o2sms v3.11

Posted: November 20th, 2008 | Tags: , | 8 Comments »

o2sms version 3.11 is out now. It works with o2’s new website.

The new o2 site is a beast. Using the network analyser of the indispensable Firebug, the page to send the web text alone takes over 30 seconds to finish rendering and makes an incredible 288 HTTP requests to completely load the page (I develop with the cache disabled). This is well above the 5 seconds generally recommended by usability experts.

Not only that, there’s no way to “stay logged in”, meaning to send another message later on that day involves logging in again and making the 4 or 5 clicks to get to the send message page, with each page taking an eternity to load.

Any web monkey can whip up a page with a few simple inputs that loads in 100ms. Surely o2’s bells and whistles shouldn’t add too long onto that.

Can we be blamed for using o2sms and other similar tools to avail of the free text messages we’re entitled to with our o2 contracts?

8 Comments on “o2sms v3.11”

  1. 1 Gerard said at 11:11 on November 21st, 2008:

    Hurrah!

    I detest the new O2 page. I was hoping you’d bring out a new version of o2sms to overcome this new “usability”. Cheers Mackers.

  2. 2 Michael O'Leary said at 13:19 on November 21st, 2008:

    It’s an absolutely disaster, I spend ten minutes sending a text now. I perfered the older one.

  3. 3 Anthony G said at 17:45 on November 21st, 2008:

    Great work, Mackers. I imagine it took a lot of effort to analyse O2’s new web text interface in order to update o2sms. While the new interface has some nice features, I find it clunky and time consuming with fairly intensive use of network and browser resources. I much prefer to use o2sms.

  4. 4 patrickthomas said at 22:24 on November 21st, 2008:

    I agree with you on this, it takes an eternity to load and is not working at the end of the dismal load time,.

    How do they get away with this???

  5. 5 Kevin said at 19:29 on January 5th, 2009:

    Perhaps o2 purpously make their site so frustrating to use so more customers send SMSs through their phones? Or perhaps they’re just idiots!

    Whatever the reason, thank you Mackers for producing and maintaining such a fine and essential script!

    Regards,

  6. 6 Robin Blandford said at 12:34 on February 2nd, 2009:

    Hey! Great work.

    Can you help me get the OSX dashboard widget working?

    Everyone I’ve spoken with gets “failed in step 0 (subtype goto) can’t connect to http://www.o2online.ie (invalid argument)”

  7. 7 mackers said at 13:30 on February 2nd, 2009:

    It’s broken for leopard on Intel. I have to rebuild.

  8. 8 Robin Blandford said at 14:29 on February 2nd, 2009:

    Nice one. Look forward to it.

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