Flash in registration — Not at all great
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I could write a whole entry complaining about the (nonexistent) Mac support of the two Finnish [sic!] makers of heart rate monitors and sports wrist computers, Polar and Suunto. I’ll save that for later, however.
I felt a sense of hope when I found Polar Running Coach, a web-based software for maintaining the data collected by a Polar monitor. Maybe - just maybe - they would have been able to create an applet that is able to command the USB infrared port used to get the data out of my Polar S710. Unfortunately, I never got far enough to find out.
Someone at Polar seems to have thought it’d be neat to use Macromedia Flash for the registration process of the Running Coach. It’s not. It’s stupid as hell. It totally highlights the biggest usability and accessibility problems in Flash.
“But hey, 95% percent have Flash player, how could we possibly go wrong with? Besides, with it we can build as great-looking drop-down widgets as we want to. How cool is that?”
Here’s how my registration ended:
Now how cool is that? Especially after spending about ten minutes filling in information about myself. Note that there are no links I could use to back up to the previous step. And as the wizard is made in Flash, I can’t use my beloved back button because it will throw me in vaults out of the whole registration process. Complete bummer.
Oh, but we still have the cool drop-downs, don’t we? Using the standard html form widgets I can type “f”, “i” and “n” after I click on a country drop-down menu and I can be pretty sure I have Finland selected. Here, I end up to Namibia (via Falkland Islands and Iceland). You know, sometimes reinventing the wheel just results in an inferior wheel.
It goes without saying that I don’t really feel like trying again, despite the pretty please. However, the outcome is that I have a €350 heart rate monitor but am unable to download and analyze the data collected with it. The Mac OS Classic version of the old software (that I’ve never been able to launch on OS X) doesn’t really cut it.. C’mon Polar, you’ve always been a forerunner. Please start taking us other pioneers into account, too.
Well, as you know, Finland has been and is still monocultural, at least when it comes to computers. Macs are almost nonexistant and the big companies seem not to know anything about them Linux on the desktop.
Supporting Mac (or linux) is not a thing Finnish companies are interested in. Nokia has its SDKs and mobile phone related software just for Windows. And who would want to use Nokia’s data suite for Mac? It is one of the worst software I’ve ever seen.
Lately Nokia has been flirting a bit with Linux (their tablet, 770) and Mac (Nokia Collector software). At least the intrest in Mac seems to be solely for marketing purposes, “let’s sell this expensive fashion telephone to fashionable Mac users”. What is the issue with Linux, and how long the honeymoon lasts is still unknown.
Please ask Polar for better Mac support, there are a few starving Mac developers in this land who could be interested in porting the software :)
Jonathan,
That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I was only supposed to comment on their Flash-powered registration process in this post, I just couldn’t resist sneaking in a bit of Mac propaganda. Heck, that’s what you get when your day mostly consists of waiting for the WWDC keynote coverage.