[Link: engadget.com]

Awesome! This won't be the first time I saved one of googles products with my suggestions. By now you would think they would run things by me before implementing them.

This is great, but it really frosts me when people who write this stuff, from the software to the article, don't write what really happens.

When I open google maps on my desktop and type in an address, I get a bar titled "Explore this area." Under that are more entries, being "Search nearby (dot) fast food restaurants (dot) pizza restaurants." The words "Search nearby" are there, but it's named "Explore this area.."

On my Samsung S4, when I click on Search, I get the last two addresses I searched for, then "Explore nearby."

So neither device has a feature named "Search nearby," and the name isn't even the same on the two implementations of their software.

WTF? Why is it that people who write about this stuff don't call it what it is? Why is it that when I make a typo on a URL, the computer doesn't figure out what I meant, but the bozos at google and the bozo who wrote the article doesn't call it what it is?

I ran into a similar problem yesterday at an RTI training. We were given a five page instruction sheet telling us how to log into the distributor's wifi system using Windows 7. Four or five of the windows that came up had titles different from the screen captures in the instructions! Damn!

Mac, here's one you can suggest: google contacts on my Samsung S4 does not open for new contacts with physical address or comments as categories, and there's no way to instruct it that I want to put in a physical address and a comment box for EVERY new contact that I put in. Every time, I have to scroll down to Add Categories and choose address and comments.

Here's another one: in addition to categories, contacts Search totally sucks. See, I have put in comments because google contacts on the desktop has a box for it and it's helpful. But when I search for my friend Russ, the result I get is, in alphabetical order by their name, EVERY entry that has the name "Russ" in it. The actual entry for Russ is the forty-first entry. Why didn't it occur to google that if I enter "Russ," I probably want the entries where the NAME is Russ... followed by all other entries?

Mac, please get working on this!

Does this mean some engineer was wrong?

There you go again. Don t think you jabs go unnoticed! LOL.

I still get a kick out of em lol.

The engineer was right. The client and the market were wrong.

I worked for a company for a few years that made record players for schools in the 80s when this was still a viable market. Every year or so someone would come up with an idea that they thought would pull them out of a dull bread-and-butter market and light up the world. When I started there it was the fan controller.

A fan was to be in a room. A wired device was to be placed in an adjacent room and that device was to be adjusted so the fan came on when the temperature difference between the rooms was some adjustable amount.

It was a fun project, but when the engineering was done, they could find nobody to market it because nobody wanted it. The lack of market killed this before it could be put into production.

As I write this, though, I realize that the only engineering mistake was that nobody said "this is really a dumb idea. Who the hell is going to drape a wire across the floor to another room, when it's so easy to just turn the fan on or off?"

So perhaps engineers, if at fault, are at fault for only following directions. As it says in Tom Lehrer's song about the work done in the 40s, prior to his coming here, by America's famous rocket specialist Wernher von Braun, "Vunce de rockets go up, who cares vere dey come down? That's not my depahtment," says Wernher von Braun.