The weather is terrible today here in New York.
I think I’ll use it as inspiration to post a few rants (i.e. annoyances) that have been on my mind…
Pagination in Flow Applications
Tumblr (among others) has adopted a convention for pagination that drives me nuts. You click on a button on the right-hand side to move backward in time (Next)Â and you click a left-hand button (Previous) to move forward toward more recent items.
I have never understood this. My confusion is that the idea of pagination is essentially derived from books — and with books, right brings you forward and left brings you backward. Same with the Kindle.
Twitter also had this issue until it developed its “moreâ€� button at the bottom of the stream — a big improvement for UI, but also creates scrolling annoyances.
Why Tumblr? Why? Can’t someone create a better solution?
Zip Codes & Online Forms
I was talking with Eric about this on Sunday.
Zip codes are unique identifiers. “11201″ means the very specific area within Brooklyn, NY where I live.
So why does every form in the online world require that I enter a City and State?
Throughout the history of the Internet and e-commerce no one has thought to create a database that matches zip code to location? What am I missing?
Nurses who are Addicted to Zynga
Last week I got to briefly visit the Zynga headquarters, it’s an impressive operation, but even more impressive is this anecdote:
Yesterday I was at a hospital in Brooklyn to have several sonograms. Sonograms require various intermittent pauses for a couple minutes each. During these ‘pauses,’ while I was lying there on the bed, I could hear the nurse laughing away as she typed on the room’s computer.
I asked her in a rather annoyed tone, what in the world she was doing? Slightly embarrassed, she replied “playing a game on Facebook.�
Turns out she was playing Café World with her friends. Putting aside my annoyance with Café World being played during my procedure, I started chatting with her and learned that not only do all her friends play, but they all buy virtual goods! “If you leave the food too long, it will spoil� she said giggling.
If well educated nurses are so addicted to Zynga that they are playing during procedures, the Zynga IPO is something I want in on.
