S went to print some photos the other day, and what was supposed to have been a simple exercise turned out to be a very frustrating one for both of us. I was utterly amazed to discover that even on the eve of 2009 there are web sites that think the world is only viewed through Windows…

S's and my respective creative sides are being adequately satisfied by the iLife suite on the Mac, but there are times when we need to get the pictures out of the silver tower and onto other media—on this occasion paper, for albums and so on. A large retailer here has part of their floor space in each store set aside for those photo printing kiosks, and I introduced S to the art of putting photos onto a USB stick so that she could print some photos when next she went there…

On her return from the shop, she reported that we hadn't successfully put the photos she wanted onto the stick. When she'd plugged the stick in, she'd found only less than half of the photos we'd stored there. Sure enough, when I plugged the stick in all the files were there safe and sound. Strange thing was I could find nothing in common about the files (uppercase/mixedcase filename, long or 8.3 filename, datestamp, etc) that would have yielded the number of photos that the kiosk had found on it.

Annoying, but life is too short to worry about it. After all, this same retailer was plastering adverts of their new web-based photo printing service… S could submit the photos online for printing and pick them up from the store later.

<sarcasm>This is where the fun really started.</sarcasm>

Their app is Flash-based but seems to have some Java involved as well. While it loaded quickly enough, the app portion of the web page had an incongruous grey background that just looked dodgy. S had to create an account and sign onto the site just to get this far though, which was a bit annoying.

The workflow seemed to be to create an album, upload pictures to the album, then select photos from the album for processing. Creating the album went fine, but when the upload function was selected there were no action buttons visible to complete the operation! S was using Safari, but Firefox made no difference.

Then I suggested she use her laptop, which runs Ubuntu 8.04. The situation actually seemed a bit better to start with, as instead of the upload function showing an embedded file selection dialog like it did on the Mac we got a "normal" GNOME file dialog box. However, only some of the photos showed again: this time, it was because they had hard-coded a non-modifiable filename filter for the dialog that was only picking lower-case file extensions!

Trying to work around this, I mounted the stick manually with different mount options. I succeeded in getting all but one of the files showing with a lowercase name, and a rename fixed that one. Back in the web page however, it still didn't like us: any file chosen from the dialog box resulted in a nonsensical error message followed by a "You have selected no files to upload" dialog.

S was beyond caring by this stage (she has a very low threshold for being stuffed around by technology). She went to Snapfish after a friend's recommendation, and found a well-designed and easy to use WEB site that required no downloads or other junk.

So why did this wind me up to the point of spending all this time blogging it? Because nowhere on Big-W's site is there any mention of browser or operating system compatibility. Not even a "we've tested only on Windows, Mac users may experience difficulty"[1]. Not a blessed thing. Their Help page has a single paragraph about trouble uploading, blaming "your IT Department" for "setting certain network properties that inhibit the upload tool from working".

I wonder if the developers of the app were just so blind to believe that their gunk would just work wherever it was run, or whether they really think that it's a Windows world. Of the two I hope it's the former.

So Snapfish gets a recommendation for being not just an application hosted on the web but a web application. They do good photos too!

[1] I never expect to see Linux mentioned on these things and get pleasantly surprised on the occasions it is; even if it says "Linux is not supported", someone there at least knows enough to mention it.