Back in the days where I had a PC conquering most of my tiny desk (uhm, that is like, 2 days ago), I had to switch between the desk and my bed all the time while using my Macbook.
Mom wants to play some silly exploding balls game in PC – Sugar must transfer to the bed. Sis wants to check out the latest news from the greek blogsphere – whoosh, there goes Sugar to the bed, grabbing pillows, amassing cables and being as grumpy as always.
I had two main itches with that: first, I have to gather all my cables and go, second, the Macbook is too hot for my thighs and didn’t facilitate prolonged use. The first I solved by buying a Logitech cordless mouse and eliminating a cord, leaving only the power cord. The other, I solved by buying myself a (pricey) iLap.
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Let’s face it – software can be a really annoying thing sometimes.
Things like extraneous dialog boxes, “tips of the day”, ambiguous error messages and clippers ticking on your screen happen daily. But sometimes, sometimes, you get a stupid behaviour from a hugely popular application and you want to smash your head on the screen till it bleeds to death – two times.
While at work, I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 for managing company e-mail. I have to say, in terms of memory hogs, this thing is a winner! I cannot possibly imagine why it hangs every time with a very moderately-sized inbox, 2Gb of RAM and a 3Ghz processor, but it does.
After waiting the full 30-40 seconds for it to load, I decide to create a filter for the e-mails received by the new guy that was recently hired. Oh, and another friend that popped in my mind, a common filter for the two, named “New guys”. I enter their e-mail addresses in the appropriate field…
I create a filter for two custom e-mail addresses
Ok, all fine and dandy so far. Till this:
Outlook asks me to go back and replace the delimiters myself. Hmm…
Uhm, excuse me? Why should I, the almighty (and fairly bored) user, HAVE to go back and replace my commas with semicolons? Why? Because the programmers were too lazy to implement some kind of string replace function to do the dirty work?
Ok, help me, am I missing something with this? Is this done on purpose? I may be exaggerating, but this is one of the stupidest things software ever made me do.
You know it’s that time of the year.
The time when I’m getting the November blues, or I’m getting too stressed, or I’m on PMS or whatever. The “Why Greek sites suck” saga is here.
Since I was recently on the market for a used car, I turned to the one medium that feels easier to me, which is of course the mighty interwebs. The Boyfriend suggested that I should check out the Autotriti.gr site, that is a site of greek driving magazine, that supposedly features a full-scale gallery of used cars, along with a convenient search form.
And so I did – mind you, I only wanted to check prices according to the criteria I had set.
First of all, in my teeny tiny (well, not THAT much) 13” Macbook screen, truth is, you really cannot see much in their frontpage, apart maybe huge ugly ads and pointless ugly imagery.
Wow. Just… wow.
Hovering the menu items hides its text in Safari – classy.
The almighty menu hover – never to work under Safari.
So I decide to conduct an advanced research, woe is me. But wait – my page has gone all the way to the right (from all the way to the left, plus, half of my page is conquered by an ugly ad which I cannot turn off, with sound which is default on to top it off.
Why is my page all crammed to the right?!
As you can see, to see the content I have to scroll horizontally. What were these people thinking, really (apart from the advertising money).
Ok then, to the search. You think this form looks too simple? Wait till you see that:
My search results, 3464 clicks and 45433 pages later.
You know how I did that? By selecting an option one page at a time. That means, in the first page, I select the brand, phoosh, refresh, I have to select a model, phoosh, refresh, I have to select the cc, et cetera. Really, you have to try it to believe it. And of course, restarting the search procedure does not work.
On a geekier note, each and every one of the search terms is passed in the query string as a GET variable. That means over 20 vars up there, after a while. *sigh*
I don’t know how these sites have users. I cannot possibly understand how. Am I too strict? Maybe. Will I ever be close to the naive user webmaster? Never.
