Ellen Beldner

At our company almost everyone uses a MacBook Pro with a 30" Dell monitor. We all frequently have the DVI distortion issues that Gizmodo reported. (I've had my display fritz out twice in the past hour, for example.) Apple has been totally unhelpful and basically refuse to admit that they have a problem. Perhaps they're afraid of another product recall or class action lawsuit? And thus are not doing the best customer support thing, which is: acknowledge the problem, apologize, and promise a fix as soon as it's available.

Anyway, I wanted to leave a review on the product page in the Apple store. I can't figure out how to post my review:

"Some words in your review cannot be published. Please revise your review." Huh?

Their guidelines state "avoid comments about... service and support", but how the hell are you supposed to review a product that doesn't work if you can't describe anything about the customer service response to the issue? I've tried about 8 versions of text for this review, and I have no idea why they won't let me publish this.

So on my own blog I'll say it:

Fuckers.

I was tuning up a new station and all of a sudden, something clicked -- you started playing music I wanted to hear. I wanted to buy a couple of albums with songs you had played. So I clicked in your interface: "Buy MP3 from Amazon.com". The click failed because, like any sane human being, I have popups blocked by my browser. Your solution: You want me to disable popup blocking?

Love,
Ellen

The Church - A Box of Birds; Snow Patrol - Eyes Open

Okay, I already knew that I hate and detest the new-ish Facebook practice in which you don't just navigate to outgoing links; you get taken to a Facebook page with the site you were trying to visit loaded into a frame, and with a Facebook toolbar at the top of the page.

And now, not only does Digg do it too, but the sites are so dumb that they're double stacking these stupid toolbars.

This is crap primarily because it breaks basic web behavior: the URL on your web browser no longer represents the page you're viewing, or trying to view. Big juju nono. We've known this since 1996, people!

Also, I don't want to send someone to http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=89405539347&h=1e79i&u=2fnBr&ref=nf. I want to send them the link that's www.youtube.com so they know where they're going and what they're going to get.

The one case where Google does something like this -- a frame with another site inside its toolbar -- is when a user clicks on an image search result. That frame bothers a lot of site owners that Google links to, but it was a necessary tradeoff because image search is kind of sketchy and occasionally unreliable. Users click on an image result and get taken to pages that no longer have the image they were looking for, and the toolbar exists to help them identify the image they wanted -- NOT as a marketing-sticky thing for Google. And even though it's often beneficial, it still confuses a lot of users.

Note that mismatched content and URLs is a usability problem for Google Maps. The URL that many users copy from their browser address bar usually doesn't correctly represent the state that the user's in due to the way the site's AJAX works. AJAX or FRAME, it's the same problem.