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.
Showing posts with label Pages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pages. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Corporations - the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing
For at least three months, Apple has included Numbers and Pages (spreadsheet and document programs) in its free list of Apps in the App store. However, if one scrolls over the name of the App, “$19.99” appears. Has Apple decided that “free” means under $20? Several people have made remarks about this in the review sections for these apps. Is anybody in Apple reading these reviews?
The New York Times had a review of “Quip”, a document writing program for the Mac, iPad, and iTunes. If I search for “Quip” in the App Store, I can’t find it. If I search from iTunes, I find it. The iTunes page that shows Quip has a header “App Store > Productivity > Quip”. Looking through “All Productivity Apps” in the App Store, I do not find Quip among the Qs.
If Apple or any other large corporation cannot be bothered with fixing these little but obvious glitches, can we be sure that they will fix big glitches that cost us (and even other large corporations) hours of frustration?
Quip is nowhere near a complete document program, but it is good for two or more people to collaborate on a document. As I type on my laptop I can see the text showing on my wife’s desktop.
As for Pages and Numbers, I think I’ll wait a year or two or three for when I upgrade my devices and these programs are included.
The New York Times had a review of “Quip”, a document writing program for the Mac, iPad, and iTunes. If I search for “Quip” in the App Store, I can’t find it. If I search from iTunes, I find it. The iTunes page that shows Quip has a header “App Store > Productivity > Quip”. Looking through “All Productivity Apps” in the App Store, I do not find Quip among the Qs.
If Apple or any other large corporation cannot be bothered with fixing these little but obvious glitches, can we be sure that they will fix big glitches that cost us (and even other large corporations) hours of frustration?
Quip is nowhere near a complete document program, but it is good for two or more people to collaborate on a document. As I type on my laptop I can see the text showing on my wife’s desktop.
As for Pages and Numbers, I think I’ll wait a year or two or three for when I upgrade my devices and these programs are included.
Monday, March 03, 2014
How many seconds in a minute?
According to Apple, there are ten seconds in a minute! Maybe even less.
Last week I downloaded and installed the latest Mavericks update on my Mac laptop. Near the end of the lengthy process, it displayed “10 seconds left” for some part or another. Twenty seconds later, the display was “10 seconds left” (or was it remaining?) And again at thirty seconds on up to sixty seconds. I don’t remember how soon after that time was displayed I started tracking the time, and I don’t remember how long after I had noted sixty seconds had passed before I stopped tracking.
But whatever, is this the lauded corporate “efficiency” that government supposedly lacks? Whatever else is going on in the operating system that is inefficient. I do know that Microsoft products have been getting slower to load. I can almost go downstairs to pour a second cup of coffee while waiting for a spreadsheet to open. This is even true of spreadsheets that don’t have a lot of data.
And of course, there are all the user complaints that seem to go on for years without resolution.
I do know from personal experience that not all problems are resolvable and that some take a long time to get enough data to solve. In the sixties at Univac I was part of the small team that maintained the FORTRAN compiler. We had a user report (number 498, I think) that we never solved. Our main problem was trying to figure out what had happened on a computer we had no direct access to and not enough information to ask the right questions. We never had another user report with the same problem.
On the other hand, I see complaints about the same problems year after year in the support communities for Apple and Microsoft.
What is the critical mass for these problems such that the big corporations will put enough resources into resolving these issues?
Here’s a radical idea! For every unsolved problem a company has, the CEO should have his or her pay docked ten dollars per day. Let’s be generous, and only count weekdays that are not holidays. Would these problems go away sooner?
What about docking the CEOs pay for every day that false advertising is present. Apple has made downloading Mavericks free to encourage people to move away from older operating systems. Supposedly Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are free. These are competitors to Microsoft’s Excel, Write, and Power Point. These three Apple products are listed in a Top Ten Free downloads in the App Store. However, if you place the cursor next to them, “$19.99” appears rather than “Free”.
Many users have complained about this for three months or more! Is this another case of Adam Smith’s warning about trusting those who live by profit and have deceived and oppressed the public?
Last week I downloaded and installed the latest Mavericks update on my Mac laptop. Near the end of the lengthy process, it displayed “10 seconds left” for some part or another. Twenty seconds later, the display was “10 seconds left” (or was it remaining?) And again at thirty seconds on up to sixty seconds. I don’t remember how soon after that time was displayed I started tracking the time, and I don’t remember how long after I had noted sixty seconds had passed before I stopped tracking.
But whatever, is this the lauded corporate “efficiency” that government supposedly lacks? Whatever else is going on in the operating system that is inefficient. I do know that Microsoft products have been getting slower to load. I can almost go downstairs to pour a second cup of coffee while waiting for a spreadsheet to open. This is even true of spreadsheets that don’t have a lot of data.
And of course, there are all the user complaints that seem to go on for years without resolution.
I do know from personal experience that not all problems are resolvable and that some take a long time to get enough data to solve. In the sixties at Univac I was part of the small team that maintained the FORTRAN compiler. We had a user report (number 498, I think) that we never solved. Our main problem was trying to figure out what had happened on a computer we had no direct access to and not enough information to ask the right questions. We never had another user report with the same problem.
On the other hand, I see complaints about the same problems year after year in the support communities for Apple and Microsoft.
What is the critical mass for these problems such that the big corporations will put enough resources into resolving these issues?
Here’s a radical idea! For every unsolved problem a company has, the CEO should have his or her pay docked ten dollars per day. Let’s be generous, and only count weekdays that are not holidays. Would these problems go away sooner?
What about docking the CEOs pay for every day that false advertising is present. Apple has made downloading Mavericks free to encourage people to move away from older operating systems. Supposedly Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are free. These are competitors to Microsoft’s Excel, Write, and Power Point. These three Apple products are listed in a Top Ten Free downloads in the App Store. However, if you place the cursor next to them, “$19.99” appears rather than “Free”.
Many users have complained about this for three months or more! Is this another case of Adam Smith’s warning about trusting those who live by profit and have deceived and oppressed the public?
Wednesday, December 04, 2013
Does the Apple of my eye have a black eye?
I've been using Macintoshes and other Apple products since September 1984. Maybe for the first 20 years I was eager to update to the latest releases. Especially when I was a Certified Apple Developer so that I could make sure my software ran on the new release.
Then I started getting "burned" by new releases. One time the migration from one computer to another crashed. Many times software that should have worked on the new release had new problems. Often it seemed like I was an unpaid debugger of software (not just Apple but Microsoft and other software publishers).
One of the latest was the introduction of iOS 6 followed by iOS 7. Many were the problems that I had with each, and Apple's "Community" web site was filled with similar complaints or others that often were never answered.
The latest was the new release of Pages, Apple's supposed challenger to Microsoft Word. As I would like to move away from Microsoft Word, I was interested in Pages. Especially so since the rumors are that Apple will be providing Microsoft "competitors" free, even for new versions, in the next year or so.
I looked up Pages in Apple's App store. Hoo boy! Many users were angry! Over half of those rating Pages gave it only one star. A representative comment is:
"But the fact remains that Apple removed so much functionality from what was once a decent, viable and affordable option for desk-top publishing for the Mac platform."
Oh, yes, on top of all those problems, Apple, which pioneered cut and paste, does not allow copy from its App Store! I had to retype the above comment.
This is another case of the "Corp giveth and the Corp taketh away".
Watch also for "Computer glitches? What's new?" that will appear in the Reader Weekly of Duluth later this week. It's about how computer problems are not limited to the software for the Affordable Care Act.
Then I started getting "burned" by new releases. One time the migration from one computer to another crashed. Many times software that should have worked on the new release had new problems. Often it seemed like I was an unpaid debugger of software (not just Apple but Microsoft and other software publishers).
One of the latest was the introduction of iOS 6 followed by iOS 7. Many were the problems that I had with each, and Apple's "Community" web site was filled with similar complaints or others that often were never answered.
The latest was the new release of Pages, Apple's supposed challenger to Microsoft Word. As I would like to move away from Microsoft Word, I was interested in Pages. Especially so since the rumors are that Apple will be providing Microsoft "competitors" free, even for new versions, in the next year or so.
I looked up Pages in Apple's App store. Hoo boy! Many users were angry! Over half of those rating Pages gave it only one star. A representative comment is:
"But the fact remains that Apple removed so much functionality from what was once a decent, viable and affordable option for desk-top publishing for the Mac platform."
Oh, yes, on top of all those problems, Apple, which pioneered cut and paste, does not allow copy from its App Store! I had to retype the above comment.
This is another case of the "Corp giveth and the Corp taketh away".
Watch also for "Computer glitches? What's new?" that will appear in the Reader Weekly of Duluth later this week. It's about how computer problems are not limited to the software for the Affordable Care Act.
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