After going to all the trouble of figuring out Selenium and JUnit, it turns out I was mis-remembering, and it should have been TestNG for my testing framework. d’ohwell, it shouldn’t be too hard to move from one to the other.
Posts Tagged ‘testing’
One Step Forward, Two Steps Side-to-Side
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012I Hate the new Gmail look
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011I am not a fan of the ‘new’ look for Gmail.
And it would seem I’m not alone in that distaste.
But Google did user testing, and they all said they liked the changes. Thing is, if you read their explanation of the testing, you’ll notice that “Stay the same” wasn’t ever on the table for fellow googlers, so it seems kind of dishonest to claim feedback was positive there. And any outside usability group you put together was inevitably going to be filled only with people who like to try new things. People who don’t like change aren’t going to sign up, so no matter how diverse by age, gender, etc your group was, it wasn’t a representative sample of the actual user base, and gives you no data about how the change would be received at large.
It would seem that some of the feedback is getting through, slowly.
But some of the worst offenses aren’t ever going to go away, no matter how many people complain, because they would interfere with the big Facebook-ification that is their ultimate goal. I get it, you want people to use Google+. Thing is, I’m not going to post everything twice, and everyone is already on Facebook, so that’s where that stuff goes. I have gigs of pictures and metadata on flickr, and that’s where that stuff goes.
Trying to mimic Facebook is a bad idea. Fads come and go. Instead of trying to reproduce the look of someone else’s website, Google should have been trying to build a tool that integrates all the social platforms seamlessly. I would kill for something that let me post my pictures to Flickr, and my words to my own blog, and lets me control how that gets shared with fine grained control, then automatically takes care of the minutia of which service which person is on. That would be good. Not evil.
“That’s going to be ugly…”
Thursday, January 6th, 2011Sigh.
Oh developers.
I sympathize with your plight in making things look like they work the same as they used to, even though the underlying code has changed radically. That said, telling me the programming side of a problem is too ugly for you to consider attempting is not a reasonable reason to not fix a bug. How it looks to you isn’t half as important as how it looks to the customer. In the case of a security product, you can’t just start leaking information, even teeny bits, just because fixing the problem is ‘hard’. Our customers don’t pay for you to have an easy job, they pay for stuff to be consistently secure.
New iTunes, new error message
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010So, apple still hasn’t fixed the problem with trying to download a bunch of app updates at once, but with today’s update, they also created a new bug. Now, when I click on “get update” for a single app, it starts downloading the update, but also sends me to a page that says, “XXX (yyy@zzz.com) has no updates currently available. To check for updates for another account, sign in with that account.”
You can tell this error was missed because they did their testing on a very fast network (or with very small apps), as the error screen goes away as soon as the update finishes downloading. So at least the updates are getting applied. One at a very f-ing slow time.
Minor Update: It’s funny, this morning, I was about to post about how iTunes had finally managed to fix it’s grabbing-focus issues, but of course this update started grabbing focus during the “updating itunes library” phase. d’ohwell.
UPDATE2: I could have sworn I had some audible books here at work, but there aren’t any here. We’ll see what happens at home when I update there. I’m also not a fan of the new “pause/stop” item at the top of the right click menu. Talk about solving a problem that didn’t exist, while creating a new one. There’s never a time where right clicking twice to stop a track is faster/easier than clicking the stop button once. If only stupid itunes didn’t lock up every 5 minutes to admire the size of my library or whatever the hell it’s doing. Putting “stop” on a right-click context menu doesn’t do much when the app doesn’t register any mouse clicks for a month.
UPDATE3: I must’ve been streaming audiobooks here at work, ’cause the ones in the library at home just migrated from audiobooks to books. The focus theft is still annoying.