Firefox 3: A Safari User’s Review, reviewed June 3, 2008

I’m sometimes ashamed to admit that I subscribe to the RSS feed for MacApper. Originally, they highlighted some neat new mac apps. Now they highlight whatever they’re advertising. I could be missing something, sure, but if a free alternative to a product exists you surely won’t find them mentioning that.

Onto the ignorance. I just picked up Firefox 3: A Safari User’s Review by Peter Craddock. He obviously notices the huge back button, and while I thought most mac users read Daring Fireball (and thus would have caught his review, which mentions the small toolbar buttons fix. Peter thinks this is just a ‘problem’ and that it cannot be fixed.

Next he notices the awesomebar, but he really doesn’t. It’s like he just started Firefox 3, let it import his Firefox 2 data, and then wrote a review based upon cursory glances. He calls it “the “recent use & favourites” drop-down menu”, but doesn’t even notice it’s built in search capabilities (it will search your recent history, so if you type ‘dar’ and you went to daring fireball recently, it’ll be ’suggested’, there’s a demo video at the BBC).

On the find bar, which he finds disconcerting, is that it doesn’t work exactly like Safari. I actually agree, I wouldn’t mind some functionality to do this, but then again, I wouldn’t want it to work exactly like Internet Explorer for Windows users. I looked deeper into this expecting that there simply HAD to be a bug asking for Safari 3 (I don’t think this was in Safari 2) type functionality, so I searched for ALL find bar bugs on mac and found nothing even close. So Peter: feel free to file a request for enhancement bug. I filled out some of the boxes for you. (If you have to sign up first, just come back and click my link, it SHOULD work. Let me know the bug number in the comments when you create it!)

I don’t have issues with much of the other stuff except the hatred for Larry UI. It’s for EV, is a major benefit for phishing protection, etc. I guess they could put the ‘welcome’ page on a https site for example purposes. But, go to paypal.com, and you’ll see the certificate issuer and verification that it’s really paypal. Good stuff.

(I ended up taking too long to get this posted, I was going to post it almost immediately after the post I’m reviewing, but had trouble finding the info on he Larry UI. I hate not citing, so I saved a draft then never came back to it. Sorry )

Dead project “Comictastic” still costs $15 June 3, 2008

When Rogue Amoeba kills off an app, they make it free. When Panic kills off an app (Audion), they also make it free. When Spiny software kills off an app, they still charge you the same amount but won’t give you any support. Comictastic, dead since 2006, still costs $15.

Assholes.

I hope PopeyesChicken isn’t real May 29, 2008

Tweet about “chicken” lately? Then you know PopeyesChicken exists, because within hours you’ll receive an @reply letting you know about popeyes certified bonafide chicken. As well as why you should have picked popeyes instead of whichever place you went to.

Hilarious. I’m hoping it’s a parody account, and if it is, I just made a parody of a parody account.

Someone’s turned the Apple Concierge into a free service May 26, 2008

Thanks for existing, Scheduly! I do wonder how you’ll deal with people where sessions end up running long, though.

Web 2.0 invite mayhem May 24, 2008

I have been watching the FriendFeed Invites Room (which is a great service). Apparently there’s a few sites already that do invites. I found one that does Brightkite Invites, there’s another that does Jaiku Invites, and a friend was telling me some site secretly runs their own invites site (I thought it was Jaiku but the bottom text says I’m wrong).

There’s also a site I found on lifehacker that does invites, Invite Share. Via googling, it turns out there’s Mashable Invites, which handles a LOT more sites.

This is kinda scary. There’s all these sites, and most of them have no real end to end verification. I know on inviteshare (I shared a brightkite invite there) that you see a list of e-mails, you can’t copy paste them (which sucks, I had to type it out) and then you say “I sent one to that user”. They have to remember they signed up at inviteshare, and say “I received it!”. This is REALLY crappy. Mashable does the same thing, a list of e-mails and no idea if that request was made recently or a year ago. As I don’t think many users feel terribly obligated to go back and say “I got it”, they may leave their e-mail up on as many of these sites as possible, forever. That’s awful! Especially if you want to get points for giving out invites.

So: I’ve got something in the works that should smash all these sites with awesomeness. Don’t just take a penny.

Jones Soda Energy sucks May 24, 2008

The one that’s a red bottle with black flames labeled “Extra Strength Energy Drink”, UPC 620221209039, it sucks. And it uses HFCS. Not cane sugar, in an ENERGY drink?

Was 75 cents at Big Lots. Glad I bought just one.

Gawker sucks May 14, 2008

A while ago I was banned from commenting forever on all Gawker blogs because I complained about the seemingly large percentage of gay male oriented posts on the fleshbot RSS feed. I still see comments in their blogs about how someone is tired that they are reporting on twitter or some other thing that they don’t “care” about, and yet they’re not banned for commenting on that. It’s the exact same complaint, except the first one deals with sexuality so it’s somehow homophobic/evil. I now declare Twitter homosexual and thus if you say Twitter is worthless and you don’t care, you should be banned from all Gawker blogs forever.

Have fun.

FuelFrog, LOL. May 13, 2008

FuelFrog is a website to track your fuel usage and mileage. Mainly mileage. A major problem:

You need to know how many miles since your previous fillup. Yes, you need to reset your trip odometer or make a note or something and then do the math, because you update it primarily via twitter or through the website with three fields:
Miles (since last fillup), Price (per gallon), Gallons (purchased).

This fails hardcore. Use math (it’s a fancy part of new math called subtraction) and accept odometer readings. This comes to my second point:
Your first fillup needs to know your the difference between it and your previous fillup, and you CAN’T use 0 for the miles since last fillup. So you can’t start out with something, you have to fill up, count, then start out. This sucks on the price range, but if their goal is to track “mileage” and not also your prices, this wouldn’t matter. You could just enter your “miles since last fillup” each time you fill up, and they could make a chart, and it would be really useless. But currently you do have a records page and so you can track your gas expenditures. But that doesn’t require knowing how far you’ve gone since the last time you’ve filled up…

So basically, FuelFrog is two different services that go together, but don’t HAVE to, and yet force you to. I would like to know that I bought gas today at 3.509 a gallon. But in order to do that, I have to give it a number for how many miles I’ve driven since the last fillup, and I can’t leave that empty. This means I’ll either:
1) Lose the first entry (and just add later fillups and do the math)
2) Lie, messing up my efficiency data.

What they should do is simple: Allow you to input your odometer, so that they can IGNORE it for the first fillup and use it to compare differences on future fillups. Right? Right.

FuelFrog sucks.

This is silly: they have a DHTML calendar for your date input. If you bought gas, it was probably today. If it was yesterday, I can edit the date by one, or at most edit the month. You don’t need a calendar popup. You’re not that important. (And still, when you post an entry it actually adds it to the system as occuring at midnight EST, because it says I bought fuel 22 hours ago, and it even did so when I updated via Twitter which would be a pretty good indicator that I just bought fuel and tweeted it.)

(via Download Squad)

Edit: My MileMarker was recommended by a lifehacker comment and it’s much better, except the order is MGP instead of MPG and you have to use a direct message (i.e. D mymm Odometer Gallons Price) instead of the public @reply system (@FuelFrog Tripometer Price Gallons). Other than that, I like it.

Google Video: Breaking features for fun and profit? May 6, 2008

In July 2006, Google announced a method to link to specific points within a video. In August, they added the ability to embed with a specific start point.

In 2008, they redesigned the site and broke this functionality, and Google doesn’t care.

Hope you don’t rely on any features Google adds, because they’ll remove it unannounced at any time.

Dear Google: ban forums that require logins for replies May 5, 2008

FUCK YOU, forum that requires someone to login/register to see replies. If it was some sort of pay-gateway, it’d be more acceptable, but when it’s free and you’re trying to get one-off users to register just to inflate your numbers, you are a cunt.

The real problem is that sites like this (and experts exchange) get indexed in google, wherein google is allowed to see the full page but regular users aren’t. Stop this, punish them by not indexing them until they remove that restriction. How great would that be? “For your individual forum posts to be indexed, you have to remove the restriction on viewing replies.”

That’s a rule I can live with.