I’m always impressed by how little understanding businesses have for basic online stuff, even when it’s very important to their business.
I hate the, “make an appointment online!” Button that basically just turns into them calling you instead of you calling them. If I wanted to talk on the phone, I would have called you at my convenience. You calling me is way less convenient. Don’t put that I can make an appointment online if I can’t
Part of faking it is not wanting to acknowledge that you can’t afford a needed service.
There are services that can manage the database for the calendar, or you can implement your own but there’s maintenance and implementation costs.
A dumb restaurant will put garbage in the way of the customers. A smart restaurant understands a 10k outlay pays for itself after a quarter or two, just from reducing friction for customers.
Part of faking it is not wanting to acknowledge that you can’t afford a needed service.
I googled it before I misremembered: Google offers this as a service built into their maps features and appears not to charge the restaurant for it (could be wrong on that bit)
Sure, Google is Google, but that’s a free option that works and works well on a site people probably already used to find you. Why more business don’t bother using Google’s map-adjacent features baffles me
Most restaurants keep reservations in a $2.75 spiral notebook.
I doubt an online reservation calendar would be $10k for a single restaurant, but still…the only profit is marginal: the people who eat there who would have without the online calendar, and I doubt it would recoup the costs in a quarter or two. Especially considering that the wealth gap and tech gap mean that the number of people who want to schedule online is inversely related to the people who can afford to eat out a lot.
web service/ hosting, programming labor embedding it in the existing site, graphic design, SAAS fees for other bullshit make up a 10k number, which is probably inflated.
The recoup assumes an extra 25% tables filled on average, ie 25 tables vs 20 every night for 90 days. If those 5 tables filled brings in 20$ after expenses each you can easily get to 10k.
A restaurant running closer to capacity is very profitable vs running under capacity.
“Only Apple users can make reservations here.”
Also, I’m not sure what a video call would achieve. Surely that’s less efficient for them?
Maybe they want to discriminate.
IPhone users won’t dispute the check
It’s just a phone number on the website. It’s macOS/iOS that decides that clicking a phone number should open FaceTime, and the restaurant has nothing to do with this - they just put their phone number on their website.
I recently got a Mac for work and noticed that
tel:links open FaceTime by default.I don’t know if there is a way to change that but it’s fucking annoying.
Ahh… typical Apple anti-user-experience.
I’m so glad I’m out if the apple ecosystem. It’s nice I guess, but there’s just so many weird unforgivable choices they make. Like the inability to turn off opening links in an application. I was so thankful that Firefox Focus didn’t respect them. It got to a point where I just deleted apps that suddenly got opened because I clicked on a link in Safari or whatever. I think I remember it happening in private mode too. And on other applications. Does Apple think all of our accounts are tied to our real name or something? I thought they were good at this privacy stuff.
On Android it asks me nearly all the time. Not sure about the mechanism but its much better either way.
I love it, but my company will not.
If it were up to me I’d be fully on Linux for work. Everything I do is on a browser anyway.
Ah, so it’s Apple’s fault. That makes sense.
Do you use like internet explorer that browser makes videocalls without permission
Yeah but they still have to talk to people face to face. Can we skip that too?
Wow. This comment thread gave me brain damage.
doesn’t a website need permission to use your camera though?
FaceTime is a proper noun.
sorry I don’t Apple
Right.
FaceTime is a thing on the OS. Clicking the link caused something that isn’t dependent on the browser/webpage. It just openend another application.
That makes sense but what I don’t understand is why it then immediately starts calling. Why would it do that?
Apple products are bad.
It’s probably just a simple HTML tel link that is supposed to open a phone app so that you don’t need to dial. But macOS and iOS opens these links with FaceTime if that is configured as your standard “phone” app. So it’s not the website that opens an app with camera permission, it’s the OS.
This can be quite annoying for web developers because HTML alone cannot prevent FaceTime from being opened instead of a normal phone app, as the OS dictates what happens when a tel link is clicked. This can easily give the impression that the camera is being accessed illegitimately, even if this is not actually intended. That’s probably the case here. I can’t imagine anyone expecting their customers to book a table in a restaurant via video call - that would be stupid on many levels.
I can’t imagine anyone expecting their customers to book a table in a restaurant via video call - that would be stupid on many levels.
I don’t remember the name because it doesn’t exist anymore and was stupid anyway (some artsy name like Pierololle or some other French sounding fake word) but I had a place want me to upload a picture of myself to reserve
I assume so the person booking has to be the one getting the table? So this isn’t too far from possible, horrifyingly stupid an idea as it sounds
Alright so just another case where iOS is stupid but no one cares because people will keep buying Apple products either way… Cool.
Does iOS default to calling automatically? At least on Samsung it pops the number in, but I still need to press the call button.
