Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Vook “blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story.” I like to think of it as a multimedia book. Vooks come in web-based and mobile-based (like for my iPad) versions. Unfortunately, you can’t buy one book and read it on two different platforms. You have to buy two different books. Duh.

What caught my interest was a blurb I read while on my iPad about a new “Vook” titled, Reckless Road: Guns N’ Roses And The Making Of Appetite For Destruction. The link took me to the iTunes store and here’s a screen shot from my iPad.

I decided to click the “Developer Web Site” button and was taken to Vook’s web page about the Guns and Roses vook. Notice where the arrows I inserted are pointing. I click the “View Trailer” button and here’s what I get. A message telling me that I need to upgrade my Flash player. Uh…where have you guys been? Don’t you know Steve Jobs won’t let Flash on the iPad? You folks need to detect the User Agent String and make sure the iPad gets an HTML 5 video. Since you were too lazy/stupid to figure this out, you probably won’t figure out the User Agent String, so I’ll just give it to you:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

Restless Road – Vook