Two Slashes

As a very select few of you might know, I’m a (very) casual user of Qik.  For the uninitiated, Qik is a popular (especially now, thanks to the iPhone 3GS) video streaming application similar to Ustream or Justin.tv, the difference being that Qik requires a cell phone instead of a webcam and a computer.

My experience with Qik has been hit-or-miss, but generally it’s been a positive one, which is why I continued to use the service in the first place.  However, the events of the past hour or so have made me reconsider that position, especially now that I have a netbook I could use instead with my Justin.tv account.  Let me additionally point out the fact that the previous version of the Qik client I had on my phone worked perfectly.  It was familiar, it functioned as advertised, and I didn’t have any complaints with the way it worked on my phone.

Anyway, I generally consider it a polite gesture when a service decides to let me know that there’s something on my end I need to do to continue my use of the service.  I think that makes things feel a little more personal when you let the customer know that the latest and greatest is out and that there’s a tangible benefit to upgrading.  Qik, on the other hand, sent me this rather sparse e-mail this evening with the air of making it sound like something was broken.  Alright, stuff breaks, and I can understand that, but the unclear meaning of this e-mail was my first clue that I shouldn’t have bothered.

Given that it’s Labor Day, I’m taking a break from some of my schoolwork for the moment, and updating Qik shouldn’t take more than a few seconds, I decided to oblige the e-mail’s request and update.  That was my mistake.  Oops.

In contrast to my previous experiences with Qik, this “update” seems more like a leap backward than it does a step forward.  If you’ll take a look at the picture I’ve included, there are two things I would like you to notice.  First, if you’ll examine the screen on my phone for a moment, you’ll notice that my Treo Pro appears to be capturing the episode of House I was watching as well as it possibly can…but that it’s doing so with the user interface rotated clockwise.  Unfortunately, something between the client and the website isn’t properly functioning, because, while I should be seeing Hugh Laurie’s face on my 22” LCD, instead I’m seeing severe artifacting and the vague suggestion that it might be the fifth season of Fox’s hit show I’m watching.  I’ve tested this multiple times (on both a cellular 3G connection and Wi-Fi), and I get the same results all the way around each time.  And, while I’m not going to point fingers, I think I know where the problem is because there are plenty of people still broadcasting as you read this.

There’s a huge difference between releasing a test version of your software with the expectation that these bugs are present and that they will be reported and sending e-mails trumpeting end-user updates to your legion of users, updates that should be devoid of functionality quirks like this.  What am I supposed to do with Qik now that I can’t actually use it for the one function it’s designed to perform?  I’m currently slogging back trying to find the CAB for the previous version of the client, the one that actually works, in hopes of moving forward and fixing this mess, but I’m not entirely concerned given that it’s not something I use on a daily basis anyway.

All the same, let this be a lesson to the rest of you, one that you can probably apply regardless of the industry you’re in and regardless of whether you’re technically inclined or not.  If you’re going to ask that your users (or customers, or whatever term you use for the people you deal with in your line of work) should take action in some form or another, make sure that they don’t get screwed for obliging you.  Do your homework, run your test cases, follow through on your research and quality assurance; in other words, make sure that you’re not asking people to make the jump from a Ferrari to a station wagon.

Edit (9/9/2009): Apparently Qik is now aware of the issue and suggests that users experiencing issues like this backpedal to an alternate version of the software that wasn’t designed for the phone.  Great job, guys!

Alright, so the title of this post is a complete and utter lie.  Read even half of the post and it might make sense.

Rather than bore you to death with the usual tirade about the poor quality of a video game or rant about the status of things on the Internet, I wanted to take a few seconds to point out some of the obvious flaws in our health education system, as revealed by HealthBase.  HealthBase, according to TechCrunch, is a medical content aggregator (I call their approach a search engine, mind you) designed to help you drill through the muck and straight to an answer.  Think WebMD, but with answers supplied by the Internet at large.

I decided that, given the nature of some of the answers I received to my queries, as well as the popularity that this particular Yahoo! Answers post (about how babies are formed, you bum) reached with some of my friends at school last year, I should answer that time-old question first.  And, as I might have hinted at with the title, HealthBase thoughtfully suggested that children are caused by secondhand smoke.  Discussing this answer with a friend, we came up with the explanation that this makes sense when you consider a drunk college girl at a smoky bar leaving with a guy she doesn’t know.  Given an image like that, I’m not surprised at all at the confusion.  I’m glad that HealthBase was able to answer that question for me.

Moving along, I decided that it was also imperative that I brush up on my profession-related injuries, so I decided to look up treatments for carpal-tunnel syndrome.  If you ignore the fact that the suggestion is based upon another name for CTS, blackberries are a suggested treatment.  If I do end up suffering from carpal-tunnel at some point in the future, I’ll make sure to stock the fridge up with as many as I can.

HealthBase also does an excellent job of educating you on the cons of insanity, which include brain dysfunction, the killing of blood relatives, and the ever-detailed “so horrific.”  I can’t wait for people who kill their families to start using this information for insanity pleas at their trials.  On the positive side, however, being classified as insane means that you have achieved your goals, which makes me wonder just how bad insanity really is.

Additionally, being a fan of House, I was curious about how HealthBase would hold up as an aid while watching episodes of the show.  Hulu (which is running through the fifth season as of this posting) sounded like a good place to pick a test episode from, and so I ended up watching “The Social Contract” (Hulu link, episode recap) through.  Borrowing from diagnoses made throughout the show, we learn that a “valid” treatment for peripheral nerve damage is manipulation (Wait, is that a House reference itself? ) and that Weil’s disease can be caused by philosophy through appropriate searches performed using the service.  So there is a reason for House’s character development to have taken the path it has, after all…

While this website may just be the ticket to confirming that snorting vinegar cures hiccups when you’re trying to impress friends, I think I’ll leave my medical opinions to a licensed professional, and I suggest that you do the same.  Frankly, I’m a little terrified that one day it might suggest that the best treatment for dandruff is something more terrifying than responsibility, like amputation or open-heart surgery, and seeing as we can’t trust people with simple things like GPS, it’s only a matter of time before we get to hear stories revolving around the use of this site unless its quality is improved.  On the other hand, though, I didn’t know that stupidity went hand-in-hand with the contents of your wallet.

In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that insanity query.  I’m undoubtedly going to have even more fun watching my incoming search terms now.