Yeah, I Said It Already

A year and a half ago I blogged about "PizzaHut.com and its high level of bad" in Pizza Hut.com, To Borrow from Vincent Flanders, Sucks.

Today Consumerist runs a story about the PizzaHut.com website not working for people.

Didn't I say that already?

American Airlines Fires Designer For Admitting Site Could Be Improved

And that headline should tell you all you need to know about the AA commitment to Customer Service, never mind Usability.

It's validating to know I'm not the only one who thinks the AA site needs major help. (Here's my post from last time I used their site:  http://yetanothersite.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-get-annoyed-again-american-airlines.html)

Here's the dialog on another blog that got the AA staffer fired: http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html and http://dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html

Dear Outlook,

I know that this is futile, but I'm going to say it anyway.

When are you going to be better? There's so many things wrong with you, but today your lack of ability to tell that 2 people are the same people is really getting to me. 

You aren't going to send the same person 7 copies, so why won't you deduplicate my to: line?

For example:

Should become this when I click the little Man + Checkmark icon.

Not this:

That way when I'm reading a list of 75 people on the to line, I can better see that Jane is on the list (or not on it).  Speaking of, it would be nice if the To: box could expand to show everyone there, but maybe that's just me. 

This mostly happens when we have 17 Outlook distribution groups, I add each one, then need to deduplicate it to see who is missing, since between them John Smith is on 15 and yet Sally Roe is missing from all of them...

*sigh*

I Think I'm In Love

Adobe has this tool (maybe they will build it into Photoshop Version.Next!) at Kuler.adobe.com.

With it you can take any picture and turn it into 5 color themes -- mathematically balanced to work together.

For example this image:

Gives me:

Or this:

Goes to this:

I'm in design love.

Of course, like all early infatuation, my lust is tempered by frustration as I get to know Kuler.  For example, Kuler is built into Adobe CS4 -- but not the photo tool, so I will be at the mercy of Adobe never taking it down if I want to love it forever and ever and ever.  Also, Kuler, like the punk rocker you dated in college, isn't ready to be brought home to Mom.  Specifically, there's no way to get Adobe Swatch Files into Dreamweaver -- I'm going to have to ink dropper each color to get its hex code if I use the ASE files.   (And really, Adobe, "Macromedia didn't support ASE files when we bought them" doesn't cut it as a reason to not allow Dreamweaver to pull hex codes from an ASE file.  That was four years ago! Get over it!)

Halloween 2009

We went with a very different theme from previous years: 2008, 2007.

2009: