New and improved??

I have been using computers for over 60 years, starting with a cards in/cards out IBM 650 to Univac mainframes to the earliest personal computer to “The Computer for the Rest of Us” (The Macintosh).  Look up the ad “Why 1984 will not be 1984”.

Unfortunately, 1984 arrived with Apple’s OS X.  Everything has changed from gradual changes to complete changes that make previous data unusable, requiring days and weeks to update.  Many of these changes are difficult to decipher or many hours to undo (like an update that moved giga-bytes of data to the cloud.

Now Yahoo! had done that with it Finance pages.

For years, I have kept a spreadsheet of weekly data for several stocks or mutual funds.  I had Yahoo! set up to give me closing prices every Friday.

I missed a week and when I tried to have Yahoo! give me my data, nothing happened.  i went to bed frustrated not knowing what had changed.

On Saturday, I figured out that I had to completely rebuild my list.  When I requested the list, I found out that it had the high and low prices but not the closing prices which is what I really wanted.

I went to Yahoo! help section and found out that I was not alone.  Many commenters were very upset about the changes.

Well, back to figuring out how to get the data I want.

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/382977-finance/suggestions/38499625-think-your-changes-out-before-springing-them-on-us

More computer woes

After I installed Norton Anti-Virus, I decided to upgrade to put it on some other devices.  I have yet to successfully do so.  I sent the following letter to Symantec:

I thought adding new devices to my Norton Anti-Virus subscription would be a piece of cake.  It has been a nightmare of changing circumstances.  Somewhere along the line, even the email address on my subscription was changed to I know not what.

I really prefer using email to ask questions, but your only choices are Chat Room or telephone call.  Both of these put the customer and employee under pressure to keep doing something.  Haste makes waste.

I have been going around and around trying to follow the directions for installing Norton on additional devices.  It has devolved into just giving me the choice to buy it from the App Store.

Please email me detailed instructions on how to get my email account recognized again and to install Norton Anti-Virus on an iPad mini, and iPad, and an iPhone.

- End of letter

I tried again today at a coffee shop to put Norton Antivirus on my wife’s iPad Mini.  Everything worked fine until I was taken to the App Store.  I forget the details, but the App Store hung up after I put in my wife’s credit card info.  Why a credit card was needed for a free download, I don’t know  I finally turned her iPad off.

Later I tried to make a donation to a local charity.  I made a mistake typing in the credit card number, and it turned to box to a rose background.  It was really hard to see what corrections I was making.  I eventually got all the correct information in and pressed the “Donate” button.  Nothing happened.   The only way I got out of that as to close the window.  This is the first time that such a glitch has occurred on the site.

After reading many of the comments to https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/many-apples-design-innovations-make-products-worse-195651509.html, I don’t feel so badly.  But Apple doesn’t see to be listening to “The Rest of Us”.

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.

How many seconds in a minute and other corporate misdeeds

According to Apple, there are five seconds in a minute!

I just did a software update on my MacBook Air, and near the end, the screen said there were five seconds left.  i watched and watched, but the number didn’t change.  I did Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two and so on.  I stopped at about Mississippi-thirty.  A bit later, the counter disappeared.  And a bit later, the system rebooted.

Yahoo! Finance redid their web page several weeks ago and took away drag and drop.  I have a list of symbols in a TextEdit file that I would drag and drop in the symbol look-up list.  I have been using this successfully and satisfactorily for years.  Then poof!  It didn’t work!  I now had to copy and paste.  Gosh!  Drag and drop has been an Macintosh feature for over twenty years.  Now Yahoo! decides its users don’t need drag and drop.

This week Yahoo! Finance flummoxed its users again by providing some very circuitous means of providing a list of quotes.  Instead of a spreadsheet-like page, they have buried a text list on the side of the page.  By some magical clicking, one can get the spreadsheet listing, but I haven’t memorized it yet.

Many users left comments complaining about this, but I doubt if there will be any change.  Some threatened to go to Google Finance.  I tried Google Finance and didn’t find it any easier to use.

My suspicion is that corporations put together focus groups and browbeat them into accepting what management wants to do.  Then management browbeats long-time customers into accepting the changes by saying the changes were what focus groups wanted.

Of course, there are many fine corporations that bend over backward for customer satisfaction.  Toyota has had some bad recalls, but many of their dealers bend over backward to provide customer satisfaction.  My examples are Kari Toyota of Superior WI and Maplewood Toyota of Maplewood MN.

For the likes of the corporations that screw up the customer experience, I can only say that the U.S. Postal Service has historically provided far superior service, when Congress lets it.  And believe it or not, the IRS too.  I have had the IRS send me corrections on my returns, both for underpayment and overpayment.

Awful Motors has introduced “new, improved” wheel design

Awful Motors has introduced square wheels, a cool new feature on all of its models.  Awful Motors stated in its introduction that round wheels were boring, they just went around and around.

This just in, after thousands of complaints of Awful Motors’ square wheels, the company has announced that by popular demand it will replace the square wheels with octagonal wheels, providing a significantly smoother ride.

Far-fetched?  This is not far from the abrupt changes that so many software designers put into their products.  A feature was working fine for millions of users, and then some designer has a “better idea”.

Some bothersome changes I’ve found recently are Yahoo! Finance’ rework of its pages and the Star Tribune’s changing relatively simple software to move between the print edition and an expanded article to cluttered software that never seems to work as one would wish.  I have no idea how other readers perceive the changes to the Star Tribune, but Yahoo had a page for comments.  These comments were almost all negative.

Google once had a simple way of moving from blog authoring to statistics without signing in again.  Now one has to log in over and over again and there are several clutter pages between authoring, feed analysis, and income review.

Apple, once the computer for the rest of us, has morphed into guess how this cool new feature works.  In the first few years of the Macintosh I was eager for a new version when real advances were made - hard drives, color, drag and drop, and on and on.  Now, I update to a major new release only when I buy a new device.

Often I think these changes are not for the benefit of the uses but the employment prospects of the designers.

“Seamless" came apart at the seams

At about three last night, I was woken by constant thunder and lightning.  It was continuous, more continuous than I have ever heard in my life.  Then strong winds and heavy rain were added.

Fortunately, we only had one set of windows open and I was able to close them before much rain came in.

Then the lighted clock went dark.

I tried to sleep, but the light of every lightning bolt went right through my eyelids.  I laid on my stomach and hid my face in the pillow.

I don’t know how long it took the storm to pass, but it did.

At about seven, I woke up and checked Duluth news on my iPhone.  It was quite a wide ranging storm causing outages and deaths.  Trees were toppled blocking roads and damaging houses.  No travel was advised.

All day our cell phone service has been erratic.  Sometimes our phones work, sometimes we can’t even get a signal.

I can see a cell phone pole from our house, but I can’t remember if it had visible equipment at the top or not.

My wife couldn’t even call on her phone.  The call could not be completed.

The strength of signal was one bar most of the day; my phone is now up to four.  But instead of 4G or LTE service, it only shows E, whatever that means.

I was able to get websites, now loading some of them gets stuck.  I wonder how much local data there is.  Just now I could not load Yahoo! Finance, but I could get most of the New York Times.  But going to a different article is going very slow, but maybe that is because convention news is so popular.  On the other hand, the online banking page of my bank is not making any progress loading on my iPhone.  Meanwhile, I started and finished reading a convention article.

So much for the seamless, at-our-fingertips operation of our gadgets we rely so much on.  We are retired and it is only a nuisance.  But there are many people who depend on these gadgets to do their work.

Now, how long will this take to post?  Essentially, quite a while.  As soon as I typed the first sentence, I tried loading blogger.com.  Firefox could not find the page!

Finally!  At 4:30 pm the web seems back to normal.  I have five dots and LTE on my cellphone and Yahoo! Finance came right up!

Can our electricity be far behind?