New, beautiful, design?

Companies keep changing their web sites in the interest of “improvements”, but they more often make them more complicated and user-unfriendly.

I’ve been using Yahoo! Finance for years to get daily quotes for a small list of stocks.  I made the request from a very obvious text block on the home page.  Then either Firefox or Yahoo! Finance stopped allowing drag and drop, a very long-standing feature of the Macintosh.  Then Yahoo! Finance moved the quote text block somewhere else.  All in the name of improved interface for the users.

Boy!  I never did make it through all the user complaints about the changes.  I gave up on Yahoo! Finance and used TD Ameritrade instead.

Even with Ameritrade and its constantly changing home page it took me awhile to figure out how to consistently get the quotes I wanted.

But Ameritrade’s news page is a humble-jumble of hidden information

Where are the numbers in

Net Investment Income
Net Realized ST Cap Gains
Net Realized LT Cap Gains
Return of Capital or Other Capital Source

They are off the screen and can only be gotten by copying the area and pasting into a text document.  Even then, the lines are all a humble-jumble.

Google’s Blogger has also been “re-designed” by making text alignment non-workable.  I think I’ve sent feedback twice on this, but I guess Google is too busy on more “beautiful improvements”.

Even that great promoter of user-friendliness gives great features and takes away great features.  Once upon a time Apple worked very hard on ease of use.  Now they seem more concerned with “beautiful” document and spreadsheets.  I’m sorry I don’t want charts with bubble points; I want a chart with connected dots.

The new look of this blog

Am I getting old or are techies writing less clearly?

I've noticed how the ads on this blog were placed on top of some other header stuff. It looked ugly, but I didn't want to take the time to correct it. Finally I did and took up Google Blogger's offer of a new interface. The new interface certainly looks better and is easier to manipulate.

I also think the layout is better and cleaner.

But getting there was a chore. Windows have cursors that change to hands, but the hands don't move anything. You have to go to another window to that action. I'm not sure how users can subscribe to my blog, but I put in a "gadget" that supposedly allows that.

Oh, for the days of the printed manuals with good indexes! I remember when the Macintosh first came out and I wanted to type certain Swedish, French, or German characters, I just looked up certain terms in index, found the page, and there were the key combinations for those letters. Now, I bet few of you who even speak these languages have figured out how to type these characters.

Well, I do know the ads are better placed. I just wish I would get more revenue from them and I could figure out how to center them. If you see me, please let me know what you think.