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A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
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Previous: Paying traffic tickets in Los Angeles | Main | Next: Advertising flyer
January 7, 2005 12:05 AM
Broken: PC ad
An anonymous reader writes:
This came from a local PC shop. I thought it was pretty funny that they chose to use a very old Macintosh in the graphic. Brings new meaning to the old saying, "Windows 98 is like Macintosh 84."
I really want to see this but your pop-ups are still not displaying pictures for me. They're broken. Is there an alternate way to view the picture?
PlantPerson - the popups are defined by code supplied by Six Apart, which runs TypePad... not sure why the code would cause trouble for you, but you could contact the TypePad support team.
This isn't really broken, just humorous. Even after a decade (and I bet the picture was taken a decade ago), the computer still looks new and high-tech.
I don't think I would have noticed it if I had glimpsed by the ad in a newspaper or magazine. And I used to be a Mac enthusiast, so I immediately recognized the CPU and minitor. I don't think the average Joe who sees the ad will notice either.
The pictures display for me, but there is no scrollbar, so I can't scroll down far enough to even see the whole monitor.
I've got one of those under my bed. Don't know where the monitor is, though.
And here's something else that is broken: your picture pop ups. Unlike every other picture pop up in the world, they use the css background-image property. This means people who need alt attributes cannot get them and people with lower resolutions (like me on this public machine) cannot scroll to see the whole picture. Also, this makes it hard to save the picture for use elsewhere.
Version 7 was the Golden Age! It is the pinnacle of Macintosh! Well, except for the crashing of course... :)
6.0.8 was the most stable OS Apple has ever released...but System 4 gets props for the whole thing fitting on a single 3.5" along with all the sys utils you'd ever need.
What I find more broken, and a lot more funny, is the misuse of quotations in that text blurb.
Who would want to buy a service agreement when they could buy a "service agreement"?
You know, because they provide such great "service" (wink, wink.)
Also, he's a "Microsoft Certified Partner", you know, "Certified" (wink, wink.)
That add belongs in the gallery of "misused" quotation marks: http://www.juvalamu.com/qmarks/
I concur with the crappy web design comments. Who the hell makes an image pop-up that doesn't scroll? How about just putting a message on the pop-up that reads "if your monitor isn't set to 1600x1200 and your browser isn't maximized, then screw you" because that's what it amounts to. I'm sorry that I work for a government agency that's broke and I don't have a big-ass monitor, you don't have to rub it in by making it difficult to see the image. I hate web designers. Just link to the damn .jpg file without ANY html and let the browser decide how to display it.
"Windows 98 is like Macintosh 84."
That's funny, I didn't know Macintosh had a fully preemptive multitasking OS in 1984. *headskritch*
I hated those mac's. "Sorry a system error occurred (restart)" would always appear, and the restart button didn't even work. You'd have to unplug the piece of crap. Long live pc's.
I hate that this somehow turned into a Mac v. PC argument...but, since it has, perhaps Rick Dickow should read this: www.tinyurl.com/4xkts.
Long live 'The Blue Screen of Death," eh, Rick? Tee hee.
Heh, that seems to happen a lot. I'm sure some folks will remember when Microsoft used some stock footage that featured a mac in it (I think it's happened more than once). I also love shots where the computer is secondary part of the picture, and they end up somehow putting windows on a PC's screen, or visa versa. I think it was an IKEA catalog that had a bunch of these one year. Of course if I were an art director for a catalog, I would do that on purpose as a joke. :)
"they use the css background-image property"
That explains why I can't see any of the picture pop-ups. I have background images turned off in my personal style sheet because I usually find them distracting.
Why would you make the image a background? Why not a regular image? Please do so for those of us who actually know how to customize our browsers and choose to do so.
Ha. A disproportionate number of Macs appear in stock photography since a lot of creative types (like Photographers and Graphic Artists) use them far more than PC's.
Being a graphic designer who has done work with computer service companies, very often the computer service company does NOT want a recognizable brand of computer, and very often a Mac is used in the photography. It usually LOOKS good enough (after retouching out the Apple logo) and is unrecognizable by the average joe computer user who doesn't know a RAM chip from a potato chip.
Now that Macs are so recognizeable (iMacs, the G5), their use as the "generic computer of choice" has fallen off considerably. That's too bad.
Yeah, as they said above, it's using the background property to display the image. I had trouble viewing it too, so I just cut out the ".shared/image.html?" part of the url, and went directly to http://broken.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/crop0011.jpg
For the record, the picture is 834 pixels high, a fair piece above and beyond my 1024x768 screen size.
Microsoft once published a book called 'This Wired Home'. On the front conver was a picture of an Amiga 3000.
Hah! Resizing the image doesn't solve the problem. There's still no scrollbar when the image window is resized, so god-forbid somebody with a 800x600 screen (or their browser window set to that size) try to view it.
I swear, it's like you're purposely making this website both hard to view, and hard for you to maintain. Now you've made it:
1) impossible to see the full-size image,
2) still invisible to people who override the .css file,
3) still impossible to see in full for people using lower monitor resolutions.
Look, the entire point of the browser is this: You provide the content, the browser provides the formatting. Now, you can *suggest* how the browser formats the document, using HTML, CSS, etc, but you generally don't have any real control over that. The browser could be running Ad-Block, or it could be overriding CSS, or it could have a minimum font size set. What you're trying to do is to take too much control, and it's not working... it's just making everyone's life miserable.
The *correct* way to display an image is to link to the image file. Don't do a pop-up, people hate those, don't do a weird CSS background thing, people hate those also. Don't try to remove the scrollbars from the window, people despise that... just link to the damned image file and let the browser figure out how to display it. Don't make life hard on yourself, and don't make it hard on your viewers.
I hate web designers.
James, your comment has made me make this reply.
how can you speak for everyone? you say people hate the pop-up things. well then i must not be a person since i like the pop-up, makes it easier to read the artical and still look at the image. i may not know much about css, but do you make websites? the is obivisaly reasons for the methods that mark has used to make his web site. its been up for quite awhile, and from what ive seen no one has had a problem with the design of the site, until now.
i hate people
No one has had a problem before because he just recently switched over to this method. I would definitely prefer just a link to the file, I don't care if it's in a popup or not.
What people are so keen to not realize is that "PC" stands for "Personal Computer". Therefore a mac is every bit as much a PC as what used to be known as an ibm based pc. or now could be known as a windows based pc.
What is really broken is that is says Intel on the bottom. AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,AMD,
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Previous: Paying traffic tickets in Los Angeles | Main | Next: Advertising flyer
_@_v - that's more like one of the mid-90s performa models which did run windows 98 which was better known as 'system 7'.
_@_v - in my snaily opinion, the best overall version of mac os was 8.6. even though i run 9 on my desktop i keep 8.6 on my notebook.
_@_v - i actually have the monitor in that picture...
Posted by: she-snailie_@_v at January 7, 2005 05:41 AM