Sunday April 20, 2008
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| New Dilbert.com = Web 2.0 FAIL! | Entertainment |
Dilbert.com was relaunched last week and it's terrible. The pointy-haired boss has won. They tried for Web 2.0 but ended up with Web 2.Oh No!
Now that I've gotten the one-liners out of the way, here are the specifics. With a plethora of new features that might have sounded good on paper, the new site looks like a MySpace page with hemorrhoids. It's loud, obnoxious, filled with Flash 9, and causes an itching sensation. Tim Bray said it best:
Tim's not the only one who doesn't like the new site. Venky also doesn't like the new site, but the most negative comments come from Dilbert's own readers:
Go back to the old format until the new one is debugged.
This is !$%*!$% Dilbert stuff: replace a simple format that works for nearly everyone with a complex format that excludes many users.
Try remembering the KISS principle: KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID!
old design==GOOD
While there is a good deal of irony about Dilbert itself being released on a site that's in beta and seems to suffer from poor QA, this just doesn't work.
Someone needs to make a decision to change this back ASAP. You just need to get all of the department heads together and set up Tiger teams, oh drat.
For a brief instant I can see both rows of today's strip then it goes to the first row. I am too dim to figure out why I can get a glimpse but yet not be able to read the whole thing.
As an aside I have been working with computers long before they were personal and I fancy myself to be rather quick. Now you've blown that little illusion.
What so I have left without a punch line and with no illusions?
Also the animations tend to vacuum. I like the voices in my head much better.
Today's Sunday strip was particularly bad as the Flash application didn't even display the entire strip all at once. I needed to page through the Sunday strip to see it all. Whatever humor there was in the strip was lost as I had to deal with the navigation. I'm lucky that the Flash even worked for me since many of the comments show that Flash 9 doesn't work on many platforms, including Solaris and some PDAs.
Perhaps Scott Adams needs to buy his own copy of How To Make Webcomics from the guys at halfpixel.com [1 2 3 4] who really know how to make a web site for comics.
Update [04/25/2008]: Scott Adams has revealed the "secret" back door page with just the comic.
Tags: comics dilbert fail halfpixel web2.0 webcomics
April 20, 2008 12:38 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [5] |
| Skate: Fail! | Hockey |
Long, long, ago, I used to play roller hockey with Joe, Rama and Will. We played in the parking lots between Sun's Mountain View buildings (now all Google buildings). Eventually I moved to ice hockey and hadn't touched the roller gear in years. This week my wife's cousin needed a sub on his roller hockey team. Not wanting to break my ankle trying to do an ice stop, I laced up the old pair and headed down the street with my dog running along side. I took a few test turns, and then *snap* - I was on my butt. Fortunately, it was not my ankle, but the skate itself. The entire bottom half of the skate just broke off. It was a cheap, plastic boot, not leather, and I guess we now know the lifespan of a cheap roller hockey skate.
The good news is I had two pairs of skates (outdoors and indoors) so I was still able to play since the game was indoors.
Tags: fail hockey roller skate
April 11, 2008 03:05 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |
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Kevin Chu, Some Rights Reserved.
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