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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#591

Post by trinovantes »

codesections wrote: post #505
trinovantes wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resume driven development strikes again! Everyone just wants to use the latest shiny thing then switch jobs and leave the pile of burning mess to the next sucker. Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech.

> Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech. But YNAB is also a great example of apps-getting-worse — you're explicitly praising the 2012 version over the 2015/evergreen version. (In YNAB's case, they had business reasons to make the app worse (or thought they did), but I bet…

I can't really blame them for their new webapp. They've built a great product that doesn't really need any further maintenance. It'd be pretty weird after they finish YNAB4 to just say, "Ok we're done, let's disband the company".

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#592

Post by srgpqt »

lentil_soup wrote: post #522
nickkell wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? I've never understood that either. I have downloaded quite a few albums for offline listening throughout the years but now I have no way of removing them because there's no listing. From time to time I still stumble upon an album marked as downloaded so I get that one chance to remove it.

If you want to delete them all, just delete the entire app and reinstall?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#593

Post by Sophistifunk »

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…

It's to steer you to cheaper (for them) content, I imagine, with enough randomness to make it sticky and obscure the real goal.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#594

Post by Sophistifunk »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #294
grishka wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an Android developer who despises Kotlin and all the other trendy stuff. I often get laughed at for my views. However, my apps are ridiculously slim and fast, so there's that. Oh and I don't have a job. It really feels to me as if developers these days care much more about the development process itself, and how their code looks, than about the end product of their work that the users see. Same for designers — th…

I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Developers don't talk about enabling people or making lives better anymore, they don't talk about helping people work more efficiently or use their computer more effectively. Developers treat their users like cattle now. They addict them and herd them and farm their eyeballs for ad-revenue. They don't program to make the world a better place, they program because it's a fun way…

I'm sick of this bullshit. I always push back against managers or leads who're trying to get in a feature that users won't like, or will find confusing. And I'm not the only one. Not every programmer works for the surveillance-industrial complex.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#595

Post by rhizome »

scns wrote: post #511
torgian wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, take a look at fashion design. Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world. But designs for clothing always keeps changing, even if they are small, subtle changes. I think you can apply the same towards design of anything. Tastes change. While a certain design philosophy might be a godsend in 2010, it might be considered trash in 2015. To be fair, I also think a…

> Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world. Objectivity is an ideal we can strive towards. And several crazy and expensive designs are worn in the real world. I have seen it with my own eyes. The people who are able to afford those clothes either: - Have bad taste (A subjective judgement which is logically wrong, since it is absolute) - Really like that look - Don'…

Humans are never objective. Ever. Not only that, this inherent and fundamental subjectivity means they could never know what objectivity looks like in order to judge whether something is indeed objective. Because their criteria are subjective.

It's not an ideal, it's a legend.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#596

Post by CamperBob2 »

godelski wrote: post #578
CamperBob2 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they could implement the same transport controls that my cassette deck had in 1989. They could also enable additional features when the vehicle isn't moving, if they cared enough to do so. What's not safe is providing an app that's so frustrating to use that it encourages the driver to touch and grope and scroll and drag all kinds of different things, looking for a commonplace UI affordance that, sure…

Honestly every car app I've used is just terrible. VLC locks out half your artists (it does unlock when you're stopped). Maps blocks limits the keyboard and forces you to use voice. I'm frequently disconnecting my phone, doing what I want, and then reconnecting it. This defeats the entire purpose of car play other than that my GPS is displayed in a place that is visible to me. I'm sure the play engineers have thought…

But I am not confident they watched people use them in the real world.

Oh, rest assured, they do. Time spent screwing around trying to get the app to do what you want is considered "engagement," and treated as a target for optimization.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#597

Post by reaperducer »

Zababa wrote: post #581
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.

> 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.

VSCode isn't a gift to developers. It's a marketing tool.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#598

Post by Zababa »

reaperducer wrote: post #597
Zababa wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

VSCode isn't a gift to developers. It's a marketing tool.

Why can't it be both? Microsoft has been doing great things recently, with VSCode, Typescript, C#. Of course maybe it's the first step of EEE. I'm personally worried about the VSCode/developing in containers that's closed source/Github/NPM acquisition, that sounds like they're preparing some kind of best of class developing experience (probably linked with Azure too) that will be proprieteray. But for now they remain well behaved, and everything until now is open source.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#599

Post by solarmist »

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 play devil's advocate on the re-write stuff. That's because new tools are usually significantly better on one or more dimensions and usually not much worse in other dimensions.

That doesn't mean you should actually do it, but as someone who's had more than enough time to get over the new and shine syndrome there's a lot to be gained by migrating as often as needed (ie. the productivity gain from the new outweighs the migration/current support cost in a reasonable timeframe).

Programming tools, techniques and languages are still evolving quickly and even in the same ecosystem I don't use many of the tools and a frameworks I did 5 years ago.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#600

Post by higeorge13 »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #579
surfingdino wrote: post #539

YouTube app on Android. You watch a video you like but accidentally tap on a different one. Try going back to the previous one now...

What boggles the mind is that it has a next button, which will play any random video. But no previous button, even though that's a dead simple feature.

It seems like tinder-inspired design. I have missed so many times having a back button in yt, that i would literally pay for it.
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