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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#121

Post by blacksmith_tb »

eplanit wrote: post #30
zorked wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm, they didn't discard it so much as bury it alive[1], though?

1: https://dvd.netflix.com/

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#122

Post by wodenokoto »

sushisource wrote: post #104
Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

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…

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). 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'…

> Music player UI is a solved problem.

No it isn’t. Not even close.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#123

Post by simonw »

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…

The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and display that note.

Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later"

I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my notes!

(I have nearly 3,000 notes in Evernote spanning back over more than a decode, so my hunch is that I'm tripping some edge-cases that most of their testing fails to cover)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#124

Post by MattGaiser »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #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 get 1-2 years at a job before they fall behind in compensation.

So my resume always needs to be fresh. I can’t be working with older technology because when it comes time to jump again, I won’t have the skills to do so.

Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects.

Devs have a lot of the same incentives product managers do.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#125

Post by upcode »

wodenokoto wrote: post #122
sushisource wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). 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'…

> Music player UI is a solved problem. No it isn’t. Not even close.

Thanks for such an insightful comment

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#126

Post by HumblyTossed »

Everything is being spreadsheeted to death. Shave a little here, a little there. Start talking about worker productivity instead of customer productivity. Make every decision based on "returns to the shareholder".

Can't have good things when the only thing the people making them care about is money.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#127

Post by zepto »

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…

This has nothing to do with anything Apple has done other than expand from serving a niche of self-identified tasteful customers into serving half the planet.

It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful customers who would for good software, all you had to do was target the Mac. Obviously it’s harder now.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#128

Post by the_lonely_road »

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…

I never had any issue with Scriviner syncing between my windows machine and my iPhone using Dropbox. Took like 5 minutes to finagle into working. The setup instructions were top result on Google when I did it a while back. You should be aware though that merge conflicts were handled exactly how you said you didn’t want. You get a conflict folder with the date on it and a second copy of the document in it. It’s up to you to decide if the conflict version or the main document version is the right one.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#129

Post by Sanguinaire »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

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…

The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20 years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#130

Post by handrous »

amelius wrote: post #89
egypturnash wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God this is every media app, try organizing your e-books in a pleasing fashion someday. You just can’t.

This is what you get when every App has to invent the File System all over again.

My kingdom for a widely-supported cross-platform standard for file metadata and tagging.
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