i.justrealized

Adobe Reader 9 is full of crap. It comes with embedded Flash support, bundled with Adobe AIR and some crap Safari extension or something that didn’t work too well.

Adobe Reader 5 or 6 is probably the best Adobe Reader. Subsequent Adobe Readers are merely products to keep Adobe engineers busy so that they won’t get fired just because they have nothing to program on.

The install process take farking bloody long and is powered by iNOSSO. Since when does ads creep into installers. Is Adobe that in need of money?

Then they attempt to bundle the eBay desktop program, please don’t install that crap. The last thing you ever need is to install more crap after installing crap.

Adobe Reader even asks you to restart your computer after installation. I NEVER restart my Windows Vista after an installation. Get real. It runs for 10 days straight and I’m not going to restart it till the next Windows Update.

Adobe Reader 9
(includes Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR)

It’s bigger, it’s crappier and all it does is to read some documents. It doesn’t edit, it just displays the file. What’s up with the file size increase, the AIR inclusion and the bad install experience. It installed Adobe Help Viewer 1.1 and install another version of Adobe Update just because the new one can’t be compatible with CS3.

I recall installing Office 2007, it lets you select what you want, have a good customizable installation experience. And it doesn’t even ask you to restart your system.

You can read more here and here.

And yeah, it wasn’t all that good. I got the invite some time back. I was preoccupied that time and I didn’t really explore well till today. Pogo is another one of those browser that does the 3D thingy (not that we actually need another more of those).

I wish the browser makers could wake up one day and understand that 3D browser is not something humans want – maybe cyborgs could’ve totally drool all over – but not humans.

Pogo does a few things wrongly, they tried to reinvent the way people bookmark without a strong social element. They put all the 3D engine into this collections thing that look really cool if not for my 770 delicious link that basically hung the browser for a couple of minutes ’cause it’s generating screenies for the bookmarks. The 3D uses JavaScript which tends to give warnings due to script running too slowly.

And what’s with different names to the word ‘bookmark’. Internet Explorer calls it ‘Favorites’. Firefox calls it ‘Bookmarks’. Pogo calls it ‘Collections’. If I wrote a browser, I’ll call it – let me think, okay – ‘Elephants’. Whatever.

Another cool thing is the history browser, also uses screenshots of web sites. Pogo, unfortunately, is not intelligent enough to know how to give the appropriate screenshots, the offset is usually wrong and the screenies are either too big or too small never just right.

To worsen what already is bad enough, it uses Firefox 2 instead of 3 as the back end. Firefox 3 sorts out lots of memory issues and it’s amazing that I can now open 50 tabs and till smile. By the way, in Firefox 2, I used to open 50 tabs and chat with my friends on MSN just ’cause the browser is taking eons to respond. In Pogo, opening 12 tabs makes me cry.

On the lighter note, Pogo does have a nice logo. (Somehow reminds me of string theory.) I felt it could’ve been packaged into a Firefox plugin instead of compiling a whole browser out of it. Associating a web site with a screenshot is not enough, the screenshot is just too small to allow me to know what I am clicking on.

My impression of the browser wasn’t good, it’s trying too hard to be different but has not necessarily succeeded in the usability department. Good try on aesthetics. The social element is missing too and there is no way to way any Firefox Add-ons which is just a deal breaker. Stars! Yea, 2 stars out of 5.

[Pogo is just a project name and would probably be called AT&T Freestyle, AT&T Lenz or AT&T Bezel.]

Holy crap, I’ll close window if I see such a CAPTCHA:

CAPTCHA is an almost standard method of human-detection during comment posting, user registration and Google search engine. (Google thinks I am a bot. No, Google, your search engine is the bot, silly.)

However, it really shouldn’t be. Image CAPTCHAs are set up to deter bots, users with malicious intent and my friend in college. But it achieves this by imposing a penalty toward genuine website visitors.

CAPTCHAs are becoming hard to solve these days as image recognition improves. It’s unfortunate that most sites implement harder-to-read CAPTCHAs that it’s so distressing and laborious to just read the darn squashed up vowels.