adobe.ly/xHZ6gl

You can use this FREE new tool if you wish. I haven't clicked the link. Having managed to wean myself off all Adobe's products and offerings for a while now, I have no interest in renewing any sort of relationship with them.

A few issues over the years have caused this. They are:

  • Buggy as hell.
  • Random crashes.
  • Memory hogging.
  • Slow.

And finally, price.

So this tool is free. Adobe's halcyon days of charging a king's ransom for stuff is gone. Diddums.

Adobe, I have two words for you, goose and cooked. You can fill in the blanks.

R!

Privatising the Police.

First they came for the NHS and I said nothing because I was not sick. Then they came for the disabled people and those on benefits and I said nothing because I had an income and didn’t care what the ‘scroungers’ said. Then they came for the schools and I said nothing because I had no kids. Then they came for the police force with private/public partnerships and for speaking up, I received a baton to the face. The private guards looked at their targets and smiled: dissent down 35% this month.

R! 

BT Home Hub and website quirks and accessibility problems.

I recently had a bit of twitter conversation with @BTCare about the cross-browser/platform quirks of BT service and the BT.com website. Twitter’s 140 characters are a bit limiting so I ended up with pat responses and to clarify I’ll post this to describe what I mean.

Some basic information — the technical setup; it’s an Intel iMac running current Mac OS X, all software, browsers etcetera up to date.

I recently had some problems with the broadband speed, well the BT Vision part of it i.e. replay or downloading programmes or movies. Checked everything, rebooted etcetera and found out it was the phone line speed. Straight after that I managed to lock myself out of the HomeHub. My own idiot moment.

During the process of fixing all this, including calling support at the end, I found some quirks, most of which I’ve experienced on multiple occasions over some years. In between I’ve done complete OS re-installs so I don’t believe it’s just my system or setup.

Quirk 1:

Looking at the BT HomeHub in Safari and trying to get the Advanced menu options on the left will leave you looping round and round to the screenshot below. This is actually an ‘improvement’. Previously, recently, the body where Advanced configuration is displayed, was just white space. Now there is some handy text which doesn’t help or explain in any way but will make you think everything is fine and make you lose your mind that little bit slower after repeatedly looping around. At least with the white space and lack of Advanced menu you realised there was a problem straight away.

Bt_home_hub_advanced_in_safari

With Chrome you’ll be awarded with being able to view (and therefore change if necessary) the Advanced menu on the left.

Bt_home_hub_advanced_in_chrome

Quirk 2:

I also tested the line-speed of the actual phone line. Strangely enough this test would work in Safari but not in Chrome. A mysterious switch?

Quirk 3:

During the support call the operator needed to connect and control the mouse and keyboard of my computer. Chrome and Safari both seemed to struggle with this so we got Firefox up and running. It didn’t seem to work either but somehow one of the three browsers worked and we got that sorted. I don’t know which browser worked because I don’t think any browser displayed the fact that it had worked on my side.

Quirk 4:

More recently I logged into the BT.com website. There was a link advertising cheaper international calling rates which I clicked through to. I was using Safari, but the drop down menu of destinations wouldn’t display when clicked. I tried Chrome, after all it’s not very helpful if I can’t choose the country to display the rate and there is no other, easily obvious way to display that information. Chrome didn’t work either. Firefox worked for that but lets say it plainly here:

I HAD TO USE THREE DIFFERENT BROWSERS JUST TO DISPLAY A DROP DOWN MENU!

BT, you’re letting us down regarding accessibility. Should I need three browsers (or more?) and the technical skills required to fault diagnose and solve or work around all these quirks?

Please get in touch, there is something else which I'd like to mention.

R!  :-/

Attention Twitter web application developers.

If your killer app is going to auto-tweet then don't do this:

Flwrs_main

Do this instead (or something better, but at least let potential users know):

Flwrs_main_adjusted

Everyone will thank you and like you. Hopefully.

R! :-D

p.s. I've no idea if the app shown here is benign or malicious so as always, if you wish to go wandering and experimenting on the internet, it's at your own risk.