Category: Rants


Keep The User In The App

Filed Under: Rants, Technology by breandan — Comments Off
12/17/2011

I’ve noticed an irritating trend in its apps – the apparent desire of app developers to keep the user in the app for as long as possible. Facebook, Twitter and Flipboard are the worst offenders I’ve seen recently. Every attempt to visit a linked URL opens a WebKit view, but everything stays within the app. UI controls are what the app wants, and you are unable to save bookmarks or otherwise surf the web in the normal way. The user can then choose to open the page in safari – sometimes. Even that can be tricky, as Facebook for a long time was adding an IFRAME to each page, making you click through once you got to Mobile Safari. All so you could add the article to your reading list, Instapaper account, or email it to a friend and not use Facebook’s internal messaging functionality. All of this is maddening.

It reminds me of the horrible ‘news’ sites that break a 600 word article into three pages to maximize the ad views, sites that take an image gallery and make it into a slideshow, or the randomly highlight words and phrases in their content and have all of those links go to other parts of their sites. All of them tend to bury the link to the source material as deep as possible, and those are the times they even bother to link. It’s the Scumbag Steve of SEO, and it is all done with the intention of keeping the user on the site for as long as humanly possible.

Sadly, it seems to be a sustainable business model for some. Facebook is just as popular as ever.

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Organizational Misbehavior

Filed Under: Rants by breandan — Comments Off
6/26/2011

Managers, please, when you consider doing a reorganization, keep this in mind:

We trained hard – but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency, confusion and demoralization. –Gaius Petronius, Arbiter, 1st Century AD

It’s as fitting now as it was two thousand years ago, which itself is an interesting observation on organizational behavior, but it has a more practical (and personal) impact: my unit was reorganized recently. Luckily, we seem to have survived the shift, mostly because our new boss is quite reasonable and wants us to succeed in our current projects, as well as bring us up to speed on the longer term goals of the new unit.

However, we’re only recently back up to full speed at work – we lost months of man-hours to the re-org. Being short staffed to begin with, this has set a lot of projects behind that we are scrambling to catch up on. I hope we can keep going the way we are, and not get re-org’ed again this Fall.

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Whiny Musicians

Filed Under: Rants by breandan — Comments Off
3/16/2011

Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.

–Jon Bon Jovi, in an interview with The Sunday Times

I’m sorry, Jon. You are an idiot. I like knowing when an album is a bunch of crappy tracks crammed in around the one or two hits that will get overplayed on the radio. I like to know this before I spend my hard earned money on the music. If you want people to buy albums, make music good enough that people want all the tracks. Then, they will buy the albums.

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The Most Important Device Ever

Filed Under: Rants, Technology by breandan — Comments Off
1/18/2011

It’s getting to be that the phone you carry with you is the most important thing you have. It has the names, phone numbers and now addresses of most of the people and places you frequent; it often has your personal email accounts and social network logins stored on it; it may have apps installed to let you bank from anywhere, any time or have apps installed that know where you and your friends are in real time.

Considering how much information is on the phone, it’s remarkable how relaxed people are about them. They hand them over to friends all the time to let them “play” with them. I’ve see people ask strangers to take pictures of them and their friends. They almost never have any kind of passcode set to access the device, they almost never use the encryption settings on the phone, and they almost always set every application to save their passwords. Once someone gains physical access to the phone, its short work to totally compromise their identity. It doesn’t matter if you use an iPhone or an Android-based device, the same applies equally.

The theft of a smartphone is a one-stop-shop for wholesale identity theft, and most people don’t seem to understand or care.

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Damnit, Facebook

Filed Under: Rants by breandan — Comments Off
1/17/2011

Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Oh, gee, let’s let Facebook application developers and advertisers access our user’s personal contact information, like their home address and phone number. Nothing could ever go wrong!

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

Remember, don’t put anything on the internet, anywhere, that you don’t want people to know. There’s a reason that most of the profile fields of my Facebook account look like this:

Sophos article here.

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