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.

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.