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Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#31

Post by Ensorceled »

hutattedonmyarm wrote: post #25
richardw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. How about Apple forcing me to sync my music via their dumb cloud thing if I happened to have enabled apple music at some point? I have a phone linked via a cable to a computer, want to get two songs on the phone, can't do it unless I sync multiple GB of junk via the internet. Then they won't let me sync a song via their cloud because it's a voice MP3 I bought ages ago and isn't high bitrate enough?! Kill. Af…

>I dunno. How about Apple forcing me to sync my music via their dumb cloud thing if I happened to have enabled apple music at some point? I have a phone linked via a cable to a computer, want to get two songs on the phone, can't do it unless I sync multiple GB of junk via the internet. You can turn off the iCloud Music Library and sync via cable

You cut out the part where they said: "After much Googling all I could do was turn off apple music, sync to the device".

Why? What point are you trying to make? It's not obvious and not simple. I also had to google how to do this. Are you claiming that this was obvious and easy?

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#32

Post by puranjay »

narrator wrote: post #8
exabrial wrote: post #5

Simple: The goal used to be create simple things that just work. Now its create thigs that push your platform. As an example, to pick on MSFT: I thought hell froze over when I saw Word in the Android app store. Its a hugely wonderful word processor. I typed out a blog post and when to save, but... well I wasnt signed into sky drive. I managed to finagle my way around those prompts after 5 or so mins. Next time I open…

Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software? What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later…

I literally write for a living. I used to swear by Word for YEARS. But now I haven't touched it in years.

I've switched over completely to Google Docs. Sure, Word has more features, but none that I really miss.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#34

Post by dave2000 »

bcook wrote: post #7
TeMPOraL wrote: post #4

I'm gonna ask a different question - why Google is struggling to design useful software? It seems that every iteration of their every product loses functionality and is being dumbed down to the point of uselessness.

Can you share a few examples? Google seems to be leaning more toward "normal users" but I enjoy the software nonetheless. Are you sure you are the intended user? Catering to a different userbase might be their intent.

The camera app on Nexus devices just has none of the features any vaguely competent photographer needs, and that's ignoring the crap API Google has made available. OpenCamera should be the stock app (well, with a slightly more sane settings page).

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#35

Post by lpsz »

mrweasel wrote: post #29

I don't know about Google, I don't really use any of their products, other than search. As for Apple, it seems like their trying to make things simpler, but forget that people do development work on Macs. It's never huge things that bugs be, just minor tweaks Apple make, and sometimes half-baked features. El Capitan has seriously made me consider if my next computer should be something other than a Mac. While I do li…

Curious what specifically.

For me the underlying graphics changes and other tweaks in El Cap made my 5 year old MacBook Air snappy again, I use Xcode the entire day and things seem better than before.

There is some initial flux around new release time (broken Homebrew or something else for a week) but they tend to settle down quickly.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#36

Post by V-2 »

maaarghk wrote: post #16
rcheu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an obvious example is Hangouts. It's easily the worst messaging app I've used in years. It consistently fails at reliably delivering messages. It's very common for me to send a message on my laptop, and then have the response only show up on my phone, or vise versa. The read marker will often jump around, and people that just messaged me 3 minutes ago will have "last seen 5 hours ago" under their name. Google…

That's interesting, I have the exact opposite experience. I use Hangouts regularly, on two Macs, a PC and on my Android phone and I have never experienced any of that stuff, except maybe the "last seen" being out of sync - but that's hardly a dealbreaker.

I used Hangouts intensively for video daily meetings throughout a software project that spanned for several months - on different machines (on my work laptop, mobile phone, sometimes my home PC).

These meetings weren't big - typically 3 to 5 people - but when it worked for everyone at once, without reconnecting, rebooting etc., we cheered. This was an unusual occurence.

I had Hangouts crash - especially on Android - I had it request a browser plugin to be installed over and over again, and I never managed to get it to work on Firefox (switching to a different browser for Hangouts only proved easier), I had no audio, or distorted audio, or people dropping out of calls...

I'm glad your user experience wasn't as abysmal as ours, or rcheu's, but in my opinion you're a lucky one

One good feature it has is that it recognizes keyboard tapping, and suggests you put yourself on mute when it's detected

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#37

Post by f_allwein »

> managing their devices, or even just using basic software, is just getting too complicated.

I am amazed how average users are often unaware of basic features of their smartphones, e.g. calendars that sync across devices (holy grail in the Palm OS days) as well as contacts that sync. How many times did you see FB updates that said "I lost my phone, please send me your number again"?

As there are now so many non-geeks using smartphones, it would be good to have more information for them on how to make the most of their phones.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#38

Post by amelius »

I also wonder why they are producing such mediocre software, with so many qualified people.

Writing a web-based email service or an online document editor may be a lot of work, but these are just basic office tools, and it doesn't sound like rocket science.

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#39

Post by wtbob »

> So, with all of these factors at play and more changes to come, is there anyone out there who's doing clear and simple design well?

> Mayden had an answer pretty quickly: Tesla.

I don't think one can really say that the makers of the glass infotainment console understand design for humans. Affordances (knobs, dials, switches, levers &c.) enable one to alter settings without taking one's eyes off the road and without interrupting the flow of conversation (like voice commands do).

Re: Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

#40

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

_Understated_ wrote: post #17
narrator wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winter is coming for Microsoft. The rise of mobile and the slow down of PC speed improvements means they are having a hard time delivering real value that people want to pay for and need to find a way to generate recurring revenue through subscription services. Witness the rise of Windows 10. How can they make money if you permanently own your software? What if Moore's law stops and we're sitting here 10 years later…

I think we will be. It has stopped. I just upgraded my "old" Dell Precision T5500 to a X99 hand-built machine with an NVMe SSD and so on and I was rather underwhelmed: It's not as fast as a 5 year jump in architecture would have been 10 years ago (if that makes sense!), not even close. I think Moore's law is done already. Intel have slowed their speed improvements over the last several years and are getting rid of th…

Moore's law is still alive on GPUs, which are developing at ludicrous speed.

Of course most Office applications don't need a GPU, and all the bloat in modern operating systems doesn't help create an impression of speed on the desktop.

More the opposite - if you're saving to the cloud, it's always going to feel much slower and clunkier than saving to a local disk.

But creative and scientific applications - including AI - always need all the cycles available and then some. There are apps that could sink a 1000X CPU speed bump without blinking. They'll become more practical as they move to GPUs, but there's a significant extra cost in coding for not-really-standard GPU families than for a generic mostly-standard CPU range.

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