the incentives in the industry are wrong:
- ideally, the best thing to do is do nothing, but that doesn't get recognition. hence people are always itching to tamper around.
Apps Getting Worse
51–60 of 635 posts
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#52> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted
This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile developers and front-end developers increasingly don't want to work on technologies that are perceived as outdated, or even to work on someone else's code. Everyone wants to list new technologies and greenfield projects on their resumes.
This was one of the biggest hiring challenges at my most recent large project: iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in Swift. Android developers wanted to rewrite everything in Kotlin. Our web app was already written in React, but the web developers constantly wanted to refactor it to use the latest state management trend. When Hooks were introduced in React, we spent far too long arguing with developers who wanted to refactor all of the working code to use hooks instead.
The bigger problem is that nobody wanted to work on someone else's codebase. Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects and technologies that would look good on their resume going into the next job. Some of the most talented developers we hired were obviously only interested in using our company as a stepping stone to FAANG jobs (which didn't actually pay much more, but they were more prestigious on a resume so they wanted to switch).
Blaming product managers is an easy out and will likely match popular opinion among people who aren't product managers, but the problem extends to development teams as well.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#53Re: Apps Getting Worse
#54Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life. Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me collaborate with my husband on a few things. Then they rewrote it from the ground up as a sluggish piece of Electron crap. Added a bunch of new stuff that sure looks pretty but gets in the way of the core function of “taking out your phone and scribbling down an idea before it vanishes”. I co…
On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming.
Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete.
I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year but keep my Evernote account just to see how things are going. I want them to succeed, the key is wether the churn of existing users can be offset by new users.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#55The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…
They’ve also removed the persistent search bar and replaced it with a menu item called ‘Search’. I always fumble now because I wonder where the search box is, first I scroll up thinking it’s out of view then I remember it’s been moved behind a click.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#56This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource. "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers. The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling. Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months. My older relatives have…
Here is where OSS could really shine - make clones of old programs and give them modern features while keeping the old-school, actually-working interfaces . Rather than cloning the current (or near-current) iteration of Office, make a file-compatible version that's a snap to use and avoids as much interface fluff as possible. Applications are for work, and should facilitate work. Imagine a Word 5-equivalent WP (and n…
OSS doesn't have money for good design, because good design costs money and commitment. Both are the things OSS projects struggle with.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#57The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…
There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on the Mac, but for iOS. In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.
>> In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to.
I'm willing to pay for quality. The main problem is convincing me of the quality before buying.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#58Back in the skeuomorphism era, Twitter offered an awesome and innovative iPad app (version 4.x) that had a UX design based on three overlapping layers with navigation tabs on the side. One could effortlessly switch between your own timeline, another user's timeline and a series of tweet threads. With the amount of visual elments on screen it was very information dense and easy to follow. I had just bought a retina Ge…
What's best for the 7 billion is bound to be different to what's best for a few power users. It makes sense for them to be different apps, perhaps provided by 3rd parties if Twitter won't do them all.
I find these "7 billion" apps are often effortlessly smooth for basic tasks that I don't want to spend mental effort on. They seem to know what I want to do and make that just about the only option.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#59The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…
Wow thank you for that list of developers. I looked through all of them and found some great apps.
Is there some place that catalogs development companies that are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support these guys and keep them going.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#60This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource. "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers. The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling. Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months. My older relatives have…
Swiping gestures/actions are actually a very natural affordance in mobile "touch" interfaces. They're based on the Accot-Zhai steering law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accot-Zhai_steering_law a natural extension of Fitt's law that was developed as early as the 1990s.