Yeah, mine is off and will be for eternity. One feature I initially hated but now love is the heads-up projection screen (for the uninitiated, this is a hologramish display you see that floats at the end of the hood and displays speed, navigation, etc).
My peeve is the voice command system. Me: “Navigation. Street Address. 123 Main Street.” Car voice: “Media. Music. Favorites.” I exaggerate, but there must be something about my voice/diction that isn’t compatible. Mrs. Shark speaks German and for a lark we changed the system language to German – voice commands worked flawlessly in Deutsch!
(Acknowledging I’m a horrible human being) I don’t care at all about gas mileage, and my X3 does cut out at any hint of stoppage. As I said upthread, it’s possible that the BMW start/stop system just really sucks.
Depends on whose problem! The cable companies’ problem was that they needed a justification for charging the sorts of astronomical rates I hear about these days. (We haven’t had cable in 20 years.) It’s easier to charge $80/month for 250 channels of garbage than 50 channels of garbage.
Ah, how timely. I used to have G@#le News set as my browser’s home page. Until last year when they “improved” the site’s layout to the point that I no longer found it useful. So I changed to another news aggregator that had the novel approach of presenting information in a readable fashion.
This strikes me as a business opportunity - a “reversion service”. Copy a business / product / service, wait until they “improve” it to the point its customers don’t want it any more, then offer it up in the way that actually worked! There are a few web sites that do this sort of thing for software, and I hope I see more of it going forward.
I didn’t say anything about “everything Americans do.” I live in America and I like it. I’m just point out that one thing in the UK is vastly superior.
Electric ranges in the UK are on 240V, 32-45 amp circuits, and the switches seem to work just fine.
Thankyou a thousand times over! Google News “upgrade” was horrible in so many ways. In my favorite browser it kept scrolling back to the top when I moved my mouse to click on something. Nearly unusable. Now I notice that doesn’t happen but when I click on a link I get a blank page. Oh, and I get text overwriting text in places. So, even better, right?
A page like this can use 20 year old html elements. Keep it simple, it works for more people AND it saves developer/maintainer time.
Ugh, don’t get me started on “modern” web site coding.
There are a slew of sites that behave in stupid ways on my iPad:
On one, if you try to open a link in another tab it does so in BOTH tabs and you have to click back in the original one to get back to the home page.
A few constantly lose the displayed content as you scroll and have to reload.
Many disable scaling. WTF?!?! This is incredibly annoying, and these sites invariably use about 60% of screen real estate to show actual content, and in a small font size. Wasteful and stupid.
One site has the same exact articles turning up on the dynamic margins of the site over and over again. For weeks. Looking at you, The Onion!
I like to use the “reader” function to save pages for offline reading. Not sure if this is a problem with Firefox or the sites themselves, but a few are notorious for not allowing it. Or they do allow it, but you end up with content from another section of the site.
In almost all of these instances where the content gets screwed up in some manner, the ads work seem to work flawlessly.
I really appreciate sites that don’t go in for all the dynamic nonsense. Go ahead and have ads, I can ignore them. But going back to some older style site presentations would be very welcome.
I just got a used car with dual climate control. UGHHHHH. I want ice crystals or flames coming out of the vents until I say otherwise. So I’m constantly readjusting it. Fortunately I found the way to sinc up both sides so it’s only one set of controls to adjust. It was SOOOOOOO much easier just flipping the temp control to where I wanted it. And if the controls started to bind it was a few drops of oil on a cable. I didn’t have to pull one panel off to get to it. it cost me nothing. compare that to my buddy’s luxury car that cost him $900 to replace a $10 diverter motor. I’m seriously thinking of rebuilding the motor/transmission on my high mileage car and running it another 200,000 miles. Pull the wheels and use it as a casket when I’m done.
A website I visit recently made it so that when you clicked “Log-in” on the main screen, instead of going to a new screen to input your information a pop-up now shows up on the side to allow you to input your information there, then once you loggin the pop-up says “Welcome <Insert Name>” and you have to manually close it.
Who the hell would think adding an extra step would be somehow make it better to log in?
I didn’t read through the whole thread but, in case nobody has mentioned it, the remote control for a car radio. Who came up with that idea and why? And while I’m at it, car radios in general. What is with all these menus and counter-intuitive button pushing? Its as if they make them complicated just because they can. The wife got a new one a few years ago and I had to consult the 100 page (slight exaggeration) user manual to figure out how to turn it on. It was the smallest button on the damn thing and designed for someone with toothpicks for fingers.
That’s a good one to bounce off from: remote controls. There are remote controls for things you don’t often touch. Ceiling fans, for example. We have wall switches to turn ceiling fans on and off. If I need to adjust the speed of the fan (which I might have to do once or twice a season), then I get up and do it. It’s not like changing a TV channel, which I do quite often.
And I’ve seen the remotes for car radios, which make sense if you’re in the back seat of a 100 foot long limo and the radio is by the driver, and you want to turn the volume up because the station suddenly plays “Play That Funky Music White Boy,” but otherwise, in a normal car, your arm should be long enough to reach the radio controls without having to fiddle with a stupid little remote control (especially since car designers are putting all the damned controls on the steering wheel now).
I’m constantly reminded of Jeff Goldblum’s line in Jurassic Park about just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
Another pet peeve with websites: silly changes to make your site ‘unique’. Just stop that. We maybe want unique information, but we don’t want unique ways to fill in information; just do it the standard way that we use everywhere else.
Some examples:
a web site that wanted the city, state, postal code part of an address entered in an odd order. I understand that going from the largest geographic order first makes it easier to validate the address. But people have been using addresses in a specific order for a century or so now. Changing that is not user friendly. (And skip unneeded info. Entering the postal code usually is enough for the computer to automatically fill in the city & state, so have it do that.)
Most modern browsers will now pre-fill common fields like first name, last name, email address, etc. automatically. A very helpful feature. But it depends on the webpage properly coding the input fields so the browser can recognize that it is a field for first name or whatever. Some webpages seem to be unable to code properly for this, and expect the user to enter manually all that information. (Personally, I usually just go somewhere else – there is almost always somewhere else on the web offering this same thing.)
Say you’re ordering something, or registering your new string trimmer’s warranty, or getting on a mailing list, or whatever. Enter name, enter address, fine. Then you get to the STATE part of your address, and rather than having a little text box to enter the two characters of your state, there’s a menu. A menu with fifty items on it. So now I have to either use my mouse to navigate this 50+ item menu, or tab to it and see if it’ll keyboard-shortcut. I live in Texas, so I hit T, and it jumps to Tennessee. It might let me arrow down, it might not. Usually, if I hit T again, it’ll go to the next item, Texas. Well, how is that shorter than just entering two characters myself in a text box?
I don’t understand why everyone, everyone, everyone who asks for an address has somehow universally agreed that “state” should be a menu instead of a text box.
There are some new parking garages near me that have sensors and lights over each parking space. The lights turn red if there’s a car in the space, green if there isn’t. The useless part is that you can only really see the lights once you’re going down that aisle of the garage. And since you are, you’ll see the empty parking space when you drive past it, anyway. It’s not like it saves you any driving, or lets you home in on an available spot from a distance.
I can foresee possible uses for this information in the future. If the system won’t let more cars in when all the spaces are full, or if there’s some sort of app that guides you to a space, that would be helpful. Considering how poorly most garages are kept up, right now this just seems like something that’s expensive to maintain for no real benefit.
It bothers more than just you.
Lucky you aren’t in Minnesota, where it commonly takes 4-6 keystrokes to get to the state in the menu. (The number varies, depending if they include the US Overseas territories in the list. So you can’t even learn a uniform number of keystrokes.) And pity Montana or North Dakota, which take 8 or more keystrokes. Many times what it would take to just key in the 2 letters.
Lazy programmers do this because it’s easier to code. The logic for choosing an item from a menu is built into Windows. If they just accepted the 2-letter entries, they would have to code edits to verify them. (Simple edits – just check against a table of the valid ones, but still more coding work.)
Have we mentioned touchless bathroom fixtures? Found myself waving my hands at a faucet that couldn’t have cared less yesterday. Dmitri Martin covered this perfectly.
This puzzles me as well – I suppose a backseat passenger could use it?
Something I really like in my cars are the media controls on the steering wheel. Except on one car it’s on the “wrong” side of the wheel and I often turn on the cruise control instead of the stereo.
Nonsense. True, things like canned food are good for quite some time after the “sell by " or best by” date, but things like ground meat, milk etc can easily spoil.
