Category: Rant

Firethorn released a pretty cool iPhone app today that allows mobile banking (check balances, transfer funds… etc). But Citibank is simply not ready for this roll out.

First the website on CitiMobile was buggy. Then I found out they don’t service the iPhone. I wonder how much longer I can take their crap before going with BoA or another tech savvy bank in terms of customer-facing applications…

Why am I still banking with them anyway?!

Update: Citibank has been rolling out incremental updates to the app. Unfortunately it still sucks and is not very intuitive when it comes to mobile UI. Some companies just don’t get it.

I’ve written Volusion a few times. The first time I used Volusion (version 4) it really sucked in terms of UI (though the commerce portion was pretty good). And many of the problems in V4 were addressed in V5. So kudos to Volusion for noticing what sucked and made improvements upon them.

The good on V5:

1. Much simplified templates. No more nested ASP codes that one may accidentally delete/alter and break the entire store. It’s now easier than ever for any designer types to make modifications to the store’s front page.
2. Way better administration console on the back end compared to V4. Cleaner UI with improved tool tips.
3. Great documentation now with video tutorials and an active community forum.
4. Ample email tech support.
5. Easy to copy/paste Div IDs that would ultimately to be replaced by generated codes. Volusion has good documentation on them too.

Now the bad on V5:

1. Templates are somewhat messy and limiting. For example, it’s hard to change the way the featured products are dynamically laid out on the homepage. There are tables upon tables upon tables nastily nested within each other with the generated codes — I’ve never seen a more ugly generated code with tables like that.
2. Web 2.0 functionalities need to apply (unless they were implemented by Volusion). It’s a little dubious that neither Prototype nor jQuery were allowed to run on Volusion because somehow it breaks the

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   $

   functions that make those Javascript libraries so beautiful and powerful to use.

3. It’s one thing to produce generated code, but it’s another to NOT give them good ID or class labels so that us designer/coder types can at least manipulate the look and feels more easily. It’s not unusual to target a table nested 3 or 4 layers down with CSS selectors trying to get something look just right.
4. Tables are evil, especially nested ones. At least have the sense of giving us the chance to alter/modify those templates that were generated from the ASP code (i.e. featured products). For example, give us the template that generates the output of each product. Even if they are just tables, show them to me and allow me to replace all those tables with nice and easy DIV tags!
5. About the only thing that someone can really customize is the homepage. Everything else is pretty much locked down (or at least I couldn’t find a way to modify the other product pages in any meaningful way). In other words, customization is limited only to the homepage (layout wise), everything else all you can do is font sizes, colors and what not (maybe some graphics)… that is if you know your CSS (Thank you, Firebug and Safari 3 Web Inspector)
6. Volusion claims that they have fixed the transparency problems with

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   .png

   files. They lied. PNG files will show like a sore thumb in IE6 and earlier. And don’t bother to include one of those

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   .htc

   fixes in the header or CSS either. Volusion doesn’t allow them.

7. Instead of using standard Prototype and other popular Javascript libraries, Volusion opts to use some commercial package that is 3rd rate at best in performance and generated output.
8. The pages are pretty slow to load. I’ll bet it’s because of all the nested tables. It’d be in Volusion’s best interest to cut down the load on CPUs on those nested tables per page so that its overall server performance can increase for everyone!
9. Email support is getting pretty slow in replying issues. It used to take mere hours, now the turn around is the next day.

I hope Volusion fixes at least the problems with Javascript libraries so that I can use Prototype and Scriptaculous to enable my clients’ sites to be more visually interesting (without constant page refreshes!). The next big deal would be to allow more flexibility with templates elsewhere.

Otherwise, I think Volusion is still a decent package. It’s just that many of the stuff they implemented are still stuck in 1998.

Brian and I are supposed to start a project on a site that would help consumers make more informed decisions on products they consume on daily basis. It’s going to be a site where anyone with Internet (or heck, an Internet phone like the iPhone) would be able to find out immediately all they’d need to know about a certain product they are buying: materials used to manufacture them, labor conditions, political influences of the manufacturer, environmental impacts/footprints….etc.

So I was doing some reading and research on the underlying software and how I’d build or modify it to work the way Brian had envisioned. I went back to some bookmarks I saved for this project from a couple of months ago and was surprised that some of them had already gone offline! And then I dug deeper and did more reading and realized that a lot of useful info on how I’d approach the project had all but disappeared!

We have all been relying on the availability (or the perception of) and immediacy of the Internet too much nowadays. We expect everything at our finger tips through the power of Google. But most of the time we fail to retain the information the good old fashion way — make a copy of it… This is frustrating… So I guess from now I will just use OSX’s “Print to PDF” feature more liberally when I see a keeper on the web….