101–110 of 635 posts
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OSS doesn't have money for good design, because good design costs money and commitment. Both are the things OSS projects struggle with.
OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop. And it's becoming quite competitive in mobile and touch interfaces, too.
Where? OSS is consistently a mish-mash of unfinished ideas.
The 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…
One of the frustrating things about their mobile app too is that they don't keep the controls on screen when it's playing. I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got so far from the core product experience that they actually hide the controls of a music player. I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to click to see the 'skip' control.
> 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…
I am just writing some hardware test app using C++ and wxWidgets.
But in general, yes, you are completely right. It's just virtual signalling between developers. You can't just write something, it has to be Instagram friendly. It needs to be popular and have hundreds of stars in GitHub.
The 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…
From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose. About as pure an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.
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Heh. I am so sick of all the movie apps and how hard it is to find which one has what, plus the fact that they all only have American superhero movies, that I started renting discs again. Turns out there's someone in my country that rents movies via snail mail. I suspect it's just someone with a very large collection trying to recoup some of the money spent on it. It works really well.
I love it -- the fellow countryman picked up, dusted off, and re-used the good business model that Netflix discarded so long ago. It's great.
Software is no different
On the contrary, Chrome on Android recently release "tab groups", and I hate it. Had to search around for a bunch of esoteric chrome flags settings, but even after applying those i couldnt get back to individual tabs.
It said that researchers tried for ages, and at great expense, to find ‘the perfect’ pasta sauce and couldn’t do it. No-one would ever all agree. It turned out you needed to make 3 or 4 versions and different people would find each perfect according to their whims.
This never seems to happen with software though. When Facebook does a massive redesign they (eventually) force it on everyone. Likewise the new iOS or any software update as mentioned in article. It’s always in this quest to find one perfect version, rather than accepting that there is no perfect version for everyone and you have to give different users choices, or at least options!
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…
What was wrong with VSCode?