I’ve been pretty happy using HP’s Snapfish service to share photographs of school and family events online, and the prints they produce are terrific in my experience.
However, the site itself so desparately needs work. The big issue is that when I upload a few hundred pictures, I find it’s far, far faster to copy the photos from my Mac to my PC and then use the Snapfish upload tool (which doesn’t work on the Mac). Stupid. That should be easy for them to fix, but then again HP’s support of Macs has always been spotty.
What’s bugging me today, though…

is that when I go to share an album with friends or family, the parsing code that they have for the email addresses (to send the sharing invite) doesn’t actually know how to parse and read email addresses.
Enter something like

John Smith <john.smith@TheSite.com>

and it’ll kick it back as an unrecognizable email address. It wants just the user@hostname.com section, nothing else.
But since I often copy and paste addresses from mail messages, it’s a huge pain: every single address is in the above, well formed, RFC-822 format, but I have to manually edit each and every one to ensure it’s just user@hostname.com
Come on, Snapfish, let’s get it together there.
This is symptomatic of a whole class of basic user interface errors that we encounter every day on the Web too. Another one I’ve noticed: In Google Calendar if I enter a date as “5 Sept” it’ll actually pick up the “t” as part of the description, rather than recognizing it as a four-letter abbreviation for the month name. Took me a while to figure that out when I’d enter a shortcut like “4 Sept, 12pm, Lunch with Mike” and see “t, Lunch with Mike” as the description of the event.
Gah! Maybe I’m just cranky this morning. 🙂