Turn Right Immediately After Temporal Distortion Field

Flaw with the printer driver?  Image captured for printing while repainting after the map was moved?  Who knows?

The time and space rift was moving north/northeast at 35 miles per hour
Click for full size

All I know is that I hoped I go through a shimmering curtain to a world where the developers cared about quality as much as they care about tweeting clever but trite insults about their disfavored presidential candidates  But all I got was closer to Arnold, Missouri.

UPDATE:

Commenter points out that the printed page tells you not to print directly from the page, but to use the Print Friendly option.  In the business, that’s what we call a work-around, and contrary to what your developers would tell you, it’s a subpar solution.

However, MapQuest still has a little problem on its hands: the page that displays in the Web browser does not contain this warning.

Here it is:

The MapQuest page that doesn't tell you not to use it wrong
Click for full size

Notice what’s missing there?  Oh, yeah, the admonition to use the Print Friendly view.  If you can find that button amid the clutter of advertising, maybe you’d use it.  My best guess, though, is that users probably just click the browser Print button first, which can yield the broken page I noted above.

Huh.  The page is smart enough to swap out the Don’t do that; use Print Friendly instead message (received only when user prints without using print friendly), but it’s not smart enough to swap out the bad map with the one it would have provided on the print friendly page.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 11:43 am by The Director and is filed under Failed Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

No Responses to “Turn Right Immediately After Temporal Distortion Field”

  1. pberry Says:
    October 17th, 2008 at 10:14 am

    You did print having selecting the printer-friendly option first, didn’t you? I mean, it’s still annoying when things turn out like this, but at least MapQuest are aware of this and have put a disclaimer at the top of their map pages.

  2. The Director Says:
    October 22nd, 2008 at 11:37 am

    I did not; actually, the disclaimer that appears on the printed page does not appear on the Web site when you’re looking at it; only on the printed page. See the update for details.