It is nice to see someone apologising for their planned failure to consider Linux users. It's ridiculous that they even have to. It seems to me that these people have spent way too much effort on making the logo and menus scroll in from the left and right of the screen, and not enought effort on the actual functionality of their website.

I fail to understand what benefit they have gained from using the Pizza UI for their logo & menus (yes, really) rather than using simple links - or CSS-based menus, if they needed fancy. The page layout doesn't actually need anything more than simple text links. The logo (thankfully) does nothing after it's page-load scroll. For extra 'fail' marks they substitute graphics when I initially arrive with Javascript disabled (and wearing my tinfoil hat) but the graphics give me the appearance of a menu without actually performing a useful function.

The user-interface situation gets worse later, when I am taken through five successive screens to upload and classify some new media. It seems that in order to bore people who are foolishly trying to upload their home movies over "poorband" they attempt to display a progress bar. A better approach would be to ask me all of the questions about the media I am uploading on one single page and let me get on with something useful. This might be news, but it seems that such an interface could be done in plain HTML, and wouldn't actually require me to enable javascript for a site which is riddled with cross-site scripting flaws.

Since it's the school holidays at the moment we took advantage of Te Papa's excellent institution of "Late Night Thursday" last week and visited the other end of the website in person. My disappointment in the website was then entirely eclipsed by my disappointment in the real-life part of the exhibit. The "walk on the map and see photos of the area" component was decidedly clunky, with no clear feedback between stepping on a tile and media appearing on the wall In fact it seems most tiles don't actually do anything, and there are only a few small screens in the walls to display the images. The "postcards blowing in the wind" gimmick amused the kids for about 20 seconds, tops.

The 'wall' was quite a lot more successful, amusing me and the kids for nearly half an hour, though we're unlikely to go back next time we're there. There were plenty of annoyances also, in particular that it doesn't appear to use the full resolution of uploaded photos, the interface is slow and it is difficult to see what you are doing at times.

It's good that they've started practising their apologies, firstly targeting the small (but geeky :-) segment of New Zealanders who are Linux users trying to help them out by providing them with free content.

Now I am looking forward to their further apologies to larger groups of justifiably annoyed people, culminating with the ultimate one, where they apologise to all of the taxpayers of New Zealand who funded this incredible waste of money.

I can imagine that something interesting could be done with a lot of media of New Zealand and now that Te Papa has started to amass a collection in this way, perhaps they will.