I struck upon a wonderful little idea which I’ve implemented in a simple plug-in I’m writing for a project I’m currently working on.., add a ‘variable_prefix’ parameter to your plug-in or module… allow devs using your add on to opt to have variables prefixed with any value.
This is really useful if your add on might have variables which conflict with another add on or native ExpressionEngine variables. This could also allows a dev to nest once instance of your plug-in in another without having to resort to embeds, they simply specify a tag prefix for the outer tag pair.
We’ve had out family iPad for some time now and whilst it truly is a ‘magical’ device it still falls a little short of being the perfect family computer. For many the iPad is a ‘personal’ device but for others it serves as a ‘shared’ device. Ours is used by all members of the family and often found in the lounge on the coffee table, or in the kitchen, or in one of the kids bedrooms!
What the iPad (or more specifically iOS) really lacks is multi user accounts though. Both my wife and I use the iPad a fair bit – I’d love to be able to check my mail on it but that means giving 3 young children access to my work mail account (hmmm!). By the same token the girls hate having to wade through screen after screen of ‘boy games’ and well myself and my wife can’t both be signed into Facebook at the same time.
The iPad is a social device which lends itself naturally to being shared, here’s hoping Apple makes more of this in a future software update! :)
It’s some time since we waved goodbye to the awful unreliable lump that was our Kia Sedona and back in 2009 I set myself the target of denying Kia £1 million in car sales to repay them for their glorious customer service ethos.
Well, just over 2 years later the blog posts here on the subject have amassed a rather reasonable 32,508 unique views… if each person that read about our experience with Kia was turned off from ever buying one then that’s a lot of potential customers down the drain.
Now it would be daft to assume that all those users are actually potential Kia owners (though they could be), instead lets work on the basis that only a teeny tiny 0.5% of those visitors were actually people who were considering buying a Kia and lets consider that the average Kia costs in the region of £10,000. Despite the small percentage this still suggests a rather impressive £1.6 million worth of potential sales now lost. Therefore I declare victory.
To close I’ll just say that I found this recent article about the planned demise of the Kia Sedona in 2011 a mildly amusing read, in particular the following line from a Kia company representative:
…production [of the Kia Sedona] will end due to reduced demand.
Well hopefully my readers made a small contribution to that reduction.
You might also want to read:
I was foolish enough to buy a Blu-ray player a few years back, how many times have I used it? Probably 3 or 4 times in the space of more than a year. It’s not that I don’t like watching movies, but the user experience with Blu-ray is nothing short of terrible. Khoi Vinh sums my thoughts up perfectly in his post Blu-ray Blues, the comments are well worth a read also – especially if you were ever an advocate of HD-DVD.
The fact that just over a month after switching from Santander to HSBC I’m already compiling a list of annoyances with their ‘online’ banking system says something I guess. Maybe I’m a bit of a moaner or maybe I just expected more from someone that claims their online banking system is ‘award winning’.
- Standing Orders: Don’t be fooled in to thinking that you are actually adding, editing and deleting your standing orders ‘online’. The reality is that changes are not live despite what the online banking interface might lead you to believe. The reality is that an email request is sent to some chap somewhere is HSBC and he manually processes these requests as and when he’s at his desk. Heaven forbid you might want to change a standing order on a weekend or any other time when ‘stand order man’ is away from his desk… you’ll just have to wait an unknown amount of time for the change to happen, meanwhile you’re in standing order limbo unaware of if the change you requested is actually going to happen or not.
- Beneficiaries: Want to use the HSBC online banking system to maintain a beneficiary list where two beneficiaries might have the same sort code and account number, forget it. You can’t do that. As much as I hate to say it – even Santander could manage this one. The problem here isn’t so much that the ‘legacy system’ behind the front end can’t handle multiple beneficiaries with the same account number and sort code, the problem is the user interface… rather that spouting a useless error code (HE7) at me why not just tell me what the problem is and advise as to how I can work around it.
This is an ongoing list which I’ll no doubt be adding to!
Update: I had a rather lovely letter back from HSBC advising me that they are currently working on a development to improve the beneficiaries system but that there was no planned further development of the currently ‘manual’ standing orders facility. If these issues bug you too why not send them an email to let them know...
