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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#131

Post by reaperducer »

kowlo wrote: post #22
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…

What was wrong with VSCode?

For me, running more than one Electron app at a time for too long is a recipe for kernel panic.

I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20% chance I'm going to have to reboot that day.

Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#132

Post by maficious »

masa331 wrote: post #40

Are PMs the only one to blame? What about developers "bored" with old and perfectly working stuff jumping to new shiny hype trains whenever possible?

That's true. I feel the urge to use new shiny stuff pretty often, but have no choice but to use old robust solutions, because new ones are just mostly proofs of concepts. This is also extremely true about the whole web-dev thing (the good ol' one JavaScript framework a day).

I guess it just comes down to working ethics. Doctors are a good example. Among them there are people who just do a job, who aren't passionate about the whole saving lives. And those are people that work directly with patients and heal people. Now imagine how bad a situation is when a person doesn't work directly with people and responsibility seems little. Among developers, there are people who are genuinely concerned about quality of the code they produce, but they are a minority. There are far more of those, who came in the field just because that's the next big thing and where the money's at. They just spend their whole day ramming that badly written code in a badly written codebase because manager told them to get it done by the end of the day. They don't see the consequences of their actions.

I read something like "a bunch of developers are controlling data of millions of people" some time ago. It feels relevant. Quite a lot of developers don't realize the scale of impact their software can have on people.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#133

Post by ardit33 »

wonnage wrote: post #39
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…

Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable. All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...

The engineers that did that have gone, replaced by newer folks...

As companies get larger, the engineering talent reverts to the mean. The first crop of engineers, that were passionate about it, and made it a success. After they move on, they are replaced with average corp. employee, that joins Spotify as safe/boring job. Hence anything interesting gets removed, and the most boring features survive.

Ps. I was one of the involved on that feature. I didn't write it (It was done in Sweden), but I created one of the earlier demos, (and patents), and that eventually became touch to preview.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#134

Post by MattGaiser »

bradlys wrote: post #99
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…

Blaming the engineers for wanting to follow trends is really passing the buck. Blame the industry (hiring managers, ctos, investors, etc) for not hiring people who don’t have the exact skill set that they’re looking for. To be competitive (aka get paid well) in today’s marketplace you need to have a skill set that is with whatever trends are most common. I’m fortunate that the company I was hired at doesn’t care that…

Or just the fact that you need to constantly be on the market to get market compensation.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#135

Post by 1_2__5 »

While not letting PMs off the hook - I think “PM culture” is a cancer on the tech industry, and companies have ceded far too much influence to them overall - I think the issue is something else. The way I’ve described it is: the goal of many apps, services and sites now is to get you to spend as much time as possible in/on them, not to make you happy while doing so. They’ve learned that FOMO increases engagement. That the more time a user spends fumbling around for what they want, the more time they hold your attention. That user re-education means more time, more attention, more eyeballs.

We are in a world being rapidly destroyed by metrics. Any sense of intuitiveness or even humanity is considered worthless, because no PowerPoint-driven argument can be made in favor of it, while the metrics faction has reams of “data” to back then up. A thousand times a day we’re subjected to things we don’t want to experience, nobody wants to experience, but they make a metric somewhere go in the right direction. Shittier, harder to use software is just one facet of it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#136

Post by chunkyks »

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…

To counter your point, it's not just that product managers are easy to blame; it's that it's literally their job to change stuff.

Developers want to change stuff and do greenfield because it's fun, but that's a whole different beast to a career track whose job it is to change things. This goes beyond just poor incentives ["Googler gets a raise because shiny new thing"], into "upper management have created a construct whose purpose it is to disappoint existing customers who like what's already there".

There may be an argument that you'll draw in more people with shiny stuff, than you'll lose when you break old stuff. I only have anecdotes and personal experience that that's untrue [digg? reddit? metro?], and no examples of cases showing that argument to be right.

Also, personally I get my jollies working on other people's old code. I work with several FORTRAN codebases that pre-date my birth, and I enjoy it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#137

Post by andrekandre »

_fzslm wrote: post #23
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…

how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.

not the op, but...

i find it pretty good, i use it for swift development (packages/libs) with a swift plugin (language server)

it works pretty well for that, its quite lightweight and smooth for the most part

my only concerns are

1. the swift plugin hasnt been updated in a long time, when will it stop working? (general issue of relying in plugins)

2. i think it uses its own text engine, so it "feels" different to other cocoa apps, not a big deal, just something i notice

3. if you wanna just open a file and get syntax highlighting, dont care about autocompletion/building, its maybe a little heavy for that (in the ui sense)

4. this may depend on plugin functionality, but error messages sometimes dont work as well as in xcode (click to fix, duplicate errors reported etc) ---

its not as fully powered as jetbrains tho someday maybe it could!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#138

Post by na85 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #71
dmitriid wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>OSS has the best designs, at least on the desktop.

I guess you haven't used GIMP

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#139

Post by antisthenes »

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 mean, the worst offender is Windows itself, and by far the most critical to everyday user experience.

The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security.

Nor is it really true that older OSs simply aren't able to be made secure without releasing additional UI/UX changes alongside security patches.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#140

Post by Causality1 »

Ex File Explorer Pro remains the best file manager for Android. It's the only one that treats network shares as seamlessly as local file folders and support tabbed folder windows. Unfortunately if you want to use it you have to get an APK from before the developer was bought out by a malware company.
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