Get your zing outta my zang!

Nik Rantlets No Comments ,

Don McAllister mentioned ZangZing on Twitter yesterday. I’d never heard of it, so I Googled it. It’s a photo-sharing service, similar to Flickr and whatnot. My love for Flickr has been steadily decreasing since Yahoo bought them, so I figured I’d check out this new thing. What I liked about it, immediately, is that it hooks into other services (including Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr), so importing your photos is a snap.

Anyway. After I’d signed up, they sent me a nice little welcome message via e-mail, at the bottom of which I read:

ZangZing nudity policy

Is it just me, or is this a little ridiculous? I have no photographs containing nudity, but I’m not offended by it. On the contrary, I’m kind of offended by this policy.

  • This blanket ban makes nudity feel dirty, as if every photo containing nudity were pornographic.
  • It also seems lazy: they can’t be bothered to implement proper filters, so instead they’re choosing to ignore a whole category of artistic expression.
  • I guess this means we can upload photos of animals only in silly costumes, right? Because otherwise, they’d be nude, and we can’t have that. (Like I said, ridiculous.)
  • It seems kind of counterproductive, no? Part of their spiel is, hey, aren’t you tired of having your photos all over the place? Now you can have them all in one place! Well, no, no we can’t, because those nude silhouettes and happy puppies splayed on couches still have to be posted to a “real” photo-sharing site, don’t they.

I’m sure I’m exaggerating and unclothed animals are fine, but still. In this day and age, such restrictions seem silly and detract from the site’s credibility. Until they reconsider, I can’t recommend them as a real alternative to Flickr. (To be fair, SmugMug is considered one of the more professional sites and they have this restriction in their TOS, too, so there’s that.)

This is how not to check for updates

Nik Rantlets No Comments , , ,

I was reading an article, earlier today, when I was interrupted by an Adobe Flash update notification. Not wanting to deal with the many browser tabs I had open at the time and not trusting Safari to handle them properly on its own if I quit and restarted the application, I decided to put off the update and clicked “Not now.”

Some time later, after everything had been processed and/or filed away, I quit Safari, opened the Flash preference pane, and clicked to check for updates.

My expectation? To see the normal prompt to update to the latest version, the one I’d previously dismissed. Instead, I was taken to the Adobe web site, where there were a small Flash widget displaying my current Flash version and a table displaying the latest versions of Flash for each platform.

So now I have to wait for the prompt to appear again or I have to download Flash manually to update it. Not a big deal, but come on, it’s so cumbersome and unnecessary! It’s the lack of attention to little things like this that tarnishes Adobe’s reputation. They may make applications that are industry standard, but installing and maintaining those applications are pains in the butt.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8