Re: Weather Dashboard Widget

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From: Paul Mison
Subject: Re: Weather Dashboard Widget
Date: 20:58 on 20 May 2005
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,

-- 
:: paul
:: historic light cone

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