STM CORTEX M3

Recently they changed it all over to flash and now it is absolutely appalling.

My input is that I thought "to hell with that" and went and bought a Atmel board instead.

If you look around at various web forums, you will see a lot of complaints about the new website.

Simon.

I didn't think it could be THAT bad. I was wrong.

By the way, what browser should I use? It doesn't work with FireFox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.

RK

Just on the CM3? I now find the entire STM site so entirely unusable that I'm buying other people's parts just to avoid the horrors of having to dig them for datasheets.

You could search it on Digikey, they have links to the datasheets.

Sometimes it helps trying to write to the CEO about bad web design. Usually they don't know how many orders they lose because of such a website, maybe because the presentation of the designer looks great, but they didn't try to use it as an engineer.

Last year the website was usable, but now the Flash animation is of the size of a postage stamp on my widescreen display (you can see 5 lines of a product family in a scrollable table, and more than half of the screen is empty) and the usual web navigation, like open a link in another window, doesn't work and in Linux it doesn't work at all (Opera can show the Flash animation).

I wonder why they waste money on Flash animations for engineers, instead of using it for a functional website like Digikey. But of course, STM microcontrollers and other products are nice.

Too many managers with too little to do.

-a

You need Flash installed to use the ST website now which is something I refuse to install for just one website as I do not need it for the rest of my online activities.

As well as the fact I've found Flash based websites to be bloated and slow, especially when you try browsing them from a mobile internet connection which I do a good portion of the time, I also refuse to open my machines to a major source of malware (given Flash's security history).

BTW, someone mentioned when I posted about this new website a month or two ago that Google don't index Flash based websites. I wonder if ST have considered that...

Simon.

Fellows, thank you very much for the information about STM's terrible website. I will make a compilation of the comments here sans names/id and get it to the C.E.O. and a few others. If anyone already knows his/her email, please pass it along.

All this time I thought that maybe that I was dumber than I already knew because I was getting nowhere.

Thanks.

Joe

Carlo Bozotti is President and Chief Executive Officer of STMicroelectronics and has held this position since March 2005. He is the Sole Member of the Management Board and chairs the Company?s Corporate Executive Committee and Corporate Strategic Committee. Bozotti also serves as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors at ST-Ericsson SA.

It's terminally broken at present. I even tried with (gasp) ie, but it made no difference. Perhaps it designed to work on an Ipad, or some other trendy mobile device. You can find the data if you click on some of the graphics, but clicking on the microcontrollers tab produces a page telling me search term not found !.

Don't these people ever test the functionality ?. It won't stop me using their devices, but they really need to get their act together and quick...

Regards,

Chris

I've just tried it with firefox on ubuntu, and it works fine.

Usability is a big problem. It's mostly unused white background, a lot of scroll bars (there are even *two* nested scroll bars on the main panel), and tiny boxes with parameters and results that only show 3 lines at a time.

You're missing the point. It's *art* - it's not meant to be functional. You're obviously just not erudite enough to understand the artist's cry of protest against a harsh universe governed by usability conventions.

Define: "works fine" ?.

Presentation, not substance, or as someone else said so succinctly:

"The Medium is the Message: :-)...

Regards,

Chris

I think I see what the designer intended me to see. I see lists of devices and parameters, and very impressive animations of GUI elements.

I don't think I'll be using this site for selecting devices. Instead, I'll just go to digi-key, especially since they now allow sorting by price.

If so, the Message in question would appear to be:

GO AWAY! WE DON't WANT CUSTOMERS HERE! YOU'RE GETTING IN THE WAY OF US EXPRESSING OUR INNER ARTIST!

w,

There are a number of viruses that are installed with flash scripts. No sane person would ever require flash to view a web site.

Gee, wouldn't you want your chip vendor to be sane?

RK

There are also viruses that are installed with PDF documents. Does that mean that we should avoid PDF files from chip vendors? ;-)

The problem with flash on a web site has nothing to do with virus vulnerability. I'm convinced that almost any data format can be used to transmit a virus. The problem with flash is that it really isn't necessary to provide engineers with appropriate data.

Mark Borgerson

I can view PDF by tranferring them to the Kindle and mitigate the risk. Now that I mention it, I suppose I could view web pages over a smart cell phone if it supports flash and mitigate the risk there, too. So I suppose there are options.

But to be honest, I really would like to see web pages designed to work well with Lynx. So that if I choose, I could avoid flash and animations and silverlight and so on and get by just fine in a dos box viewing the web.

I'm not happy being forced into using flash or silverlight to access chip vendor content.

Jon

slow,

on

nes

Through PDF? Really? Is there an example that will survive snopes.com? With PDF one can control the active content. Not so with flash.

But I think that we are in agreement that the use of flash on the ST web site is "wrong".

RK