venomous porridge

jacob:

dwineman:

If you use the Tumblr iPhone app to read your Dashboard, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes a post will appear to have its margins set too wide, so you can only see the left side of it. It happens when there’s a URL or other long block of non-whitespace characters, which screws up the text wrapping.

I don’t know if this is a new feature or it’s been there all along and I just noticed it, but here’s how you get to the rest of the text: Drag from right to left with two fingers. The offending post will scroll horizontally all by itself, leaving everything else where it is. If this works because Tumblr’s developers did some magic to enable it: thanks, guys. It’s always nice to see things improve.

Hah! I added this feature when we updated the dashboard for the new version of the iPhone app. To my disappointment, I assumed it just flat out didn’t work. Neven Mrgan explains why the two finger gesture is required:

Any time an element on a webpage viewed on the iPhone implements its own scrolling mechanism you scroll it using the two-finger gesture. This is because the single-finger scroll is reserved for Safari’s top dog, the viewport.

Awesome! Glad I left that code in there. And thanks for showing me how to use my own feature…

Hey, cool. So there’s the answer: the two-finger drag didn’t work until very recently, and apparently I discovered it before Tumblr did! Such a strange place, this Internet.

If you use the Tumblr iPhone app to read your Dashboard, you’ve probably noticed that sometimes a post will appear to have its margins set too wide, so you can only see the left side of it. It happens when there’s a URL or other long block of non-whitespace characters, which screws up the text wrapping:

I don’t know if this is a new feature or it’s been there all along and I just noticed it, but here’s how you get to the rest of the text: Drag from right to left with two fingers. The offending post will scroll horizontally all by itself, leaving everything else where it is:

If this works because Tumblr’s developers did some magic to enable it: thanks, guys. It’s always nice to see things improve.

weselec:

When I encounter something that confuses me or just moves too goddamn fast, my first inclination is to blame it for being misguided or some shit. The Venture Bros AIN’T THAT. That show is outright amazing and I am dumb for not keeping up and you should be watching it because it transcends humor into some other realm where comedy only exists for the intelligent. My god.

I sometimes try to tell people that Venture Bros. is the funniest, best-written show ever to appear on Adult Swim, and that it would be much more successful if it weren’t part of a programming block designed to deliver, in concert with the peaks and valleys of its viewers’ various psychotropic flume rides, ads for restaurants whose chief virtue is that you can go there right now and get your fix without even remembering where your wallet is because when you sat down on the couch you got for free off the street at the end of last semester you absorbed enough loose change in your buttocks’ meaty folds to buy a six-pack of chimichurrupalitos and if you hurry you’ll only miss one 11-minute “episode” of that show with the talking meatball actually that one’s pretty funny I like it when Carl touches himself wait weren’t we going to get food at some point.

No one ever listens.

funsizebytes:

Tumblr 1.1 for the iPhone is out. App Store Link

Reblogging is still a big bag of hurt. In case you thought that might have been important enough to get working on the iPhone.

It does other things. apparently.

Yes, reblogging is still as broken as it used to be, if not more so: there now seems to be no way to cancel a reblog without quitting the app. The Cancel button is inexplicably missing, there’s no Back button anywhere in the interface, and clicking on the Tumblr logo opens the desktop Dashboard in a pop-up.

As far as I can tell, all the things that were awful about the 1.0 Tumblr app are still awful in the 1.1 Tumblr app, except that now it doesn’t reload your dashboard at page one every time you breathe on it. So that’s nice, at least.

But by far the worst misfeature is the way it displays photo posts. The iPhone OS provides a perfect solution: the two-finger pinch/stretch gesture, which dynamically zooms in and out of images; plus, you can double-tap to make any image instantly resize to fit the screen. It’s precisely this feature that makes web browsing on an iPhone more comfortable than on any other mobile device.

Yet the iPhone Dashboard intentionally disables this great feature, instead providing just two choices of image size: thumbnail (way way too small) and 100% (way way too big, so you have to pan around to see the whole image). In other words, the OS has a fit-to-screen feature built in, and Tumblr’s developers actually wrote extra code to disable it. What a tragic, boneheaded mistake. The workaround used to be turning off the iPhone Dashboard, but that option’s gone now.

(Tumblr actually isn’t alone in making this mistake. The iPhone version of Flickr Mobile does the same stupid thing, but at least Flickr provides an app that’s actually usable.)

I say this with love: it’s time for Tumblr to grow up. Fix the bugs. Hire usability experts. Build a rich API and test, test, test. Get your stuff working so well—make your user experience so utterly painless—that you can do silly things like Sharks vs. Cats and Dashboard marriage proposals from time to time without looking like college kids drunk on venture capital.

Oh hey, Unsubscribe Guy. It’s us again. No, don’t get up, this won’t take a moment. We just stopped in to confirm that we saw your No Trespassing sign. Great sign, by the way. Really nice work.

Anyway, if that sign was a mistake, or if you ever change your mind about the trespassing thing, give us a ring. We’ll keep all our photos of your home and family on file just in case. By the way, you might want to close the bathroom door when you pee. And maybe get that mole looked at. There’s links to some excellent clinics right on our website. You know about our website, right? Here, I’ll just leave the URL right there on your coffee table in case you need it.

OK, that’s it. You are totally one-hundred-percent unsubscribed now, mister. Have a nice day, and we’ll see you tomorrow. I mean never. Ha ha, “tomorrow,” what am I saying? Boy it’s been a long day. No, don’t worry, we are out of here.

Unless you change your mind. You didn’t change your mind, did you? Just thought I’d ask. OK bye.

Hot Ding Dong?

Go read Sean’s plaintext-password story (and followup), because it’s hilarious. I have one of my own.

Years ago, I registered an account with Equifax to get a copy of my credit report. They sent me a confirmation email containing my password, in plaintext. Normally I would have shrugged it off, but this was a. Fucking. Credit. Bureau. The account I had just created contained enough of my personal information to make an entire bad-check-writing Wineman clone army.

So I called them. I explained how they had endangered my privacy and potentially even my personal safety by emailing that password to me in plaintext. Anyone who managed to intercept that email—and who knows how many servers it had passed through or been stored on—could impersonate me, download my credit report, apply for credit in my name, or worse.

The representative calmly replied that I was perfectly safe. Why? Because my password was of no use by itself, and anyone using it would have to guess my username.

What?

That’s right, as long as I kept my username secret, they insisted, it was OK for them to give out my password.

But I made up my password, I said in a tiny incredulous voice, and I carefully chose a secure one. My username is the same as my real name.

Maybe you should have picked a less obvious username, then, they said. No, you can’t change it now. Sorry. Bye.

My desk still has the forehead marks.