joeblog

Well, this is just brilliant. HandBrake tells me that I have an update and should I install with the new version? Of course! It only makes sense doesn’t it? I then restart the app and… wait. Can’t restart the app. It’s rendered inoperable since I have a Power PC and not an Intel Mac. Awesome. Just awesome.

It's cracked! Ya get it? Huh?

I do enjoy Cracked.com. I find the writers more humorous than say, The Onion, who are more newsy and political by nature. Not my cup of tea. The consistent foolishness of the human race is closer to the grist the Cracked team enjoys milling. So, in this new age of mobile compatibility, I was, of course, overjoyed to find an iPhone app that accessed the current Cracked newsfeed. At first. As I continued to enjoy the wry wit of the Cracked team, I discovered that their iPhone app was lacking in features that most basic RSS apps have by default. And they charge .99 cents for the thing. Is the joke on me?

Anyway, in the Cracked tradition of listing 5-10 things that drive them mad (ho ho… that’s a joke a son; you’re too low to the ground) I’ve compiled my own little list. Enjoy.

1. A Search.
There’s a huge archive of great Cracked articles online, so why make me exit the app, go to Safari and try to read their non-mobile site?

2. Being Able to Pop Out a linked URL.
It’s great that any app can browse from within its’ confines, but most of them are slow and rather pointless. Why wouldn’t you just code it so the article would display in Safari or add in a “save to Instapaper” feature for offline reading? Are you trying to keep me in the app for a reason? Fair enough. I get it – with users attention spans akin to a shit-addled rat, we must keep eye-balls on the subject at hand. This, then, brings me to the next bone-headed annoyance…

3. The “GUI”.
If I do have to leave the app to, for example, look up something triggered by the hilarious and yet, well-researched articles in Cracked, how about being in the same spot in the article I was reading when i return? Every time I do something – answer a call or get out of the app to research a fact to see if they’re bullshitting me, I am always greeted with the top news-feed on my return. This is confusing and unnecessary.

Now... uh... where was I again?

4. Zooming into an article’s text or image.
The captions under images within a Cracked article are a great underlining of an already humorous diatribe. Why not let us read them on an iPhone? Try clicking on the image below. Frustrating isn’t it? Same goes for pictures. Maybe someone wants to see a close-up of an image of a Hooter’s waitress. (Not me, someone else.) I can tap to get it on it’s own, then zoom in, but when I exit the viewing “interface”, I am shot back up to the beginning of the article. The app also pops out the bare jpeg like I was on a web page with poor coding. Knowing how hi-larious and yet sometimes long-winded the Cracked author can be, this requires repetitious scrolling down to where I was reading.

Can you read this? Didn't think so.

5. More nudity.
They’ve apparently taken care of this in the past few posts.

Well over-all, until Cracked does some serious work on this app, I’ve just grabbed their RSS feed via MobileRSS. I’ll cross my fingers and wait for an update.

It's so true. Well, consistency is a virtue.

Source: the future stack