Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse. It has its place. Especially in a generation of PC gamers that came up with optical mice. Me personally the muscle memory I have from PC gaming for some reasons or other seem to have made navigating ui with a mouse that much more intuitive to me over the last 2 decades and some odd years. To the point it actually feels really good and extremely proficient to me. I feel like I'm faster using a mouse than just pure kb shortcuts. Although I do use a combination of keyboard short cuts and my mouse. Guess it just depends on the task/work flow.
Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
131–140 of 388 posts
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#132This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…
>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You still have to waste a lot of time doing this crap. Last time I set up a printer for my mom, it was a PITA: I had to download drivers, install some giant pile of crap software, go through a bunch of screens of garbage, etc. Needless to say, her computer runs Windows 10. By contrast, when I wanted to print to…
To print in the 80s were slower than today. In the 80s there was no Linux Mint, no laptop.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…
> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally…
> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world.
There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because it's all that they can easily do. The tools you use shape how you work, and what you can work on.
FWIW, I learned to pay attention when the machine doesn't help me do what I want (it's a good source of ideas for side projects), so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate. I do sometimes resort to screenshotting GMaps, or photographing paper maps in the past, just to have a map on my phone. I've seen non-tech people do that as well. So I can be confident that it's not just me and the Twitter thread's author that want this.
> For expert-users the tools that existed decades ago are still there and still usable. Or you can craft your own!
The Twitter thread's point (and mine as well) is that expert users can and do work around this degradation. It's a frustrating chore, but it's not all that difficult if you can code a bit and have some spare time. It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves.
> For non-expert users the information in the world is orders of magnitude more accessible than it used to be.
The way it's accessible, it's almost as if it wasn't. Sure, you can easily Google random trivia. But good luck trying to compare things. That's always a pain, and usually involves hoping that someone else made a dedicated tool for similar comparisons on the topic you're interested in, and that the information hardcoded in that tool are current and accurate. Notably, the tools you use for searching have no support for comparing.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last printer I had to configure on my Linux machine required finding a downloading a hidden mystery bash script from the manufacturer's website and running it with root permissions. Not exactly "plug and play" or "safe"
Then you got the wrong printer. Some manufacturers do a good job of supporting Linux (HP is probably the best actually; their drivers all ship standard in most distros), others don't bother.
I have HP LaserJet 1018 and it is pain to setup. Currently, when I will need to print, I will just turn on printer and then upload firmware manually using cat to make it work.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally…
I think you’re measuring use-cases by volume (i.e. Monthly Active Users) instead of by mass (i.e. number of man-hours spent engaged with the app’s UI by those users.) Certainly, a lot of people use Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions. This means that they interact with the actual UI and visible map tiles once , at the beginning of the trip; and then from there on are given timely voice directions every few minute…
Honestly, the two use cases have an obvious intersection: a planning/wayfinding session in which I want Google to compute me a route that I want to then inspect, perhaps modify, and then save into my planning session.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#136The problem is human memory! People forget all the features, and dependencies software has.
Since the natural direction of the Universe is entropy. As time goes on, software is developed, dependencies are broken, and features quietly stop working.
When you look into fixing it, you notice that its this giant hairball of dependencies which nobody can unwind. So then the next best thing is to put another layer of abstraction on the hairball, and you build on. The price of this is things will get slower.
My Commodore 64 had a more responsive terminal than my macbook, since it was thin layer over hardware, only one or two abstractions deep.
HTML/CSS and Javascript are garbage technologies for making responsive UI, they are so so many levels deep, with so many dependencies and constraints.
The way forward is start fresh with something new, but no idea what it is.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? Literally all of these are still a thing...
Do you remember using jumpers to select IRQ and IO ports on ISA cards, or for selecting master and slave mode on IDE drives?
Yes, and I would vastly rather have to do that than configure anything from Haskell.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…
> Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. What are you talking about? How in the world is a DOS that can only run a single app at a time better than a system that can run…
> What are you talking about? How in the world is a DOS that can only run a single app at a time better than a system that can run dozens of apps at once? How is non-multitasking a better experience?
The person you were replying to was specifically talking about POS (Point of Sale) systems.
Retail workers use these systems to do repetitive tasks as quickly as possible. Legacy systems tend to be a lot faster (and more keyboard accessible) than modern web-based systems.
It is not uncommon for retail workers to have a standard Windows workstation these days so they can reference things on the company website, but then also shell into a proper POS system.
Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#139This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the g…
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map . It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-t…
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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017)
#140Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse. It has its place. Especially in a generation of PC gamers that came up with optical mice. Me personally the muscle memory I have from PC gaming for some reasons or other seem to have made navigating ui with a mouse that much more intuitive to me over the last 2 decades and some odd years. To the point it actually feels really good and extremely proficient to me. I feel like I'm…
"Whoa no need to attack the poor mouse."
Did you actually read the article?