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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#181

Post by goldenkey »

tome wrote: post #104
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

Does anyone know if you can do the same with iPhone?

If you have root you can write a MobileSubstrate hook that calls UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO in a hooked constructor of UIView (then call super.)

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#182

Post by finchisko »

I think what guy is actually experiencing strong feeling of nostalgia for older times. And I understand that. I see it on myself more and more with coming years too. We were simply born in some era, which holds strong memories in us. We hold sentiment to old things (programs), because somehow they're connected with best memories from time we were much younger. And the best memories are usually bounded to age around 20 - 30. Ask senior to tell you a story from his time and there is high probability that the story will be from their younger times, than from older ones.

My point is, that maybe todays software is not all that bad. We just don't feel the same needs as 20 year old guy somewhere at Google who programmed it. And it also works apposite way too. Show 20 year guy Visicalc, what he will think about it. Or check teens reactions to Windows 95.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ucCxtgN6sc

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#183

Post by marbletiles »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

We've even managed to slow down things like Excel 97. I played with a 486 laptop recently, and was completely amazed at how fast things like Word felt (once they'd loaded off the ancient hard disk).

The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various windowing pipeline "improvements" over the years seem to be in the mix.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#184

Post by softawre »

Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

Atom is pretty terrible, but you have options. VSCode is also based on the web stack and is very fast (though Sublime is even faster).

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#185

Post by geofft »

pmlnr wrote: post #142
geofft wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are decent, completely offline solutions (Libreoffice vs GDocs) LibreOffice is slow . On a ~2010 business-class Dell laptop that still is in perfectly good physical condition, running Debian 9, with a handful of tabs in Firefox and a mosh running: adamantoise:~ geofft$ time libreoffice --terminate_after_init real 0m8.103s user 0m1.696s sys 0m0.520s The rant here isn't about cloud vs. local, it's about perform…

re 1: Slow - compared to google docs? Are you serious? EDIT: not startup time, who cares about startup time? When you load a few hundred pages doc, or a massive excel. re 2: I only wanted to give examples, but you're right, my wording is off. I wanted to say there are fast and good interfaces: there's vim for the terminal, there's Rainloop for webmail, miniflux for RSS reading - these are all keyboard-oriented ones,…

> EDIT: not startup time, who cares about startup time? When you load a few hundred pages doc, or a massive excel.

It was an example - the slowness (to me) is present for the entire interface. It was just easy to demonstrate. (Also in both LO and Google Docs I can type plain text into an existing document just fine.... I'm curious what you find slower in Google Docs than LO.)

My point is that this rant is not, as far as I can tell, a "local software good, cloud software bad" rant. There are reasons to believe that, e.g. debuggability and computing freedom, but UI speed is not one of them.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#186

Post by dredmorbius »

gumby wrote: post #108
sushibowl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Was originally a tweet-storm -> https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/927593460642615296 , if anyone is confused by the stream-of-consciousness style. I don't mean to detract from the point, but this piece would be helped so much by properly fleshing it out into an article. presenting it as a sequence of 92 tweets is combining the worst of both worlds.

I thought the choice of medium was itself an ironic comment on the crappiness of modern computer usage. Tweetstorms are essentially unreadable, even with a tool like this thread aggregator.

Precisely my response on first encountering the content.

Wherein I discovered that this particular tweet aggregator could be initiated by a third party (others ... cannot).

https://plus.google.com/+TimWesson/posts/VSGs2BddARD

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#187

Post by epistasis »

acdha wrote: post #167
epistasis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a huge frustration with current web pages for me, and for iOS. Animations that stall interaction rather then enable it do exactly the opposite funtction. And if you're ever in a situation where interactions get chained from user requests, like the bug in the iOS calculator, you're gone way off the path on your UI

Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion on iOS is a really nice way to improve the subjective interface speed.

That had zero effect on the interaction-halting animations for me.

I'm not opposed to animation, I'm opposed to animation that makes the phone unresponsive and not listen to input, or delays the display of information for more than 200-300ms. Unfortunately the "Reduce Motion" only seems to be for some very minor things.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#188

Post by wnevets »

ambrosite wrote: post #15

I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"? For example, it was a common piece of advice that if clicking a button opens up a dialog box, there should be a brief animation showing the box expanding from the direction of the button, so the user would associate the clicking of the button with the appearance of the box and u…

>I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"?

I disable most if not all of the animations on my android phone and windows desktops for that very reason. The animations make for great tech demos but also makes everything feel so much slower when trying to get things done.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#189

Post by digi_owl »

anjakefala wrote: post #180
Declanomous wrote: post #29

This could be a copy-paste of rants I have written. I think marketing has ruined pretty much everything. Everything has a subscription now, and it's in the cloud . My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else. There are a…

I feel like this is the core of how "Open Software" is aiming to combat this. By removing the consumer-driven model away from software and putting users in closer touch with developers, we are supposedly developing tools together that better fit our needs. Though, OSS arguably is struggling to meet this theoretical ideal, especially with the current lack of support most OSS devs have. My life improved considerably wh…

Sorry to say, but the big name DEs are off chasing the UX tail of the big name commercial stuff, come hell or high performance costs...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#190

Post by sevensor »

paulddraper wrote: post #46
kgwxd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last week I discovered I could disable animations in Android through the hidden developer options. It's fabulous. The only initial quirk was no visual feedback when a picture is successfully taken, so it felt like i missed the button, but I've gotten used to it already.

!!!!! 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:/…

This is the best thing I've learned all day.
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