For a long time I have used Yahoo TV to get my television schedule information. I was able to easily find out what was playing, in a clean and easy-to-read format. There weren’t any unnecessary bells and whistles, until now. Apparently Yahoo TV has been redesigned, and according to the logo it is now in beta. The new site focuses more on television news and video clips from upcoming shows, trying to remake itself into an entertainment portal complete with the over-the-top Flash and AJAX we would expect

Why does every well crafted and reliable site need to be reinvented? The site now uses Javascript everywhere to load sections of the schedule as you scroll the page. The page loads 10 channels at a time, causing a severe delay as each new section is loaded as you go down the page. This makes the page longer and filled with more ads, as there is an ad after each section. As each section of stations loads there is a significant stopage where you can’t even scroll the page and your browser becomes unresponsive as the information is loaded. This happened in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and it is completely unacceptable. Here is a picture of the next panel loading:

With Javascript off nothing shows on the page. There is no message, and no alternative non-Javascript mode. I also wonder if this new page is accessible to the blind. With this new design also comes lots of light blues reminiscent of every “Web 2.0″ site out there. Good job Yahoo, way to be original.

Here are small screenshots of both versions, courtesy of Google Desktop. I couldn’t get a better one of the old tv listings grid, so I chose to keep them both small. The original is on the left, and the beta is on the right. You can see that the original provided more information in less space, and it was extremely fast.

  

My advice to Yahoo: bring back the grid. Until then I will be using AOL Television’s TV Listings or Zap2it’s (which powers AOL’s TV listings), though neither has the fully concise layout that is easy to quickly scan. AOL’s is almost there but they have too much space above the fold and above the TV listings.

This morning I joined the throngs of people who have waited out in the cold for a Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately I was not so lucky. I got to the Best Buy here at about 8:30 am, and the line was already fairly long. I had my cute iPod Nano to pass the time and I was hopeful. That hope would be gone by the time the store opened at 10 am.

News quickly spread through the line that a Best Buy employee had been camped out since the night before and had a list of 69 people who were first to the line. According to this unnamed induhvidual the store would be going by his list and everyone else would be out of luck. At this time there were about 130 people in line. No one knew whether to believe him, and it was quickly pushed out of our minds. A little later there was some commotion and we would all later find out that they had apparently handed out tickets for the Wii. There were 60 Wiis and over 130 people in line, so I missed out. Many people had more than one ticket, and at least one person went around asking if anyone wanted to buy his ticket for $300. You would then have to pay $250 on top of that and it was just plain ridiculous. The woman ahead of me told him he was disgusting and to get back in line. That was the best display I had seen lately.

As I was leaving I saw a guy and his son with 3 Wiis and felt sick to my stomach. Many of the people on line were planning to sell their Wiis, and they won’t even wind up getting much for them online. In the end my experience was spoiled by the Nintendo haters who were just out to make a quick buck, the kind of people you hope will stay inside their nice warm house filled with the whirring of a PlayStation 3. There were no nice Nintendo fans at my Best Buy. At least not among the majority of the people who were able to buy a Wii. It looks like I will be waiting longer for my salvation.

Do you like testing out the coolest new projects around? Do you get joy from finding bugs? Then we want you to beta test Nexus Trade. We are building a great place for college students to buy and sell items to others nearby. This is your chance to help us make sure that everything works as expected when we launch.

More details are up at www.NexusTrade.com. And you can post comments here if you have any questions.

I just decided to blog live while djing on the air. You can check it out here at RadioFirefox.com. Unfortunately tonight’s episode isn’t anything special, but if Nathan Weinberg winds up calling in I might get a little peak at what’s happening at TechCrunch NYC. How dare they fill up the event before I could add my name to the list. lol. It’s a stretch as to whether he will call in, but one can always hope.

If this works well I might do it more often, and find a way to get the playlists up as the show is happening.

Radio Firefox: Live Blogging the Show: November 16

Tonight on Radio Firefox I have a great show for you. I will be going over the Democrats’ election win, and what they hope to accomplish. I will also cover some of the NJ race. The Spotlight on Security will cover Mozilla and Microsoft security updates. And there is some interesting developments happening in the SGA and Dining Services Committee.

I will be editing the show out of order, and hopefully having it up by Monday. It is just too important not to put online.

Zooomr is another photo sharing site, and by posting an uploaded picture I’m supposed to be able to get a free pro account. It has some nice features such as being able to save or embed varying sizes of any uploaded photo, and the pro account offers a lot more upload capacity (4GB/month) over Google’s Picasa Web Albums which I have been using lately. What I really like about Zooomr is the ability to click on a photo’s name and change it right there using AJAX. I love instantaneous results. You can also geotag your photos.

Now all I need is a scanner with ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) and I can finally get my trip photos from Spain and France online. That will let me scan a pile of photos automagically while I do other things that aren’t so labor intensive. The problem is that they are fairly expensive, in the $200-$300 range for a low-end scanner with ADF. It costs $100-$200 just to get a feeder that goes on top of an existing scanner, but the scanner I have was free after rebate and is therefore of poor quality. If you have any suggestions let me know.

(Via plaxoed)

Election day is almost here. On November 7th millions of Americans will head to the polls to cast their ballots for which candidate they think sucks less. Hopefully they will be informed, but it’s hard to find out where politicians stand on real issues as it nears election day. The world is full of sound bytes and misdirection.

I tried looking around online for a site that would do a side-by-side comparison of candidates stances and Vote-Usa.org was the best I could find. The problem with them is that they often either don’t have information on where one or all candidates stand on a specific issue, or the information they provide appears to be taken right from their campaign websites. The little information that is available doesn’t get to the point and causes confusion.

We need a single, unbiased resource that compiles a succinct list of what candidates have said they believe. This could also include their voting records when they have held a position before. The ideal site would also allow you to choose where you stand on issues and find out which candidate is more closely aligned with your personal ideology.