Two Things That Bothered Me Today
1) The weather: I know, I know, there is nothing I can really do about the weather, and I know that global warming's main effect is to cause radical changes to weather pattens regionally, but it doesn't mean I can't be bothered by it, so today, I find it bothering me.
Mostly, I think this is because I just don't expect to feel this cold at this time of year. Especially after having gone through a cold, damp, July. And I am largely an accepting kind of individual when it comes to things I can't change.
So, maybe it's just another aspect to aging. Or, maybe it's just one more thing to add to the ever-increasing list of things that I remember being better before. Or, even more likely, it's the first indicator that the fall (in the many senses of that word) is not so very far away.
2) Tablets and Android's browser: I am writing this on the company's newly-purchased Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. While over the past two or three days I have largely been busy downloading apps from the Android Market, and trying to determine whether there is in fact a legitimate business reason to use a tablet, I've also been trying some of our own browser-based applications on the Android browser. And this is where I'm bothered. By and large, the browser is fast, capable, and renders sites very well.
But for the past four years, Google has failed correct a significant failing. On sites requiring logging in using http basic authentication, it is not possible to download files. Period. The login authentication is handled separately on a download request, and is not supplied from the browser. Many, many developers have complained about this failing, but Google has done nothing about it. Firefox works fine, so why not the webkit browser? Other failings of the browser have to do with keyboard input.
And a complaint about the Galaxy Tab in general: Smart controls like this post editor, or a Flash application's text input field, do not necessarily respond like browser text fields, so on a touch-screen device, you cannot easily position the cursor, and for those of us who keyboard a lot, the lack of cursor movement controls on the touch-screen keyboard is a real shortcoming. In fact, on a Flash application text input field, the touch-screen keyboard sometimes simply will not come up, perhaps due to the control's display size or some other factor. So seriously, from a true usability perspective, there is much that needs improvement.
For now, I'm just bothered.
Mostly, I think this is because I just don't expect to feel this cold at this time of year. Especially after having gone through a cold, damp, July. And I am largely an accepting kind of individual when it comes to things I can't change.
So, maybe it's just another aspect to aging. Or, maybe it's just one more thing to add to the ever-increasing list of things that I remember being better before. Or, even more likely, it's the first indicator that the fall (in the many senses of that word) is not so very far away.
2) Tablets and Android's browser: I am writing this on the company's newly-purchased Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. While over the past two or three days I have largely been busy downloading apps from the Android Market, and trying to determine whether there is in fact a legitimate business reason to use a tablet, I've also been trying some of our own browser-based applications on the Android browser. And this is where I'm bothered. By and large, the browser is fast, capable, and renders sites very well.
But for the past four years, Google has failed correct a significant failing. On sites requiring logging in using http basic authentication, it is not possible to download files. Period. The login authentication is handled separately on a download request, and is not supplied from the browser. Many, many developers have complained about this failing, but Google has done nothing about it. Firefox works fine, so why not the webkit browser? Other failings of the browser have to do with keyboard input.
And a complaint about the Galaxy Tab in general: Smart controls like this post editor, or a Flash application's text input field, do not necessarily respond like browser text fields, so on a touch-screen device, you cannot easily position the cursor, and for those of us who keyboard a lot, the lack of cursor movement controls on the touch-screen keyboard is a real shortcoming. In fact, on a Flash application text input field, the touch-screen keyboard sometimes simply will not come up, perhaps due to the control's display size or some other factor. So seriously, from a true usability perspective, there is much that needs improvement.
For now, I'm just bothered.
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