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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

#301

Post by sliverstorm »

kgwxd wrote: post #21
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…

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.

Try setting just "Animator duration scale" to 0.5x while leaving the others off. This will fix the camera problem, as well as makes things like closing apps in the "recent" list less janky, and you still get the rest of the benefit.

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

#302

Post by wtetzner »

gmmeyer wrote: post #281
vikramkrishnan wrote: post #272

The front end developer at one of the companies I was working for nearly fainted when I told him I like Craigslist's web interface. The only criticism he could muster was "But it looks like the 90s". And then he proceeded to tell me off "because you don't want to learn how to use a new interface". Of course I don't want to, it is a skill with zero transferability. Learning how to be productive with an interface that…

Craigslist has an amazing interface. It's so easy to use. It's ugly, but who cares! I don't care if it's pretty. It does exactly what I want. There was a great article on this a few years ago that I think is perfect: https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-t...

And honestly, to make it not be ugly would really only require some tasteful CSS, not a redesign or rewrite in some JavaScript framework.

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

#303

Post by hawski »

mnm1 wrote: post #262
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…

A lot. Just take a look at the desktop switching animation in OS X that's been there now for years. I bring that up anytime anyone tries to suggest Apple has decent design sense. No sane UI designer would put something like that in without the possibility of disabling it (like their other shitty animations). To be clear, any UI designer who hasn't understood the absolute fact that after a hundred or a thousand times,…

Few years back when I had to use OSX I tried to use native workspaces. The switch workspaces animation was already too long for me the first time. In Windows there are (were?) at least all those registry edits that one can do to do whatever one pleases. Also Windows has the adjust all visual effects for best performance setting. But I couldn't find anything for OSX.

An example of the way I use workspaces:

- one workspace for terminal, browser with documentation and some text editor

- second workspace for a full-blown IDE, another browser window with documentation and the developed application

It's funny that there are easy solutions to the cut scene problem. If user skips the cut scene there could be a little message that if you press some key the cut scene will replay. And/or give the list of all cut scenes to the point somewhere in the menu. But most of the time cut scenes are there to bring the cinematic experience and are easy and lazy thing to do...

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

#305

Post by nirv »

paulddraper wrote: post #220
gokhan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you you're comfortable with custom ROM, LineageOS[1][2] is very stable and snappy on Nexus 5.

[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/hammerhead

[2] https://download.lineageos.org/hammerhead

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

#306

Post by hawski »

lolsal wrote: post #206
falcolas wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for actual, physical maps, with indices for finding locations, and all kinds of markings to denote things of interest (such as restaraunts, museums, etc.)

Physical maps don't necessarily have: - satellite imagery - reviews for destinations - automatic re-routing - traffic congestion - toll/public-transit information - On a mobile/gps enabled device you get your location as well - etc. Comparing physical maps to Google Maps is one-dimensional: you can see a specific area (if you had the foresight to buy it before hand!) with roads and mile markers.

Do people actually use satellite imagery other than to appreciate how cool is to look at one's house from above?

Reviews are mostly around average 3 stars for most places. Because there are two types of revies: 1 star - waiting times were horrible, the meal was cold and waiter was rude; 5 star - the best meal I ever had, everyone was cheerful and helpful.

Automatic re-routing is good. Especially with traffic information. However it is miserable where there are unknown closed roads. It will constantly reroute you to the closed road. You can't pick a road segment and remove it from consideration. Then you are back to experience of physical maps. However slightly worse, because you don't know road numbers - up to this point they were irrelevant.

Traffic congestion is a big plus.

Public-transit is also a great thing.

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

#307

Post by michrassena »

ryandrake wrote: post #257
michrassena wrote: post #177

Last year, in a fit of nostalgia I finally bought an Apple IIe, a system I had wanted 30 years ago, at a garage sale. Somehow in moving it back to my house, I dislodged the floppy controller card, leaving the system to boot from ROM. I turned it on, it beeped, and there was the prompt. I perceived it as instantaneous. I know that from that point I could have written a BASIC program and saved it to a cassette tape. Th…

> Developer time has outstripped hardware costs, and somehow an hour of developer time is worth the same as wasting a million hours of the users' time Key point here. It's hard to get the biz guys and product managers to agree with spending developer hours on performance improvements, because it's hard to measure the effect it has on business metrics. Does making your application take 750ms to launch rather than 8 se…

And I'm not even talking specifically about application performance, though what you're saying is still absolutely spot on. Think of all the time wasted because of poor, or incomplete documentation. An I sympathize with anyone writing documentation. We're definitely still in the era of move fast and break things.

These costs which accrue to everyone because no one can afford to take it on themselves, I would call externalities in the same sense we do when talking about pollution.

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

#308

Post by bitwize »

kayamon wrote: post #235
bitwize wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is faster when you build it into ROM. The cost is flexibility. Should you wish to run another OS on that ST, ypu would have to bootstrap it through TOS.

On a modern system, you could use flash RAM to get the same speed with all the flexibility advantages.

Indeed and unlike the 90s, SSDs are cheap now. :)

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

#309

Post by losvedir »

fallingfrog wrote: post #3

This! I once took over programming a point of sale system that our (internal to the company) users were complaining about. Turns out there was no concept of tab sequence, you had to use the mouse for everything. I asked the previous programmer to show me how to use the form he created, and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad. But hey, it had lots of javascript!

> and he started typing a phone number using the top row of the keyboard instead of the numpad

As I'd expect any good programmer to...? As a 100+ wpm touch typist (including symbols + numbers) and former finance professional, I use the top row of the keyboard for numbers.

How is having 8 fingers available that don't have to move much going to be slower than using three that have to move up and down?

I get the point that the programmer wasn't behaving like the users; that's a good critique, but I'm picking up the vibe from this comment that you think the numpad is inherently better for that sort of thing? No way...

Edit: huh, seeing the chain of comments here, I guess I'm in the minority? I don't see how someone can consider them a touch typist (type quickly without looking at the keyboard) and not be able to reach and use numbers and symbols, but maybe a lot of folks here are like that? How do you program with numbers, and ampersands, and parentheses, and asterisks and the equal sign and underscores and all that, having to look down at the keyboard???

It just seems obvious to me that a skilled typist would be much faster using the top numbers than the numpad.

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

#310

Post by gunnihinn »

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…

> I am unsure if LaTeX is completely OSS

The TeX sources are widely available and (infamously) well documented. The LaTeX macros are merely widely available. I forget what licence they're under, though.

What makes you unsure they're open source?

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