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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

#211

Post by white-flame »

tomc1985 wrote: post #203
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 think animations, as most program them, slow down the UI exactly as you say. But when their timing is tight, and the whole thing happens in under, say, half a second, you get the benefits of that context association and it still feels really cool and high-tech. People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms)

I don't have a link, but in referencing interactivity tests for some remote software development I did some years back, the maximum time between pressing a button and perceiving its effect to be considered "instant" is around 200ms. You don't want to go slower than that if you want it to "feel" fast & responsive.

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

#212

Post by white-flame »

tomc1985 wrote: post #196
finchisko wrote: post #182

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 2…

But maybe it is. On nearly every metric that matters to power users software is worse. Control? We have less. Options? Less. Ownership? Not that we ever had it, but now you don't even get a disc. Licenses are even more restrictive. The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster And when the business dies now? Now you're fucked. There are stories of mechanics running their shops today with 40-year-old dinosaurs, wh…

> The pace of 'upgrades'? Way, unnecessarily faster

Not only that, but the availability of easy upgrades has incentivized companies to sell unfinished software and hope to patch fast enough in response to user complaints, instead of even bothering to actually finish the product as marketed.

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

#213

Post by s73ver_ »

pmlnr wrote: post #163
slaman wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone it prepared to host, maintain and secure a server cluster of OSS.

Having a choice is not a thing for granted. You need to work for it. You need to maintain the right to it. Those who are not prepared, learn it, or live with whatever is provided by others.

This really does smack of elitism. Not everyone simply has the time to do that.

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

#214

Post by digi_owl »

dredmorbius wrote: post #53
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is hundreds of times more feature-rich than 10 years ago too though. But, sites like HN are some of the few that are still built like they were 10 years ago. The rest all adds rich JS frameworks (for supposed faster interaction after the first load), a few billion social links, ads, cookie banners, "sign up for our newsletter" or "pay our subscription pls" popups when you first land on them, rich fonts, anima…

And yet I find myself increasingly reaching for tools to remove that complexity: Outline.com, Reader Mode, Pocket (despite its many, many flaws). Not infrequently: stripping out content, running it in Markdown, and generating a static document (PDF, ePub, text) that I can just fucking read .

Noscript or Umatrix?

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

#216

Post by nextos »

marbletiles wrote: post #183
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 wi…

Old PS/2 keyboards are faster than USB because they were based on interrupts. That said, I think the cause underlying perceived low speed on modern platforms is more a bloat and inefficiency problem. Things are totally out of control. The PS/2 slight advantage over USB is an anecdote.

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

#217

Post by tomc1985 »

white-flame wrote: post #211
tomc1985 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think animations, as most program them, slow down the UI exactly as you say. But when their timing is tight, and the whole thing happens in under, say, half a second, you get the benefits of that context association and it still feels really cool and high-tech. People jsut set their animations too slow. (Seriously, nothing should ever take longer than 500ms)

I don't have a link, but in referencing interactivity tests for some remote software development I did some years back, the maximum time between pressing a button and perceiving its effect to be considered "instant" is around 200ms. You don't want to go slower than that if you want it to "feel" fast & responsive.

Even better. Does that give the animation enough time to show though? At that speed I'd guess you might as well make something instant

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

#218

Post by zokier »

dfox wrote: post #106

Recently I discovered how well sapGUI works from the UX perspective. It is essentially an glorified graphical 3270 terminal emulator which runs applications that very often rely on user entering cryptic but human readable IDs (there is lookup functionality integrated in essentially all such fields, but frequent users typically do not use it that much). Another interesting fact is that the 3270/sapGUI/dynpro model is…

3270 is really fascinating evolutionary dead end. I don't have first-hand knowledge (wish I had!), but as far as I can tell it is bit like high-level ncurses/dialog(1)/forms built in directly to the terminal layer. Of course being very proprietary very enterpricy tech, there isn't that much information about how it worked in practice, but it certainly feels like a very different path for UIs.

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

#219

Post by digi_owl »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #123

One way to improve this is to do like gmail and provide keyboard shortcuts in addition to the point and click interface. (It has to be explicitly enabled in settings, but it didn't have to be that way). Like the author is claiming, it takes very little time to get used to and you get more productive quickly. The only problem I've run into (also covered by the OP) is that input focus might be different than what you t…

Ugh, now i am reminded of how Youtube hijacks the home button to mean "start playing the video from the beginning". This makes it impossible to scroll back to the top of the page quickly using a keyboard.

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

#220

Post by paulddraper »

gokhan wrote: post #138
jasonkostempski wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my first try I accidentally tapped "Android version" instead of "Build number" :)

on 7.x, that leads to an easter egg.

:( I am still on Android 6.

I thought the Google Nexus 5 phone would be getting updates often...but I guess not.

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