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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#381

Post by baby »

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…

Have you tried to use the iTunes app on desktop? It’s pretty horrendous too. Been using it for more than a decade and it’s slowly gotten better but the integration with iTunes match and apple music is really weird.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#382

Post by markmark »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #252
pshc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in Swift Swift is hardly new anymore... are you going to maintain an ObjC codebase in perpetuity?

Yes? Why not? What's the objective benefit of rewriting something already working into a different language?

The ability to hire developers to work on your product?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#383

Post by mark-r »

hanniabu wrote: post #355
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'…

> I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. Similarly with the Google Play to Youtube Music transition. Play was so clean, snappy, and intuitive. Youtube Music is similar to what you describe of Spotify where everything is buried, busy layout, and nothing is intuitive.

Google Play was perfect for playing the .mp3 files on my Android phone. No need for an internet connection. Then suddenly it was ripped away, and YouTube is not remotely a replacement. I still haven't found an adequate replacement because I don't know how to search for the features that are important to me.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#384

Post by marderfarker2 »

Ecstatify wrote: post #187
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…

My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.

I listened to 3 minutes of Joe Roegan out of boredom and now Joe roegan lives perpetually on the Spotify homescreen

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#385

Post by vladikoff »

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…

Oh my goodness, you are so right. Every new Spotify update is a freaking disaster. Makes me want to unsubscribe!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#386

Post by CamperBob2 »

godelski wrote: post #364
sflicht wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with having a lot of settings? I absolutely hate that Twitter does not let me turn off their "features", but rather only lets me say "see less often" (which of course does nothing because I told Twitter not to track my preferences etc, but probably doesn't do anything for anyone anyway, except maybe provide a datapoint for some poorly thought out ML algorithm they put in place).

I like a lot of settings but I'm also okay with them being buried a bit. Advanced users tend to not care about going 5 layers deep to get what they want.

Exactly. They can be buried, and in many cases should be, but they still need to be there somewhere. Spotify seems to lose one or two useful features per calendar quarter. They're not hidden, but lost altogether.

If you really want your blood pressure pumped up, try the Spotify mobile app under CarPlay sometime. At this point, it lets you do basically nothing. A 1980s-era cassette deck gave you more control over the listening experience, just because its fast-forward and rewind buttons worked.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#387

Post by userbinator »

MereInterest wrote: post #219
reaperducer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there's a huge tragedy of the commons when it comes to RAM. I get all the arguments about unused RAM being wasted RAM, and that it is more effective to drop a cache at the last moment, just in case it would be used before then. But those arguments only apply if you have a single entity handling the allocations. Otherwise the program holding the memory has no idea that it should drop a cache to allow a differe…

IM applications are the worst offenders --- they are often left in the background and only for notification purposes, yet we somehow end up with monstrosities like Slack and Teams which use more RAM when idle than an entire computer a decade ago.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#389

Post by CamperBob2 »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #184
upcode wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for such an insightful comment

It’s infinitely more insightful than the claim that it’s a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.

OK, let's try to move the conversation in a more productive direction. What aspects of the music-player problem weren't already solved by 2010 or so?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#390

Post by SkyPuncher »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #50
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 on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their…

The Playstation app and Android TV apps randomly desync the UI from the content being played. It seems particularly problematic with Daily Mixes that change from time to time. Selecting a song (or hitting next) basically selects a completely random song to play.
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