From: Leon Brocard Date: 19:52 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Weather Dashboard Widget Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (wow, I need to start thinking up longer relase names) has Dashboard and widgets. It's a pain to develop these (whoa, there's another hate), but more importantly for this hate it ships with a weather widget: http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/images/indexweather20050412.jpg So I type "London" into the back of it (because Apple has gone UI crazy and the back of widgets is how you configure them) and am pleasantly suprised at the massively hot weather that it'll be in rainy old London. Very surprised. For the next few days, until I figure out that it is stupid software and showing me the weather for London, West Virginia. You see, Dashboard widgets have a completely different UI to everything else. What I wanted to do was enter "London" and hit return. Even though there's no button, no form that I can see. Then it'll give me a list of cities and I can choose "London, United Kingdom". Would it be too much to ask to understand that people might mean "London, UK" a little more than they mean "London, WV"? This is supposed to be the future, dammit. Stupid software causing me hate because I have to work around it and guess what it is actually doing. Gah! Weather update: 15degC, overcast
From: Tannie Date: 20:43 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget --On 20/05/2005 19:52 +0100 Leon Brocard chatted the following lines: > So I type "London" into the back of it (because Apple has gone UI > crazy and the back of widgets is how you configure them) and am > pleasantly suprised at the massively hot weather that it'll be in > rainy old London. Very surprised. For the next few days, until I > figure out that it is stupid software and showing me the weather for > London, West Virginia. Yeah I had that with Amsterdam. Not getting the right Amsterdam (Amsterdam, NY wth?) or London seems extremely hateful to me. Does it get the wrong one based on alphabetic order? Hateful hateful....
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Henrik_Lund_Kramsh=F8j?= Date: 19:16 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget On May 20, 2005, at 9:43 PM, Tannie wrote: > --On 20/05/2005 19:52 +0100 Leon Brocard chatted the following lines: > > >> So I type "London" into the back of it (because Apple has gone UI >> crazy and the back of widgets is how you configure them) and am >> pleasantly suprised at the massively hot weather that it'll be in >> rainy old London. Very surprised. For the next few days, until I >> figure out that it is stupid software and showing me the weather for >> London, West Virginia. >> > > > Yeah I had that with Amsterdam. Not getting the right Amsterdam =20 > (Amsterdam, NY > wth?) or London seems extremely hateful to me. Does it get the =20 > wrong one based > on alphabetic order? > Hateful hateful.... yes, very and =10Copenhagen - yeah most people live in Copenhagen, NY ... wtf!! We have the capital of another European country So like London, writing Copenhagen should get you Copenhagen, Denmark =20= by default So no, I dont think it is done with alphabetic order - on the other hand they might have a problem finding the right =20 alphabetic order ;-) Best regards Henrik -- Henrik Lund Kramsh=F8j, cand.scient, CISSP e-mail: hlk@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, tlf: 2026 6000 www.security6.net - IPv6, sikkerhed, netv=E6rk Follower of the Great Way of Unix
From: Anton Berezin Date: 09:25 on 23 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget On Sat, May 21, 2005 at 08:16:46PM +0200, Henrik Lund Kramsh?j wrote: > and Copenhagen - yeah most people live in Copenhagen, NY ... > > wtf!! > We have the capital of another European country > So like London, writing Copenhagen should get you Copenhagen, Denmark > by default I seem to have developed a subconscious hate of writing to this hate list. Wait, maybe not... But this theory at least explains why I've been explicitly typing "Copenhagen, Denmark" in various web-based weather forecasting services for years. :-) \Anton.
From: David Cantrell Date: 09:16 on 23 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 09:43:31PM +0200, Tannie wrote: > Yeah I had that with Amsterdam. Not getting the right Amsterdam (Amsterdam, NY > wth?) or London seems extremely hateful to me. Does it get the wrong one based > on alphabetic order? No, just stupid provincialism.
From: Paul Mison Date: 20:58 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget On 20/05/2005 at 19:52 +0100, Leon Brocard wrote: >So I type "London" into the back of it (because Apple has gone UI >crazy and the back of widgets is how you configure them) and am >pleasantly suprised at the massively hot weather that it'll be in >rainy old London. Very surprised. For the next few days, until I >figure out that it is stupid software and showing me the weather for >London, West Virginia. Although not written as hate, Sven-S. Porst's review of Dashboard on his weblog covers the boneheaded, US-centric city lookup in the Weather widget, and also, to my mind, takes pops at: * Dashboard being a crap workaround for Calculator being slow to launch * the UIs all being awful * bugs in adding new widgets * a general failure to consult system preferences * lack of localisation * bloatedness (Clock takes 15% CPU) * and of course security See, here: http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2005/05/x4_dashboard Of course, US-centricity is hardly anything new. The Yellow Pages widget is apparently unable to give you anything outside of the US; Sherlock was always crap if you didn't live in the One True Home of Computing; and guess what? Google's new portal (I'm sorry, personalised home page) wants a zip code for a weather forecast. Great, I'll get back to you when the USPS takes over the Royal Mail, shall I? Even mentioning digital music download services is a bad idea. Hatefully yours,
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 22:29 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget > * and of course security > > See, here: http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2005/05/x4_dashboard Dashboard doesn't have any real security problems that I know of. I'm quite impressed by that, I was afraid that they would put a lot of support for it in Webkit, but instead they seem to be using something like I/O slaves to insert the extra functionality into Webcore ONLY when Dashboard itself is running the widget. Yeh, the sandbox in Dashboard doesn't work worth a damn, but Dashboard is just an application environment, it doesn't need a sandbox any more than iTunes, the Screen Saver manager, or any application that uses Audio Units does. Just because it uses HTML and Webcore, that doesn't mean it's sandboxed, that shouldn't mean it's sandboxed, and that can't mean it's sandboxed... because a sandbox with a hole in it isn't a sandbox, and the whole point to Dashboard is that it's a hole in a sandbox. There is a security problem, but it's not in Dashboard, it's in Safari. It's a combination of an old design flaw, the idea that it's OK for Safari to pass untrusted objects on to unsandboxed apps, and the erroneous identification of Dashboard as a sandboxed app. And that security problem is still there.. but it's <i>not</i> in Dashbaord.
From: Paul Mison Date: 22:52 on 20 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget On 20/05/2005 at 16:29 -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: >> * and of course security >> >> See, here: http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2005/05/x4_dashboard > >There is a security problem, but it's not in Dashboard, it's in Safari. Point, and Sven correctly identifies it, even if I didn't: "With Safari automatically moving downloaded widgets into your Library folder, we start feeling uneasy about being faced with Windows like situations where evil code can find an easy way onto people's machines. It might still take a user action to activate a widget, but the barrier has just become lower. I wonder why Apple considered this a good strategy in a time where they start cashing in on the higher perceived security of their OS" However, the Safari auto-download bug (which is, admittedly, fixed in 10.4.1) is compounded by the fact that user-domain widgets can impersonate, and will get run instead of, system-domain ones, whereas, say, ~/Applications/iTunes.app isn't going to fool anyone. http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~aaron/files/widgets/ documents this "bad design choice", for the interested.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 04:38 on 21 May 2005 Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget > However, the Safari auto-download bug (which is, admittedly, fixed in > 10.4.1) It is NOT fixed in 10.4.1. The bug is that "open safe files after downloading" is an option at all. The fix is to remove that capability, not to have it pop up a dialog box saying "I'm about to do something that's almost always what you want me to do, and you're used to clicking YES when it comes up, quick, quick, what do you want me to do, YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING ELSE until you choose!" And anyone who's had to support Windows users knows that some people WILL choose YES over and over again... and serve as a constant pool of infected machines. Hateful bastard software. I expect that from Microsoft. It ticks me off when it comes from anyone else. > is compounded by the fact that user-domain widgets can > impersonate, and will get run instead of, system-domain ones, Yeh, I know. That wouldn't be a problem at all if Safari wasn't messed up. > whereas, say, ~/Applications/iTunes.app isn't going to fool anyone. No, but ~/Library/Screen Savers/RandomSaver will still show, up and if you even preview it you've given it local application access.
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