The Open Rights Group (UK’s equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is two years old today. They fight for our digital civil rights (shoddy electronic voting schemes, software patents, all that kind of stuff) and are very good at it from what I’ve heard and seen. Go read all about them and please consider supporting them, if you haven’t already.
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Open Rights Group: Two Years Old!
November 19th, 2007Tags: freedom, org, rights -
Search interfaces
November 7th, 2007Tags: interface, maps, searching, webUgh. I just did a search on streetmap.co.uk for a latitude and longitude reference and it didn’t recognise it. I spotted the radio button to tell it what kind of search I’m doing and clicked again. Still no luck. Removing the comma between the two numbers got me what I wanted.
It is not difficult to detect when someone is searching for a latitude and longitude. It is a pair of floating point numbers with 13 decimal places. Who lives on a street named with 13 decimal places? How many businesses are named with just numbers such that I would require 13 decimal places to tell them apart?
And then, after the user goes out of their way to tell your software what to expect, why not accept a few variations of the input (though one lousy comma would hardly count as a variation to me).
I’d be better off with a pencil sketch map and a divining rod. No wonder these services are losing all their business to services like Google maps.
John Leach is a human being living in Leeds, UK.