Jack Schofield 

The Intro and the Outro (ETech)

I've just been playing with Intro, which its authors think is a "cool" idea. You fill in a load of information about your skills and interests and the software matches you with other people with similar skills and interests -- great for a conference like Emerging Technologies. Every participant is positioned somewhere in a 2D space and you can zoom in to find the people who are "most like you", look up their details and send them a message. Unfortunately, like a very large proportion of the online applications written in Macromedia Flash, it ignores usability standards, Windows standards, Web standards, and the whole principle of the Web, which is that the client software should decide how to display data. Intro, in contrast, enforces an overlarge fixed screen that comes nowhere near fitting on my humble (small, light, cheap, obsolete) 800 x 600 ultraportable. Want to resize or scroll a window? How old fashioned! "We designed it to take advantage of the newer computers that everyone seems to have these days," says the helpful person doing Intro's support. Well, I don't object to applications designed to exploit overpaid fashion victims with boat anchors, only the clueless stupidity that renders them almost unusable by everybody else.
  
  


I've just been playing with Intro, which its authors think is a "cool" idea. You fill in a load of information about your skills and interests and the software matches you with other people with similar skills and interests -- great for a conference like Emerging Technologies. Every participant is positioned somewhere in a 2D space and you can zoom in to find the people who are "most like you", look up their details and send them a message. Unfortunately, like a very large proportion of the online applications written in Macromedia Flash, it ignores usability standards, Windows standards, Web standards, and the whole principle of the Web, which is that the client software should decide how to display data. Intro, in contrast, enforces an overlarge fixed screen that comes nowhere near fitting on my humble (small, light, cheap, obsolete) 800 x 600 ultraportable. Want to resize or scroll a window? How old fashioned! "We designed it to take advantage of the newer computers that everyone seems to have these days," says the helpful person doing Intro's support. Well, I don't object to applications designed to exploit overpaid fashion victims with boat anchors, only the clueless stupidity that renders them almost unusable by everybody else.

 

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