Deth

Visually impaired fitness and everything else in this shit show.

The Amount Of Acceptable brokenness Blows My Mind

One thing that I have been noticing over the years is just the sheer amount of brokenness that is just left to go. It happens in apps all the time. Websites too. As long as it looks pretty enough, everyone appears to be just fine with it. Functionality is only an afterthought, though.

I reported the bug months ago on the SP app, where things are cut off at the bottom of the screen. That means it’s inaccessible. Note: The same company immediately put captions in videos for a publicly vocal deaf person. I reported it, and they said it’s a known issue. I can use the website just fine, and prefer websites to apps anyway because I can set things up my way. It’s less pretty, but I can see it. It’s not forcing the very thin, microscopic text.

Another oddity with that website is that there are two different calendar views. One starts on Monday and one on Sunday. It is so strange to me that a glaring inconstancy is acceptable. I guess they used two different frameworks. On one view, you cannot edit a workout. It’s been a known issue for over a year now.

Another thing I’ve become aware of over the past few days is that the Ambient Weather page will not change the date range for either the chart view or the graph view. I use that to export the CSV files that I use to generate the weather pages. That hasn’t worked for a few days now. It does nothing. I know it relies on JavaScript, which is such a mess of frameworks and stuff that relies on hundreds of packages. There are so many breaking changes buried in them that it’s surprising that they work most of the time.

It just seems so fragile. It’s such a messy pile of dependencies that I could understand it for the charting on that website, but there are so many seemingly simple things that have a million dependencies.

One thing I would be willing to bet on, though, is that if anything had anything to do with cookies or partners, it would be fixed immediately.

Don’t even get me started on how broken sites are on mobile. Giant text with broken layouts and most information missing. They purposely break things to try to force you to use the app because it is better. No, the app is not better for the user. It is better for tracking. Most apps are just a front end to the website, which is nothing more than a copy of the browser with more tracking included.