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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#271

Post by tomc1985 »

sonofaplum wrote: post #20

There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with! The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. There is always room for improvement, but a…

You had me until you started minimizing power users, like pretty much every software developer today. I don't see the guesswork as a good thing; Google Maps hasn't "just worked" for me anywhere near 100% of the time in years. "One step forward, two steps back" would almost perfectly describe GMap's "smartness"

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#272

Post by asdfman123 »

coldtea wrote: post #202
asdfman123 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciated his complaints, but not his solution. Only a programmer would think that going back to keyboards is a good idea. Most people are happy waiting for a few seconds for their webpage to load, if it means they can do it without learning anything new. Programming is a profession, and we design software for people who have other interests than software. Many of us would be better off if we got better at empath…

> I appreciated his complaints, but not his solution. Only a programmer would think that going back to keyboards is a good idea. Or anybody that has to deal with frequent input work -- anybody at a POS, a factory control center, an air traffic control tower, a ship, a library, and thousands of other such cases. Those people would very much want to go back to keyboards if they used such an interface, and would very mu…

That's true and actually that's a good point because I sometimes design software for people who key in stuff at a warehouse. I should ask them if they'd like those features.

It's funny I read the article without thinking I could apply the results at my job!

But going that extra mile is hard. In most shops like mine, what people need is more features and fixes, and elegant UI isn't a high priority. It's not all laziness, there is wisdom in satisficing.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#274

Post by cgh »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #39

Sorry, but in 1983 I was using CLOAD and CSAVE, and it took very long minutes to save & load anything (on cassette!).

If you read the article, he's talking about the ui experience for certain narrow applications, not i/o on '80s 8-bit home computers.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#275

Post by TeMPOraL »

sonofaplum wrote: post #20

There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with! The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. There is always room for improvement, but a…

There are many excellent points made in response to your comment, but I'd like to point out one thing:

> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y'

Being a power user isn't a function of geekness, or a mark of belonging to some niche. Being a power user is a function of frequency and depth of use.

My wife is a power user of a particular e-commerce seller backend, a certain CAD software, and Excel, all due to her job. She is not technical, but when you spend 8 hours a day each day in front of some piece of software, you eventually do become a power user. Teenagers of today are power users of Snapchat, because they use it all the time.

Software being "power user friendly" isn't about accommodating existing power users; it's about allowing power users of that software to appear. It's about allowing the room for growth, allowing to do more with less effort. Software that doesn't becomes a toy, inviting only shallow, casual interaction. It's not all it could be. And it's the worst when software that was power user friendly becomes less so over time - it takes back the value it once gave to people.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#276

Post by floatboth »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #206
kabdib wrote: post #72

I had an Atari ST in a closet, and decided to get rid of it a while back. I pulled it out to test it. The boot sequence, all the way to a desktop with a mouse that moves, takes less than one second. If you boot from a hard drive, maybe another second. For a while I just kept hitting the reset button, marveling at the speed at which the ST came up. Most machines I work with these days take minutes to get rolling. Okay…

The latest AMD CPUs are particularly bad at this, I got a 3600 and for half a year now there are known problems with extremely slow booting. The latest BIOS update made them a bit better but it's still at completely unacceptable levels.

That's very board specific I think, some boards from the first Zen generation also had that problem, but my MSI board boots very quickly

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#278

Post by arminiusreturns »

Coming from the ops side and as a user, I blame a focus on abstractions away from fundamentals that lure new and old developers alike into overcomplicating stacks.

For example, I would say some significant percentage of both websites and electron-style apps don't need anything other than pure HTML5+CSS3. Javascript only if necessary. Not here are 5 different Javascript frameworks! Of course there are cases where a framework is applicable, but I'm talking about the vast majority of cases. Then on top of all that are 20+ javascripts advertising and spying per page and pages become unusable without a good js blocker (umatrix is my favorite). Some of this is technical and some of it is business, either way developers need to focus on the fundamentals and pushback against dark patterns.

Now on the desktop side, this is also why I am a CLI junky who lives in a terminal. CLI apps don't get in the way, because most of the time you are just dealing with text anyway. There are many websites that ought to be a cli app at least via api. This is also one of my criticisms of companies trying to force people into the browser by disallowing api clients.

It was the constant bloat and spying that finally spurred me to go gnu/linux only many years ago, and things are only getting better since then. It requires a change in how you do your computing, yes. It may not be easy (higher learning curve), but the rewards are worth it.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#279

Post by microtherion »

The author must have lived in a different 1983 from me. I remember Commodore BASIC freezing up for a minute to perform garbage collection on its 30K of heap if you created too many temp strings.

The C-beams glittering in the dark were pretty cool, though.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)

#280

Post by rconti »

eitland wrote: post #60
sonofaplum wrote: post #20

There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with! The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. There is always room for improvement, but a…

Edit: yes. Rewrote half of it. The thing with Google Maps was that it was actually reasonably good and intuitive on mobile until sometime 5 or 7 years ago when someone decided it had to be "simplified". The old version was easy: you enter "to" and "from", and it gives you a route. I think it also had multiple entry points so you could choose "navigate", "browse" and "timeline" or something directly from the system me…

I'm convinced this is the entire purpose of Google PMs; take a good product, make it "prettier", strip away functionality and usability, move to another department, get replaced by someone whose goal it is to make the product even prettier-er, strip away even more functionality, wash/rinse/repeat.

Is there a single person who prefers the monochrome GMail UI where you can't easily visually parse one thread from another, or the "new and improved" functionality where you need to click at least 2 or 3 times to even SEE what address you're sending to or from, or to change the subject?

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