As many of you know I used to work at CNET. It’s been over a year since I left but I occasionally still work on things there and I still care about how things go there (and I still like CNET – it was a great place to work). But when I see the company do stupid things it still burns (just as it did when I worked there).

In the spring of this year a coworker there released a JavaScript UI interface for mobile apps for the iPhone (CiUI). This script lets you turn a mobile interface into an animated, ajax driven experience without writing any of your own JavaScript and it’s very tiny. I use it for Iminta’s mobile interface and it saved me a ton of time.

For some reason, the iPhone experience that they released 9 months ago is gone and what’s there now totally sucks.

Before:

After:

If you want to see the old version in action, it’s still around. Be sure to view in an iPhone/iPod Touch or in Safari.

At first glance, they don’t look that different, but let me count the ways in which this new version sucks:

• You can’t search??? – WTF? Who is this for? If I can’t search for something – news, a product, whatever, am I using this thing? No.
• The initial page that loads on the current version is a total of 242K (the old one is 82K). They apparently don’t get the basic principle behind the word “mobile.”
• You can browse by category, but the navigation is a select list. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a huge love for the iphone’s select list.
• When you select a category, you get a page of recent reviews (another 200+K) but if you want to refine those results (still no search!!!) you get a page with two dozen select lists. Changing any one of these immediately moves you to the results page, which means you can’t choose, say,  LCD AND 1080P resolution for TVs.
• There really isn’t any effort put in place to try and make it look like much of an Apple native app. No animations or anything, and every page is a full load – no ajax optimizations, so I get to download that header, footer, the background images, and css all over again. Thanks!
• Half of the screen is now dominated by not one, but TWO banner ads.

What made me think of this was that Wired just released its own iPhone app (an actual native app – not just a web app) and while it’s not awesome, it appears that they at least care about the user experience.

I haven’t spoken to my friend who worked on the original iPhone app for CNET but I’m sure he’s not happy. It’s obvious he didn’t build the current piece of crap.

/rant

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under CNET JS Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.