131–140 of 349 posts
The web feels slower than it was 10 years ago too. It's fascinating how we tend to over-engineer and bloat things.
You can still use server rendered templates and have things load extremely fast. Most sites don't need 3mb of JS to show structured text.
Nice rant, but sadly as he says, this is just how it is. There are very few pieces of software I use that aren't absolutely chock full of brain dead stupid behaviors....not just mildly annoying or difference of opinion style issues, but downright dumb/broken. Gmaps is a good example, my blood pressure always rises while trying to use it.
A decade ago I would navigate web pages quicker than now. I was using Opera, which had keys for navigating from hyperlink to hyperlink (spatially, using shift+arrow keys). It also keys for navigating to the logical previous and next page--that is, not navigating history, but following "link rel=prev" and "link rel=next" links. Unfortunately, the web evolved to make this harder. Everything is a hyperlink and no one uses link rel tags anymore.
One counter-point, though.
> I make no secret of hating the mouse.
If you look at the original uses of the mouse it was great. Especially in systems like Xerox Star. Star allowed people to perform complex tasks with almost no learning curve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
(Note how they weren't shy of using keyboard either. There are dedicated hardware buttons for standard commands like copy, find, repeat, "properties" and even for common text editing actions. Meanwhile, our keyboards don't have dedicated keys for undo, redo, cut, copy and paste - operations that are used in almost every application today.)
Trouble is, we lost most of the driving ideas behind Xerox-style interfaces. Using a predefined set generic, powerful commands. Object-oriented UI. Uniformity of representations. Modern system have those things only as vestigial traits and in very limited contexts.
I don't think there were any quantum leaps in conceptual UI design since Xerox Park times. There were some minor improvements in very specialized apps and significant regression in software that's used universally. For examples, phones and tables almost completely lost drag-and-drop functionality and generic file UI.
For example, drag-and-drop is a very powerful concept, because it allows you to perform actions by combining things you already know about - and those "things" figure out how to interact in the best way possible. So, for example, instead of having N "Print" buttons in N applications you can have a singe drag-file-onto-printer-icon action that does different things based on the type of the file. [BTW, this is also the key idea behind the original notion of OOP.] Unfortunately, that's not how it works in modern UIs. They don't use either the keyboard or the mouse to their full potential.
everything seams a bit much. There are so many things you just could not do at all in 1983, like HD videos or 3D engines or even rendering Mandelbrot fractals
In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. I think optimizing for user experience is partly to blame for this. You don't want users to have a confusing experience the first time they use the application, and you want the application to look good and be inviting. But that may be at cross purposes with making applications that allow open-ended exploration. Exploration implies that…
> I think pretty much everything in computing is like this. But then there's Dwarf Fortress, Blender, Vim, Emacs, ... Accounting for Sturgeon's Law, things aren't quite so bleak.
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I agree modern websites look a lot nicer... Or do they? They all look the same: big images, not much text, the top bar, yeah this newsletter thing to upsell with these crappy (but effective) marketing techniques... Somehow I feel old school websites (HN, Reddit, and so) are more sticky, more addictive, more unique. They focus on what we really want: contents and communication with others.
Another thing I realized it's nonsense lately: object oriented programming. It's often an over-engineered bloat that only works for trivial Programming 101 courses (yeah the famous Employee or Bike class). But in 10+ years of programming, I found that OOP is just a complete mess (you end up with awful classes in your code like Service, Manager, AbstractFactory, and so). I wish we could just use variables and function…
You still can. You need decent data structures too, but I never in over 20 years really "got" OOP. It seemed needlessly complicated. Functions and data always seemed to do the job for me.
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!!!!! That is a amazing!!! I had no idea developer meant "interested user". > Make sure developer options are enabled. If they're not, go to Settings > About phone, then tap on Build number several times to enable it > Go to Settings > Developer options, and scroll down to Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. > Tap on each of the animation options and turn them off. https:/…
On my first try I accidentally tapped "Android version" instead of "Build number" :)
A lot of the changes that break usability for me are purely cosmetic changes that, e.g. replace a `button` with an `img` or `svg`.