Friday, November 03, 2006

Pringles website testing

I've just got a code from a packet of Pringles just visit their site to get some freebies. So first off I missed the "s" off Pringles, what a surprise a camper has set up a site at that address, correcting that sent me to the correct site.

Hmm they must have missed the memo about disability testing, it's Flash only. No Flash no site.

Easy to read huh? Ah well Flash re-enabled and a reload later oh gee thanks for the funky music that starts before the main screen appears and I can turn it off. Ah time to pick a country - Union Jack I choose you.

Time to register: First name - check; last name - check; Date of Birth - hmm any particular format, well it accepts dd/mm/yyyy so okay; email address - foo"foo.co.uk wha? foo"foo.co.uk No I want an @ there not a " what'll happen if I try an " instead oh lookee a @.

Old time game players and programmers can probably guess this, for everyone else it's a US keyboard layout. " and @ reverse places between the UK and US keyboards (along with some other changes). I've got to admit I'm fascinated by how they managed to do this. Both £ and ~ appear as #, but oddly \ appears fine (On an US keyboard it's not next to the Z and is instead covered by the Shift key, programs with a hardcoded US layout therefore tend to fail to recognise that this key even exists).

So what does that tell me - simply that despite having the choice and being able to select the UK, nobody in the UK actually bothered to test it. That they did all the testing in the US with a US keyboard and hey they can use @ with no problem.

Oh well the whole world is American don't you know that, besides - bonus I got a Faithless wallpaper out of it.


With an easily removable Pringles logo heh heh.

0 comments: