There are lots of tiny little fails out there. Here are some that I’ve found.

The Digg iPhone app

The Digg app came out for the iPhone to much fanfare but I wasn’t originally a fan.

First off, you can only really use the app if you have a regular Digg account. If you have a straight Facebook account like I did, there is no way to login. FAIL. If you’re going to release an app to let your users use your product, don’t alienate some of them because they chose an easier login method.

Second, when you digg an item (either up or down), it blocks the UI until the network call comes back. This is fan-fucking-tastic when you are on a sketchy wireless connection and it locks up the app for 2 minutes. Sure you can hit the home button to get back to the main screen, but half of Digg is digging things, so otherwise it’s just a news aggregator. Fine, but for somebody that actually uses Digg, it’s kind of useless.

I’d also like to point out that the last mobile app I wrote (Blackberry, university project course with another guy) properly did network and filesystem activities in the background, and didn’t block the UI, so it’s not like it’s the hardest problem in programming.

gdgt

I talked about gdgt before but I’ll bring it up here again, since it’s similar to the next point.

Basically, gdgt is social networking for gadgets and the geeks that love them. One of the main functions of the website is adding stuff to 1 of 3 lists: Have it, Want it, Had it. Please keep in mind that this is one of the main, if not the main function of the website.

You have to click three fucking times to add anything to a list. Three! FAIL.

Steve Krug says it doesn’t matter how many clicks it takes to do anything as long as the clicks don’t require any thought, but I beg to differ. Three clicks to do the main function of a website is bloody ridiculous.

YouTube

YouTube used to have a single click to add a video to your favorite list, but no more. FAIL.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Wordpress.com and Chrome

For some reason, Wordpress.com fails to work properly in my Chrome Beta for Mac. It just loads forever. It’s the only page I’ve found that fails to work properly in Chrome Beta.

In other browsers, it’s just slow. Damn slow. FAIL.

Gmail mobile view

I love Gmail, but using it on my phone sucks. I feed all my mail through my Apps account, and I have 7 addresses that it aggregates. The problem is, there is no way to send as those addresses from the mobile interface, or from Mail on the iPhone. FAIL.

There’s no drop down to choose which address you send as like in the normal view. What’s up with that? I can sort of understand that the mail app on the iPhone won’t allow this. How does it know you can send as those?

The mobile view though? Really? No option? Lame.

All in all, there’s lots of fail in the world today. What sort of fail have you seen lately? Post them in the comments.