Tag Archives: bug

Bug in Gmail Message Time?

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Every so often I come across a user experience that is most likely a bug but could also possibly be by design. Here’s a good example. I often write myself emails through Gmail to serve as future reminders. Essentially overloading e-mail and leveraging it as a todo list. After sending myself an email from my laptop this evening, I noticed that Gmail told me that I sent the email 3 minutes ago – even though I had just sent the email. After some investigation, I saw that Gmail uses two different data sources to figure out when an email was written and how long ago it was written. Let’s take a look with a sample email: 

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As can be seen in the second image above, 7:54 PM is based on the actual and correct time (according to Google’s servers) as to when the email was written. “3 minutes ago” turns out to be based on my computer’s internal clock. This can be easily reproduced by opening up the settings in OS X and changing the computer time to some time different than the correct time. 

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Bug in Facebook Friends of Friend Navigation (iOS app)

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Noticed a bug while looking through my friend Joseph’s list of friends on Facebook.

Here’s what I’m shown first when I go to browse his friends. As expected, I see his list of friends sorted alphabetically and I’m shown the friends at the top of that list.

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After scrolling through the list, I encounter one of my other good friends Tom:

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…and I click through to view his timeline:

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When I’m done viewing his timeline, I touched the “friends of Joseph” menu item in the top left section of the page. As a user, my expectation was to be taken back to Joseph’s friend list at the exat spot where I originally selected – namely the T’s where Tom’s name exist. However, I am taken back to the top of the list:

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FB iPhone App Bug: Search Doesn’t Remember What You Like

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Noticed a strange bug when searching for a business page on the Facebook iPhone App. Even thought I had previously liked the business, the search results still displayed a hollowed out thumbs-up icon that indicates I have not yet liked the business. Here’s how to reproduce the bug.

1. Start with a Facebook Page you’ve already visited and liked. Search for this Page in the iPhone app:

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2. Just in case you haven’t liked it yet, double check, and press down on the empty thumbs-up icon to like the page again:

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3. Visit the page and confirm that you have liked the page:

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4. Touch the top level menu to search again. Here you will see your previous search query correctly displayed in the liked state:

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5. Then, clear out the search box:

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6. Finally, search for the same page again. Now, you will see the page displayed again, but it is displayed incorrectly as if it is not in the liked state.

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Twitter Bug: Incorrect Redirect

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Noticed a bug in the Twitter web flow when a non-signed-in user attempts to view another user’s Following list. For example, I was attempting to view the list of Twitter handles that Bill Simmons follows.  

Steps to reproduce: 

1. While you are not signed into your own Twitter account, go to a Twitter page and click on the Following module:

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2. At this point, you will be redirected to the sign-in flow. Presumably, this is because Twitter doesn’t want guest users (not signed in) to view this information: 

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3. After sign-in, you should be redirected to the user’s list of handles they are following. However, you are incorrectly redirected to your own Home feed:

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Amazon iPhone App Missing Sales Rank That is Available in Mobile Web

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Discovered another case of a disparity between a product’s iPhone app and the same product’s Safari mobile web app on the iPhone. I was browsing for some books on the Amazon iPhone app and was curious to see what the Amazon Sales Rank of a particular book was. Everywhere I looked in the product description, I was surprised to see that I could not find it. So I turned to the mobile web app to see if it existed there. Lo and behold, I found the sales rank in the product details section of the mobile web app product page:

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Then I returned to the iPhone app to see if I could find it in the same section. Surprisingly, I found the same section with all of the same pieces of information for the book, except for one: the sales rank.

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I’m fairly certain that this is a bug and that if Amazon has made the decision to show this piece of information to the user in the mobile web view, there’s no reason not to show the same information in the iPhone app view. Especially since they are showing all other pieces of information (i.e. ISBN numbers, number of pages, shipping weight, etc.) in the same Product Details view.

iOS 6 Bug: Assistive Touch + Multitasking View + Siri Doesn’t Work

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Assistive touch is a feature in iOS that lets you enter multi-touch gestures using just one finger. This feature is off by default and can be enabled via the iOS settings. Here is what assistive touch looks like in the iPhone:

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Recently, I discovered a bug with assistive touch that does not let the user get to Siri from the assistive touch menu while simultaneously in the “multi-tasking” view. Here are the steps to reproduce the bug:

1. Double click the iPhone home button in order to enter the multi-tasking view

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2. Touch the assistive touch icon on the screen in order to also enter the assistive touch view

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3. Touch the Siri option

Actual results:

Nothing happens – user is not shown Siri. User sees same screen as step (1) above. 

Expected results:

User is shown Siri 

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Glitch in iPhone Date Module

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When you go to set a contact’s birthday in the iPhone date module, you will notice something strange if you go back in time quite a bit. By scrolling the year field as fast as you can, you can relatively easily reach the absolute end of time as it pertains to the iPhone date module. When you do this, you’ll notice something strange. The year “1” repeats twice at the beginning. Instead of the years going 0, 1, 2, 3, 4…, the years go 1, 1, 2, 3, 4…

Originally, I thought that maybe this was due to the module incorrectly repeating the year “1” twice. But this is not what is happening. It actually has the year “0” but it is listed as the year “1”. What do I mean by this? Technically, the year “0” was a leap year but the year “1” wasn’t. So if you go to the first “1” (which was supposed to be “0”), the date module will let you choose the month and day February 29. But if you try to do the same for the second “1”, the date module will not let you. 

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Google Finance Institutional Ownership Metric is Broken

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Institutional ownership refers to the percentage of a company’s shares that is owned by large institutional investors such as mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, etc…

Most finance sites that provide stock quotes also track this metric. Based on what I can see, it looks like Google Finance may have a technical issue or two with the data they are showing for this metric.

I’ll provide two examples. The first is VeriFone. According to the Google Finance quote, this company has an institutional ownership of 103%. No need to double check with other finance sites. Already we can see that this is technically impossible (as the highest amount of ownership is by definition 100%).

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The second example is Google. According to the Google Finance quote, this company has an institutional ownership of 66%. Based on my limited knowledge of the stock market, this seemed way too low of a number. So after double-checking with a couple of other sites (Yahoo Finance & Etrade), I’m assured to know this number is actually closer to 83%.

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Most likely the Google Finance Institutionally Owned metric is simply outputting a number it gets from a stock service data feed. It could very well be the case that this feed is what is feeding the site the corrupted information. But either way, this is something that should be fixed.

Unnecessary Error Message in LinkedIn Twitter Flow

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After signing into LinkedIn, you are taken to a personalized Home page. At the top, similar to Facebook, you will see a status update share module. In the bottom right hand corner of the module, near the Share call to action, you will see a checkbox to share the same status on Twitter. 

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If you are using this feature for the first time, you will be taken to a page hosted by Twitter that asks for your Twitter credentials and permission to have the LinkedIn web app post to your Twitter account:

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By clicking on the Cancel, and return to app link, you are taken back to LinkedIn, but you are shown the following unnecessary error message: 

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The correct user experience would be to either show one of the following: 
1. An informational message upon returning to LinkedIn
2. Not showing any informational or error message upon returning to LinkedIn 

 

Twitter Mobile Registration Content Bug

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Noticed an interesting error message when going through the Twitter registration flow on the Safari browser on the iPhone.

Let’s start with the main Twitter landing page shown when the user goes to http://www.twitter.com:

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When you click on Sign up, you will see the registration page:

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Here’s the interesting part. If you leave all of the fields empty and click on Sign up, you will see the error messages for each field that you did not properly fill out.

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All of the error messages make sense, except for the first one that is shown if the user does not enter their name. The text content is: translation missing: en, settings, name, hint

It’s pretty clear that instead of showing the correct error content, the app is showing some “code” content most likely from a configuration file. In this case, my guess would be that “en” refers to the English language, “name” refers to the text field for the error message, and “hint” refers to the name of the error content field that needs to be served to the user.