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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#581

Post by Zababa »

reaperducer wrote: post #131
kowlo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

They made one of the best text editor/IDE and released it for free. I wouldn't call that being lazy and cheap.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#582

Post by Causality1 »

godelski wrote: post #177
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 there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hinti…

Purely the justification of their own job. Open up any settings window in Windows 10. The title bar and the window contents are the exact same color, making it impossible to tell where exactly you need to click to drag the window. In a sane world the programmer responsible for that would be out on their ass.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#583

Post by ProZsolt »

godelski wrote: post #177
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 there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hinti…

> Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android).

I'm not a designer, but I know this. They needed less stuff on the right, so the can have a notch in the center.

This made the UI worse for everybody else.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#584

Post by exporectomy »

gtyras2mrs wrote: post #517
exporectomy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's best for the 7 billion is bound to be different to what's best for a few power users. It makes sense for them to be different apps, perhaps provided by 3rd parties if Twitter won't do them all. I find these "7 billion" apps are often effortlessly smooth for basic tasks that I don't want to spend mental effort on. They seem to know what I want to do and make that just about the only option.

The problem I find is that when apps are created for the common-denominator, they alienate the power users that usually create the content that the rest consume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) The Twitter app for example, is perfectly ok for me as a lurker/consumer -- but is most often criticised by the people who i follow (and who are active tweeters)

But you can just use the another one if you're in that special minority, can't you? I've heard of Tweetdeck being a Twitter application used by content creator type Twitter users.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#585

Post by CRConrad »

lanterk wrote: post #432
actually_a_dog wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of pure UI, I agree. There were a few peaks in Windows UI/UX: 3.0, 98, XP, and Windows 10. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more bloat. But, if the long-term trend continues, maybe Windows 15 will clean things up again. :)

Just casually skipping over the highest peak (Windows 7) I see...

The last one that could be made to look like NT4 / W2K; yeah, definitely the best all in all. (Though it was of course somewhat bloated from all the .NET stuff.)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#586

Post by CRConrad »

handrous wrote: post #130
amelius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How large is it, and does it come with any good-looking princesses?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#587

Post by CRConrad »

zozbot234 wrote: post #60
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #6

This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource. "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers. The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling. Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months. My older relatives have…

Swiping gestures/actions are actually a very natural affordance in mobile "touch" interfaces. They're based on the Accot-Zhai steering law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accot-Zhai_steering_law a natural extension of Fitt's law that was developed as early as the 1990s.

The problem with swiping and gestures is precisely that it has no affordances.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#588

Post by dang »

svnpenn wrote: post #440
thethethethe wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This makes sense in the short term but what happens when UI design passes you by and all your competitors look slee…

This is the dumbest comment I have read in a long time.

No personal attacks please, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We ban accounts that post like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28116532.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#589

Post by handrous »

CRConrad wrote: post #586
handrous wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How large is it, and does it come with any good-looking princesses?

I'd tell you, but I was keeping all that info in extended attributes and lost it all when I switched filesystems.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#590

Post by surye »

nickkell wrote: post #243
TeMPOraL wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was very sorry to notice Spotify getting worse and worse. It seems that now the app won’t display anything without an internet connection, or certain items that were downloaded don’t appear in the list. What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them? The desktop app is also getting worse. After a certain period of time clicking play simply has no effect, so it needs to be r…

> What’s the point of downloading songs for offline use if you can’t even navigate to them?

So you can listen to them without consuming potentially expensive mobile data.

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