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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#61

Post by chriskrycho »

egypturnash wrote: post #47

Evernote. 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…

You might try Obsidian. I think it checks all of those boxes except “web view”: it’s an Electron app, but like VS Code it shows that web tech doesn’t have to be slow (it just nearly always is). They just shipped the native client and it’s not perfect but it’s surprisingly good.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#63

Post by b3morales »

j-pb wrote: post #9

The 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…

Most of the developers you mentioned are still around and still cranking. Panic and Rogue Amoeba in particular. Others have emerged, though there's a lot of crossover with iOS these days, since people want their data available across their devices. Bear and Things come to mind; Dash by Kapeli; The Archive; Kaleidoscope has been reinvigorated by a company that seems to know what they're doing; Alfred; Paw, Proxie, and Proxyman... they are out there.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#64

Post by aduitsis »

A staggering percentage of applications today, regardless of platform (native, mobile, web) can be fully implemented, as regards their UI, with the usual set of UI widgets such as text boxes, dropdown lists, radio boxes, buttons, etc. These widgets are available in any toolkit or browser in highly polished and performant implementations that require very little from the developer in terms of fiddling with the UI.

So it completely boggles the mind that, during the last decade, we are witnessing an unbelievable onslaught to any sane UI convention that people have come to expect. At the top of my head:

- No accessibility at all, even though there are extensive sets of standards fully implemented by the UI toolkit. - No scrollbars at all. Even worse, scrollbars that don't behave quite right.

- Ugly styling that doesn't follow even the most basic modicum of guidelines crystalized around the 80s.

- Text boxes and other widgets that have hidden weird behaviours, or are generally ridiculously slow.

- UI widgets that are badly sized and don't correctly follow the regular zoom controls.

- Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area.

- Trivial apps for which the browser has to download megabytes of js and raise the CPU to a point that the fans need to start spinning.

- Cryptic icons that don't have any semantic connection with what they are supposed to accomplish.

- My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact with it.

- Phone button menus that have an unknown size below the bottom of the screen and there is no visible clue how many icons below the bottom are not visible.

We are possibly very near hitting rock bottom in terms of UI in 2021, which (oddly enough) means that there is bound to be a renaissance of some sort as regards those things. After the middle ages many turned to the classical antiquity for inspiration. Drooling over the skeuomorphic UIs of the original iPhone and the pseudo-3d toolkits of the 1990s...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#65

Post by kall »

Laforet wrote: post #31

Back 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…

I believe the iPad app was so damn good because it was an app called Tweetie that they bought. That was a real shame when it went away in favor of the lowest common denominator.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#66

Post by joe_the_user »

I think the explanation for this comes down to same dynamic involved in Microsoft eating the office application world in the 90s; People who buy the application for X feature will still buy it or stay with it with X feature now crappier while people want Y feature, even if it's crappy will now also the app - especially if the app is a market leader.

In software development, there's an internal to the company dynamic where the designer/lead-architect/etc wants to show value to the company and so rework the architecture into the current thing or some idiocy of their own devising and this is how features worsen. You can call this a extra process but I think of this as just the way economic dynamic happens. If this dynamic didn't still make the company, it would be stopped.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#68

Post by nicoburns »

pantulis wrote: post #54
egypturnash wrote: post #47

Evernote. 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…

What makes you think it couldn't compete with the solid implementation it had without adding new features?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#69

Post by throwawayboise »

samb1729 wrote: post #24
eplanit wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me oth…

My Prime Video experience on Apple TV in the UK mirrors this. I knew exactly what I wanted to watch but I simply could not figure out how to get the app to show it to me. The search feature returned and endless feed of results, none of which matched. Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV right now: - The Grand Tour - The Grand Tour…

I can't watch The Office. Too much like the real office.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#70

Post by mattmanser »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #36

I just started reading a Kindle ebook on my phone and on a Kindle device. The process of switching from one to the other used to be that you open the one, read your location number in the book, and jump to that location in the other. At some point Amazon introduced "real page numbers" for their ebooks. Those are supplemental numbers intended to synch up with the page numbering of physical books. You could display you…

Err, no, the process for switching from one to the other is that they sync last page read automatically. You shouldn't be doing anything.

It works auto-magically for me all the time. I read a lot of books, and I often switch between my Kindle and my phone several times a book.

Maybe you don't have your Kindle connect to your network or whatever, but the reason you're struggling is because you're following the less trodden path.

It works for books I've uploaded to Kindle too, though I always use the upload service via email, precisely because then it's available on both devices.

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