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Saturday, January 02, 2010

The Solution Is Simple: Buy A Netbook And Test There!

Something every web developer should do, is test whatever Web related stuff into new generation devices such netbooks, low cost notebook, old PCs and/or smart phones.
If a non techie user surfs a website and the latter one horribly slows down his "device", in the most common case, and specially if the website is "famous", this user will blame its wonderful piece of technology, rather than the infamous designer/developer that created the problem.

This happened recently, as example, in Hotamail and with the latest Sherlock Holmes Flash banner.



The Solution Is Simple

Starting with the fact that Junior Flash developers are as responsible as advertisement hosts, unable to filter proper banners from annoying one, if a company would like to provide these heavy computation banners it should simply make a little investment as a whatever Atom CPU based device is (even just an all in one motherboard is enough!).
Even better, it could recycle a generic good old Pentium III based PC in order to be sure that computation is reasonable, where for reasonable I mean no more than 50% as maximum peak.

As an old ActionScript developer, I've always found disturbing the fact people paid to create ads, are too often unaware of problems they could cause.

I have already commented here or elsewhere old Tiscali or IBM heavy banners, recently improved and much less painful for low cost CPUs, I still find ridiculous that in 2010, the beginning of the mobile and low power consumption era, a good movie as Sherlock Holmes is could be sponsored in such obtrusive way: obtrusive for nowadays net dedicated devices: please change it!

5 comments:

qFox said...

Hi. Your RSS feed seems to be malfunctioning. There is no short description, the link for an item is pointing to the rss feed itself and as a result, the rss feed itself shows only the title of your last blog... without a link to your site (when opened in a browser, for instance).

I'm not sure whether you can fix that at all, but it's really annoying for feed followers..

Thought you might like to know that :)

Andrea Giammarchi said...

shell I file a bug into Blogger platform?
"My" RSS is not mine, is the platform one.
In any case, nothing you said happens in my Google Reader.
Which feed reader are you using?

Jani Hartikainen said...

Good advice there. Another idea might be to use a virtual machine.

One of the problems with Flash ads is in my opinion that a lot of graphics people who do Flash aren't exactly programmers - they just do their fancy effect and if it's fine on their PC they don't really know anything else.

ps. I'm also using Google Reader and this post showed up fine there just now.

Andrea Giammarchi said...

Jani a virtual machine not necessary emulates cheap CPUs properly.
In any case, this is the reason I decided to buy a netbook to develop web stuff, I always and instantly know if my code is "harming" CPUs ;)

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