Based on empirical evidence, I think just about any online form these days is a broken piece of junk. I tried ordering burgers online from The Habit and it only failed egregiously at the very end. So I hope that company immediately goes out of business as just desserts.

A main problem with any extra layers of security is that it is another layer that can go wrong. Google's 2 factor auth is sometimes pathologically incapable of sending a text message to my phone. In those cases I have sent myself an sms via other routes and they get through so I must guess that it is something Google is doing wrong. Yay. So then once I do get in I try to get some backup codes and save them, but the UX for that is weird and really bad and hateful as well. So all in all, a fuster cluck when it comes to user experience.

1. I do the online check in and get A boarding passes.
2. I print them out.
3. My printer does a bad job printing them out, dunno if they will scan at the gate.
4. Download the PDFs to my phone.
5. Think to see if the airline says that will work.
6. Their web page implies they have some special version / app that I should try to use, and that the way to get it is to say you want it when you check in.
1. but, uh, I already checked in?
7. Go to the web page to see if I can just type in the confirmation code to re-get the same boarding passes, but as mobile form as well.
8. After I type in the info, it tells me that I can check in.
1. BUT, UH, I ALREADY CHECKED IN!
2. if I click on "check in" will it kill my A's and give me I dunno Z's or something? I have no way of telling, and I don't really want to risk it.
9. Go to the app store and download the app and run it.
10. It asks me to log in, or "CONTINUE AS GUEST" (caps theirs).
11. I click guest... and wait... and then...
12. It gives me a god awful programmer art error dialog box about not being able to connect, "X ERROR Unknown Error while connecting" (oh the hate)
1. Doesn't tell me what they are trying to connect to.
2. Doesn't give me anything useful I could use to figure out what to do to fix the problem.

Have I mentioned recently how technology and the people who do stuff with it make me see red?

Update:

1. The 3rd time I touch to continue as guest, it gets in.
2. The app pretty much has the same horrible UX where it looks like I am taking a huge gamble, it has a CHECK IN button, which for all I know might kill my A's and give me Z's if I dare to press it.

P.S: Anybody (and it turns out to be a lot of people / orgs / sites) that uses I and L and 1 and O and o and 0 and Q etc. in their sekrit kodez is a freaking stupdenous idiot of dumb idiocy (oh the hate).

This is not saying anything new, but on the whole I think Android's biggest failing (and in particular vs. iOS) is in User Experience.

For example, the hardware tends to be under powered vs. what they try to do in the UI. Often when I am trying to swipe in Android Gmail, and other apps, things go all to heck. Either nothing swipes, or things swipe the wrong way, or things start to swipe but then think I did not swipe far enough and rubber-band back to where they started. Any number of completely incorrect user experiences from my user perspective. I just went through a minute of fighting with Gmail on this. What a bloody nightmare experience.

(Lest you claim that this is the fault of the handset folks, rather than of the Android OS folks and the overall ecosystem, I'll point out my current phone is a Moto E 2015 LTE, which I guess is in effect actually kind of a Google product, not some random 3rd party thing.)

So maybe iOS's market share will continue to recover, and eventually eke out Android, as people say, "forget that stuff!" to the Android UX.

Formalism is power.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/rank-polymorphism.pdf

My other band name really truly is <<The Right Abstractions>>.

"We also have a lot of crazy ideas for building out Kerf as a large scale distributed analytics system. Kerf is already a suitable terascale database system; we think we could usefully expand out to hundreds of terabytes on data which isn’t inherently time oriented if someone needs such a thing. There is no reason for things like Hadoop and Spark to form the basis of large scale analytic platforms; people simply don’t know any better and make do with junk that doesn’t really work right, because it is already there."