Knee-jerk response to Flickr Gamma

Flickr’s new Organizr is a huge step backwards. It takes an incredibly usable Flash application, reworks it into a much-slower JavaScript version (that’s still just as inaccessible, and who really cares about screen readers seeing as we’re dealing with vast numbers of photos? *flamebait*), and in the process removes useful graphic (as in, having the quality of graphs, not graphical) elements, replacing them with numeric date selectors, etc.

Oh, yeah, and they’re browser-sniffing and rejecting anyone aside from Firefox, Safari, and IE. Which is ridiculous because Opera is so much easier to get to work with stuff than Safari is… in fact, it’s one of the better behaved browsers. Meanwhile, Flash would work on anything and so many people have Flash it’s hardly a great problem. To choose between a great, usable app and a less-usable, quasi-standards-embracing, still-just-as-inaccessible app seems like it should have an obvious outcome. Sigh. Why couldn’t they just focus on making the Flash thing work better? Multi-select dragging in the Flash UI was the last thing I really desired from Organizr: beyond that, I’d be pretty much content with existing features. But no… they had to go tear it apart. Grrr. Just because programmers like numbers, doesn’t mean the rest of us do. Bring back the drag-and-drop!

p.s. Yes, I know you can get to the old version still. It’s not that so much as the new version seems like a massive regression with absolutely zero advantages, and development on the Flash version is going to be in permanent hiatus (at least until they realise I am infallible and surrender in their folly, etc., etc.)