An Open Letter to Facebook/Android

Here's my monthly "Hey, Facebook for Android and Facebook Messenger for Android teams! Here's the stupid UI breakage you need to fix" posting. This is a copy of a tagged posting I actually posted on Facebook.

First, Messenger:

1) The new Messenger, which is trying its best to look like the new built-in Messenger, *is not usable on a phone-sized screen*. It's just barely usable on my tablet, but since it has no extra functionality, there's no sense in it being a separate app, and I didn't install it there.

2) The only real reason *to* install it is if you're trying to hold chats *and* use the actual Facebook app at the same time, in the first place.

3) The new Messenger UI makes it somewhere between difficult and impossible to get a list of who's logged on just now -- which is the major use case for Messenger in the first place: "I'm bored."

4) I am *just barely* convinced that merging Chat and Messages was a good idea in the first place.

Now, Facebook:

1) Links from system notifiers should not go just to the target intent, they should go to the main app, with a pointer to launch the intent. This avoids user mental modeling breakage when there's a loose intent floating in the Running Apps stack that they can't Back out of properly without relaunching the main app. Yes, I know that this takes more memory.

2) When I pop up the notifiers list, and click on something, Back should take me back to the main page *with the notifiers list still extended*. You broke this 4 or 5 releases ago, and you still haven't fixed it.

3) If someone posts a FB video, and I click Comment or Comments -- I should go to a page with the embedded video stillframe *and the comments*. Instead I launch the player. So there's no way to comment on, or see comments on, a natively-posted video.

4) The native Photo Viewer has gotten both better and faster, but *still can't count*; comment and like counters now both still cap at 98, regardless the actual counts. The icons on the left are also too small for phone displays. Spread them out, and put the counts in between, biased slightly towards the Comment and Like icons.

5) In both the web and Android Apps, the semantics of "accept and decline" for friend requests may be the same everywhere, but it's impossible to tell that, because each team uses its own syntax. Comin' to Jesus time on that topic, people. I should be able obviously to decline the invitation of someone I don't know well without feeling like I'm going to adversely affect their account status.

6) On tablets, the Android app does not display the Timeline header and photos, for onesself or others; there is no way to set a cover photo on a tablet.

7) FONT SIZE, FONT SIZE, FONT SIZE. We know you guys are all in your 20s, but guess the fuck what? We aren't. On a phone, it's a little too small. On a tablet, it's Way Too Fucking Small.

and finally

8) Where Is The Share Link??

Facebook is purportedly all about sharing. And yet, the Facebook Android app has *never* had a share link on *any object*. With photos, I can get around it using the Android Intent Sharing facility, though this does break the original poster's crumbtrail and counts. For anything else, I'm screwed.

8a) Please make all blocks of text, postings, captions, comments, etc, long-press Copy-able. You've finally at least allowed copy and paste in text entry fields. That's half the battle; please stop fighting the other half.

Even the mobileweb app gets most of this stuff right; if you can't beat its feature set, much less its implementations, then you should just pack up and go home.

Oh yeah: If you don't stop making "Change the permissions on this posting" also switch "change my default postings for all posts on all devices", I'm flyin to the Coast...

Friday, November 16, 2012 @ 12:19 p.m. - Comment

How embarassing...

It's apparently been exactly a year since I saw fit to post anything here. Eeek.

Facebook ate me, I guess; that is in fact why I'm posting this here: I bought an ad, on Facebook, to advertise a Facebook-listed event and draw people to it... and Facebook construed this as Suspicious Activity, and locked me out.

This afternoon at noon, and they haven't got it fixed yet, even though I knelt at their altar and emailed them my DL photo.

Anyroad; I got an Android phone last year; the HTC Supersonic, which Sprint calls the EVO4G, and I've been quite happy with it these 18 months or so -- finally got the Seidio 3500mAh battery and it's practical to use it all day, and run 4G and the hotspot and such...

And I also buy a lot of stuff on eBay, using eSnipe to do my bidding ... so to speak. :-)

And I got a bit irritated that while eBay has an Android app, eSnipe did not, and when I *finally* got their attention on Twitter, their lead dev got back to me to tell me "that's on our horizon, but I don't have enough cycles just now".

So I thought it a little bit. And I realized that another of my favorite apps, "Share to SD" was about 80% of the way there already. So I looked up it's author, Denis Nelubin (whom I gather is Eastern European; Russian or something like it), and prospected him about the idea.

Apparently, I'm getting better at the sweet talk in my old age, cause I did successfully talk him into it, and 2 weeks and 3 betas later, here it is.

If you, too have both eBay and eSnipe accounts, grab it and see what you think. I'll be monitoring the comments, but you're welcome to file a bug at GoogleCode too, if it doesn't work for you; please mention your phone model and OS release.

And I promise to write a little more often. :-)

Friday, October 5, 2012 @ 09:39 p.m. - Comment

Asterisk commits reputational suicide

I've worked with a lot of different software projects and packages over the years. One of the reasons I've always preferred open source projects to commercial ones is that they're generally much more focussed on getting real work done than playing organizational games.

The Asterisk telephony software project has always been one of those, even though it was spearheaded primarily by the Digium Corporation, who wrote Asterisk originally to support their other work, which was providing telephone support for Linux users.

Not anymore, apparently: Now There's Asterisk 10!

See this blog posting wherein they explain that they don't have the first clue what version numbering is actually for and how to do it, and -- like so many other companies who thought that was a pretty neat idea... like Sun (with Java) and SCO (with OpenServer) -- they were just gonna *drop* the first "1.x" component of their version number, and go from 1.8.x to 10.0.0.

Now, see, this is one of those dichotomies between programmers and non-programmers: if you're a programmer, you're already shaking your head, saying "what fucking morons"... and if you're not, you simply can't understand what I'm all worked up about.

But for me, this goes back to Tom Peters' 30 year old admonition: if the passengers can see that you can't be bothered to wipe up the coffee stains off the tray-tables, how in *hell* can they trust you to have been doing your engine maintenance correctly. Any project lead who would pull a move this stupid... and then *justify it* (which you'll see Kevin goes to great lengths to do in that posting), clearly understands this, fundamentally, deep down in their craw... but is going to go ahead and do it wrong anyway, for reasons unfathomable; folly unplumbable.

Oh, well; there's competition now.

Good thing, cause *I* won't be using their product anymore, except at gunpoint.

Saturday, October 15, 2011 @ 02:05 p.m. - Comment

I have a new gig...

where I'm running about full speed to learn the stuff I need to know. This means... yup! Lots of good bookmarks for you!

:-)

The first one (which is the last, if you're not reading every day -- and, really, why would you be, as remiss as I've been in posting here since I was eaten alive by Facebook?) is about iSCSI. I'm using OpenFiler, which is pretty decent looking, but you have to buy it's documentation.

Unsurprisingly, the INTERNET(!) has jumped once more unto the breach, and here's a great article about how to set it up.

More to follow. Or, y'know, precede.

Sunday, September 25, 2011 @ 09:50 a.m. - Comment

I don't post here very much anymore...

and that's probably a bad thing, and $NEWJOB may change it...

But today seems like a good day to break that string.

I only have, really, two bookends for you:

and

(And yes, as overwrought as such comments sometimes are, AB really did only air this spot one single time; there was confirming news coverage to that effect. I'd say it probably cost them a couple hundred grand. Quite pleased to see that InBev, who bought them, weren't stupid enough to shut the team down.)

Sunday, September 11, 2011 @ 10:09 a.m. - Comment

Violets are Purple!!

Did you ever have one of those moments that makes you question the collective intelligence of the human race?

Yeah, yeah; I know: you have those every 15 minutes.

I've had two, in the last week.

The kind I mean is where you hear someone say "Roses are red, violets are blue"... and you say "Wait! Violets *aren't* blue; they're *violet*! Y'know: hence the name?"

[ Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that if you're not a geek, reading the rest of this note may make your head explode. It's the 4th of July while I'm writing it, but that wouldn't help you later... :-) ]

One of the things I do a lot, being A Computer Whiz (hey; don't blame me; I don't write 'em, I just tell 'em), is to get old computer equipment working again -- you know, the stuff that's not Brand Spanking New, and therefore really really cheap, but still plenty fast enough to get real work done.

This example's an HP DL585 G1 8-core Opteron rack-mount server. It's big, heavy, *really* loud, and really *really* fast.

So I got it all set up the way I wanted, on the 36GB SCSI drives it came with (hardware mirrored into a RAID1 with the Compaq "Smart" Array 5i+ controller it came with... and then I tried to mirror that into a pair of 300GB drives we'd actually sold it with.

6 attempts later, I had learned why Ext4 is not a filesystem that's ready for prime time -- none of my cloning programs know how to deal with it properly yet. Clonezilla claims to be "compatible" with it -- but that apparently just means "We'll just raw-copy it like we do with every *other* filesystem we don't recognize; too bad, so sad".

When even open-source projects start lying about stuff like that, perhaps it's time for me to go flip burgers again.

In any event, I let it do that, and then I went to pull the 2 36G drives, and move the 2 300G drives to slots 0 and 1 on the machine, as I generally do.

That went even less well.

I believe we should actually call this controller the "Stupid Array 5i--", as it simply can't handle this act -- moving a RAID1 pair between slots at *all*, unlike *every single hardware raid controller I've worked with over the last 2 decades*. Ok, I can understand: the ROM utility might not be smart enough to handle that, and indeed, they tell you: get the one that runs in Linux and it can do more stuff.

No, it can't. 4 hours installation time to find that out.

So I grabbed their "Smart Start" CD. Another hour to determine that the newest release wouldn't start its X server. Grab an older version.

Oh, look: this is the same program I was running under Linux. And it *still* doesn't know how to do *anything at all* more than the ROM utility does. (At the time I first went through all that crap, it was to try to build the 300G raid without the controller having to *copy all 300G of nothing* from one drive to the other. You can't do *that* either; I have no idea what you do if one half of a mirror fails...)

I can tell you this: regardless how nice the hardware is -- and it is *very, very* nice -- this makes me very nervous about ever specifying HP servers for anything; this is *completely unacceptable* from the view point of a professional systems administrator: I refuse to be placed in a position where I have to tell my boss "Duh; I got no clue whether I can recover it or how long it's gonna take, boss."

The Violets are Blue moment is: how can anyone *else* tolerate this; why didn't Google reveal to me a firestorm of discontent on this topic when I looked?

[ Late UPDATE: It appears the reason is because there's a command line program, hpacucli, that's not that stupid. ]

Monday, July 4, 2011 @ 03:28 p.m. - Comment

STS-134 launched safely

STS-134 launched finally, after repairs to an APU fuel line heater problem that caused it's 29 Apr launch to scrub for about 3 week. STS-135 is 8 July, and I'll be there, though not on-grounds as I was for STS-132.

Monday, May 16, 2011 @ 01:44 p.m. - Comment