Cool Programming

QA QA QA

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:53:47 GMT

The most important part of any development process is quality assurance. It's also the least most important part of comedy.

Today, while working on a paid review for a website, I discovered the following sentence on their homepage.

"Sites that ... have a reputation for treating players fairly will not be listed on ..."

QA. QA. QA. Pay your best tester more than your best developer.

Broken Olive

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:35:34 GMT

More and more, I'm amazed just how broken most websites are. Today, I was looking for an Olive Garden in Indiana and stumbled upon an Olive Garden Canada website. I started looking for location in Canada. It asked for city or province in the search textbox for locating an Olive Garden restaurant. I typed each province in Canada and it returned "We're Sorry. No results were found near your location. Please search again." for all. I knew their was an Olive Garden in Edmonton, Alberta, so I typed the name of the city "Edmonton" and got a match. Searching on the province "Alberta" and you get no results. It's no wonder their are few Olive Gardens left in Canada. You can't find them. The same functionality worked fine from the US website.

http://www.olivegarden.ca/

EAMobile is Stupid

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:13:45 GMT

More Mobility stupidity. Today I type NASCAR 09 AT google, my favorite video game. I click through to EASports webpage for their game. They redirect to eamobile.com, a stupid Morons version of their website. If you don't know how to create a good mobile version of your website then leave good enough alone, please don't f-it up. Creating a mobile version of your website is dumb, unless you know what you are doing. Try tweaking for mobile rather than making a completely useless mobile version like the EA idiot developers.

How to Screw Up a Mobile Website

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:48:44 GMT

I work about one hour per day now on a mobile device. There are three types of mobile websites.

those that present the same website to both desktop and mobile users.

those that tweak their site for mobile devices.

those that offer a unique mobile experience.

Tweaks tend to work very well. Mostly these sites hide some ads and sidebar content for mobile devices. On the other hand, those that offer a unique mobile experience are almost always broken. The biggest example is Facebook, which is completely b0rked on my device. I think the problem is that unique means twice as much testing, which means several fold more missed bugs. This is amplified on mobile device since their are more target mobile platforms than on desktops.

Don't develop unique presentations for mobile devices. Rather, just tweak your desktop presentation.