Lacisoft's » annoying

My two cents on the new Google layouts

lacisoft — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:48:00 +0000

Lately Google started to change the layout of all its products to the so called Google+ layout. Actually its not a layout specially made for Google+ but rather it was the first product to use this new theme.

Well, i don’t like this new layout but it really didn’t bothered me too much either. This is until yesterday when Google Reader switched to this layout. And Google Reader looks awful with this theme. And not only it is uglier but its less usable.

For example its rather hard to distinguish between individual posts in the feeds, the options on the bottom of each post are also less visible (harder to find). There is too much white space everywhere, it is like the thing has no design at all.

I think if you put a few first grade school kids they do a better design. And the worst part is that they are feeding it to me and i have nothing to do but accept or change the product, which will i do shortly.

Actually i’m planning to switch from most of Google’s products to something else. Not because of the layout but also for other reasons. Soon i will write a post about the alternatives to all Google products and to many people’s surprise, there are quite a few good alternatives!

Two words about the new Google interface: Its awful

lacisoft — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:12:53 +0000

Google rolled out its new search interface and i already started to hate it. I don’t know what was in their mind. Did they try to copy Bing ? Because Bing is awful too. That’s why i don’t use it.

Apart from the odd colors they’ve put the URL’s in the search results at the top. This makes reading the results more difficult as you must stop, skip the URL and read the snippet. Hey Google, not everything is about URL’s!

I decide if i visit the site based on the excerpt and not the URL, it was perfect at the bottom of every result!

Someone should really start thinking about a new search engine, as we are at the mercy of this thing that Google became.

To my chain letter loving “friends”

lacisoft — Mon, 16 May 2011 22:17:26 +0000

Chain letters are not new, they exist for a long time, even before computers were invented. They had a specific target audience and didn’t really bothered that many people.

But now when every monkey has a computer and has access to Facebook or an IM application they’re starting to become annoying.

Just few minutes ago i read on my Facebook wall one of the newest aberrations of the chain letter lovers:

“July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This happens once every 823 years. This is called money bags. So, send this to your friends and money will arrive within 4 days…based on Chinese Feng Shui.”

And most people without even thinking about it or verifying the facts presented in the message send it forward and spam their friends.

So if we take the chain letter above:

1) Almost every 5 years July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. The last time it was in 2005 and the next time will be in 2016. Not in 823 years! In fact every month with 31 days if the first day of the month is Friday then it will have 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. And this happens quite often.

2) This is definitely not Feng Shui! The ancient Feng Shui masters never used chain letters to bring luck.

These are the facts. Everyone who cannot figure out this on his own, (at first sight) should investigate before sending it to their friends. Not doing this he wastes time, electricity, money and he loses my respect (if he had any). So next time when you send something like this think about it twice before sending it.

Because God will kill a kitten if you send it and i will remove you from my IM application, Facebook or whatever means of communication you used, because i don’t keep in touch with vegetables.

P.S.

This also applies to other chain letters like Yahoo closing or in fact to any message that threatens with bad luck or apocalypse if you don’t send it to other people.

Facebook and Farmville. Give me a break

lacisoft — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:05:10 +0000

I would like to see all those people who send me Farmville gift requests working one week at a farm! I bet they wouldn’t like farming so interesting anymore. When you have to work all day long on the crop fields or have to clean the crap of the farm animals (btw farmville fans … that smells if you didn’t knew) i bet you will forget Farmville in an instance.

Ok, i understand that we all need to disconnect from work but when you play don’t bother with that all your friends. And Farmville takes friend harassment to the next level. Yeah i play occasionally some StarCraft or some other little strategy game but did i ever sent you messages asking for God knows what ?

And now there are other “little animal” petting games on Facebook. They seem to grow like mushrooms after a good rain. If things evolve this way i guess i will have to quit Facebook and delete my account.

Your content or Facebook’s content ?

Gmail is down! How to check if it is really down or its just your connection

lacisoft — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:43:32 +0000

As i’m writing this post Gmail is down. This is very annoying as both regular Gmail and the Google Apps version seems to be affected. I can’t check my email at all.

At first i thought it is only my internet connection playing some weird games. But its not. Gmail is really down. Twitter is full of gmail spam as a result of this breakdown. If you want to check if Gmail and other Google services have a service outage or its just a problem with your internet connection then head over to the Google Apps Status Dashboard and you will find out.

Yahoo just lost a friend

lacisoft — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:28:03 +0000

Yahoo Messenger is the IM software i use most often, not that i really like it but here everyone is using it. So if i want to talk to someone i have to use it.

Two days ago it asked me if i want it to automatically update itself. I said why not, lets make sure is up to date and i won’t have surprises with some potential security hole or bug in the older version.

But here is what happened. Instead of updating only my Yahoo Messenger application the updater without asking me anything installed Yahoo Toolbar both for Firefox and Internet Explorer. I don’t hate too many things but toolbars are among those things. And i was shocked that Yahoo does such lame things. Install their annoying toolbar under false pretext of updating my messenger app.

I can say this. The toolbars didn’t stayed enough on my computer to take their breath after the install. And Yahoo lost a friend.

If i ever had any sympathy for Yahoo and their business then with this move they wiped it out.

Bye bye Adobe Reader! I need no bloatware!

lacisoft — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:02:48 +0000

I’ve just uninstalled Adobe Reader and hopefully i won’t have to install it again. I was very annoyed with this piece of bloatware. I’ve made a full reinstall of my computer and i needed a PDF viewer to read some e-books. Right away i went to Adobe’s site and tried to download Adobe Reader.

But downloading it wasnt so easy as i remembered. First they insisted i get a Firefox plugin, then when i installed the plugin i had to restart Firefox, save every tab and then the install process started. The worst thing is that it lasted almost half an hour to install Adobe Reader. The Nosso software wich takes over the installation is very slow!. And no, its not my computer, it has a very powerful CPU, 4GB of RAM and a performant hard drive, also my internet connection is broadband 20 mbps so you can’t blame any of these. It is Adobe and Nosso’s technology to blame for a half hour install process for such a simple thing as a PDF viewer.

Needless to say that even on this powerful machine the program performs poorly. It is slow and bloated. So i looked for alternative solutions.

A colleague recommended Foxit Reader. I downloaded it (it is 3.5 MB in size) and installed it in under 30 seconds. It performs very well, its fast, very fast and even has Firefox plugin to view PDF’s in the browser. So i uninstalled Adobe Reader and i will certainly won’t install it again.

I hope more and more people will do this, until Adobe realizes that usability and user friendly software are not only terms in the dictionary.

Google Chrome’s popup blocker sucks!

lacisoft — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:09:22 +0000

I’m having difficulties working on Chrome lately. I’m using a webpage that constatly spawns popups for reminders and my problem is that Chrome blocks these popups. And it shows the notice that a popup has been blocked only for a few seconds. If you are not quick enough you have no way to see the popup.

The annoying thing is that there is no way to enable popups for a certain site. At least not from Google Chrome interface. I found a startup parameter “-disable-popup-blocking” that should do that but i want to enable popup blocking only for certain sites. Not all of them! Maybe Google should have waited with the launch of Chrome until some basic features like popup blocking are finished.

Here is the rest of the startup parameters (maybe they help someone):

-disable-hang-monitor
-disable-metrics
-disable-metrics-reporting
-assert-test
-renderer-assert-test
-crash-test
-renderer-crash-test
-renderer-startup-dialog
-plugin-startup-dialog
-testshell-startup-dialog
-plugin-launcher
-channeltesting-channel
-homepagestart-renderers-manuallyrendere…
-renderer-pathplugin
-single-process
-process-per-tab
-process-per-site
-in-process-plugins
-no-sandbox
-safe-plugins
-trusted-plugins
-test-sandbox
-user-data-dir
-appupload-file
-dom-automation
-plugin-pathjs-flags
-geoidlangdebug-children
-wait-for-debugger-children
-log-filter-prefix
-enable-logging
-dump-histograms-on-exit
-disable-logging
-remote-shell-port
-uninstallomnibox-popup-count
-automation-channel
-restore-last-session
-record-mode
-playback-mode
-no-events
-hide-icons
-show-icons
-make-default-browser
-proxy-server
-dns-log-details
-dns-prefetch-disable
-debug-print
-allow-all-activex
-disable-dev-tools
-always-enable-dev-tools
-memory-model
-tab-count-to-load-on-session-restore…
-memory-profile
-enable-file-cookies
-start-maximized
-enable-watchdogfirst-run
-message-loop-strategy
-message-loop-histogrammer
-importsilent-dump-on-dcheck
-disable-prompt-on-repost
-disable-popup-blocking
-disable-javascript
-disable-java
-disable-plugins
-disable-images
-use-lf-heap
-new-http

How to make a brand hated, with newsletters

lacisoft — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:09:34 +0000

The newsletter is a good marketing and promotional tool. If used correctly. If not it can lead to adverse effects, like a deep disgust to your brand from the users part. Thats the result of tricking users to subscribe to your newsletter, if you abuse sending newsletters (send many) and provide no means for the user to unsubscribe. In this case you are close to spam.

Now let’s see how can you reach to the point were users hate you and mark your newsletter as spam as soon as they see your brand in the title.

1) You trick users to subscribe

Often users are tricked in some way to subscribe to newsletters. For example many websites put checkboxes in registration forms that are on by default. These texts usually are with very small fonts so you can easily miss them if you are in a hurry to register to use their product or something. Let’s be very clear:
A) i do not consider that i subscribed willingly when you use this method. A newsletter subscription checkbox should be defaultly unchecked and if i really want to subscribe i will check it.
B) i cannot know at registration if your product is worth subscribing to your newsletter, give me time after i registered to begin using it and provide me an option in my account to subscribe. I will do it if i like your product or service.

2) Abuse with the number of newsletters you send

A newsletter, especially about products and services, related to a brand should be sent only at distant intervals, not daily and especially not like 2-3 newsletters a day. That is very annoying. Why can’t you at least put the 3 newsletters into 1 and send that.

3) Provide no means to unsubscribe

Your newsletter lacks a link for unsubscribing. Maybe you are tricky again and you could say that you have somewhere in the account a checkbox and i should unsubscribe using that. That’s not good again. You are tricking me again. You MUST put a link directly into the newsletter. Maybe i forgot my user, my password and i certainly shouldn’t be forced to make an effort to unsubscribe.

Ok now that you have these 3 elements in place, i hate you and i will certainly mark every newsletter as spam.

What prompted this post ? Once upon a time i registered to a thing called Mapsolute Developer Network, i don’t remember subscribing to any newsletter at all when i registered. Things were ok. I was happy with that. But later they were bought or something because they became part of the NAVTEQ Network for Developers. Immediately my inbox started to be flooded with newsletters from these NAVTEQ people, altough i have no bussines with them. What is worse they even sent out 3 newsletters a day. Newsletters 3-4 page long, with no option to unsubscribe. Later i started to receive newsletters from research@evansdata.com claiming to be from NAVTEQ. Supposedly they sold or give away my data to a research firm ? Even worse then i tought. And guess what am i doing now when i receive a newsletter from them ?

Lesson: If you want to send out newsletters take an example from the Google Friends Newsletter of from Sony Ericsson. They know how to send newsletters that are interesting, not too many and they provide means to unsubscribe.

Later edit: on the latest of the newsletters from NAVTEQ there is an option to unsubscribe, but that is a new thing and after a while i stopped reading them.

Default browser in Windows. What is it for?

lacisoft — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:06:17 +0000

I don’t know why Microsoft invented the concept called default browser if they aren’t using it anyway. Let’s make this clear. My default browser is Firefox. Almost any application knows this and it is used by default to open html files and web addresses.

But not Microsoft applications. For example the bloatware called Live Messenger doesn’t respect this. When i click to open a web address or my hotmail inbox, Live Messenger opens it in Internet Explorer disregarding my default browser preferences.

So i ask again, Microsoft, what is it for this default browser thing ?