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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#611

Post by anderspitman »

jonplackett wrote: post #109

I watched a ted talk ages ago and it stuck with me (Sorry I forget which, maybe this one https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_paradox_of_choi... , please correct me if I’m wrong) It said that researchers tried for ages, and at great expense, to find ‘the perfect’ pasta sauce and couldn’t do it. No-one would ever all agree. It turned out you needed to make 3 or 4 versions and different people would find each p…

Open protocols with open source clients are the way to achieve this, but oh wait ads.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#612

Post by Zababa »

lytefm wrote: post #606
Zababa wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all putting good for yourself over good for your customer and good for your employer. Wouldn't this not happen if the employers just paid more? From what I understand, people do resume-driven development because they want to work at a place that will pay more at some point.

Fair point. There was a discussion about an article asking why companies don't pay their Developers more to stay recently [1]. If I was maintaining some decades-old legacy code and knew that my employer will most likely still be around and pay me a competitive salary for the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind just mastering COBOL. But most companies go bust or lay off developers at some point, so keeping yourself emplo…

That's what I've heard too, that most COBOL jobs don't pay that much and have been outsourced.

> If I was maintaining some decades-old legacy code and knew that my employer will most likely still be around and pay me a competitive salary for the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind just mastering COBOL.

That is how I feel too. In fact I'd prefer working on something that really lasts compared to the latest fad. But the differences in salary make this a difficult choices.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#613

Post by alsetmusic »

eloisius wrote: post #422
uniqueid wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say this view has it entirely backwards because part of the phenomenon is due to the strengths of the web today and of Electron. But the 'backward' part of the argument is that native Apple software could , but no longer does, provide its own strengths to counter the web and Electron. I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use Electron. H…

Agree. I hate every electron app I use, but even my longtime macOS favorites are beginning to feel only marginally better. They keep spicing up the UI, removing things that used to be reliable constants across applications and hiding more and more things behind ... menus like I'm on a mobile device, revealing or moving UI elements on mouse hover. Little details like the title bar of of every window behaving the same…

I agree with the sentiment that macOS UI is on a severe decline. Here’s one bit of possible comfort for you. Get the proxy icon back without having to hover over window titles:

defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/10/05/big-surs-hidden-document-...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#614

Post by rhizome »

jatins wrote: post #483
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…

Don't hate the player, hate the game. In every company, the incentives are such that you need to change stuff to get promoted. Despite hating the game, I'd probably create similar incentives if I had a company. Because the other option is stagnation. Is there a third option?

>Is there a third option?

Yes: some companies have employees who don't quit as soon as a new JavaScript framework is launched. Do what they do. Yes, large companies operate by different terms than startups, but I assume (big guess here) there are startups who aren't just angling for acquisition or unicorn-or-bust layoff pits. Note that they may not say they're going in those directions, but they will definitely manage you in those terms.

[In fact, I'd be curious how many For GP, it seems obvious that they're interviewing the wrong people. It could be their phone screening, it could be their ad, it could be their industry sector. For instance, don't advertise for a Front-end Developer, advertise for a [thing you're actually hiring for] Developer, and screen resumes on this basis regardless of what you put in the ad (which hopefully is accurate as to job responsibilities and necessary skills).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#615

Post by pantulis »

bsder wrote: post #341
reilly3000 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. It inevitably leads to compromises for which a native UX would have been superior. Speed, layouts, native idioms, and continuity come to mind. Sure it’s a lot to ask for a truly native Android app to keep parity with a truly native Mac desktop app, but compared with a React Native codebase, the experience is sublime and the fus…

> I think the downsides associated with having a common codebase are grossly underestimated. I don't. Event loops, for example, work completely differently on macOS, iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. You will abstract across them eventually and you will get that abstraction wrong unless you are a programming god--at which point you might as well just use a cross-platform system to start. The cross-platform guys have…

I guess you need to decide what indicator are you trying to optimize: user experience vs cost effectiveness. Evernote's CEO decided for the latter and I believe he's right betting the company on the Electron based clients. This is also understandably infuriating existing users as they lose the biggest feature that was the native feeling of EN. Other features are being slowly added along with some new ones that are arguably useful, but snappiness will not come back.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#616

Post by mastazi »

wildmanx wrote: post #547
mastazi wrote: post #205

There should be a new category of apps, where you can still get the contents offered by a given service (Spotify, Youtube, your favourite news service etc.) while at the same time not using the built in UI. For example, imagine a web app that embeds Youtube videos, that will show you every new video published by channels you choose. No home page suggestions, no "trending", no "you might be interested in". You could d…

"Not mainstream" is key here. Once those become mainstream, they get shut down by the provider of the original service. The original provider wants to make money off this, so they use the UI to provide you with ads and a bunch of tricks to keep engagement up. No way they let you off the hook to use what's costly without being exposed to what drives the income stream. Open APIs, that's what you need. Obviously Faceboo…

> Open APIs, that's what you need.

Well I agree in principle, but I also agree with you that the big guys aren't going to offer APIs. And even if they were, I think if you rely on some API you are going to be shut down in the long term (remember all those Twitter clients that were using the now defunct Twitter API?).

So, I think the way to go is to base everything on embeds. They are never going to get rid of the ability to embed posts/videos/tweets because it brings more traffic to their sites.

You still need a bit of scraping, in case the service in question doesn't have RSS (Youtube does for example). And yes, with scraping they will try and make your life impossible (dynamic class names etc. to make scraping hard), but you would only need it for discovering the URL of new posts/tweets/videos, and nothing else.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#617

Post by pantulis »

nicoburns wrote: post #68
pantulis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming. Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete. I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year…

What makes you think it couldn't compete with the solid implementation it had without adding new features?

This is a great question.

My point of view is if you can't deliver new features you become the incumbent and new player will replicate those features with lower cost or better execution. Also, the ball is moving: newer apps are heavy on features like backlinking that could not be delivered with the glacial release cycles of the "good old Evernote".

I understand that EN is still the best on being the ultimate digital repository, but as a "digital brain" the market has slightly moved towards the PKM space (see Obsidian, Notion, and so on).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#618

Post by mastazi »

ekimekim wrote: post #534
mastazi wrote: post #205

There should be a new category of apps, where you can still get the contents offered by a given service (Spotify, Youtube, your favourite news service etc.) while at the same time not using the built in UI. For example, imagine a web app that embeds Youtube videos, that will show you every new video published by channels you choose. No home page suggestions, no "trending", no "you might be interested in". You could d…

The problem is that these apps come with a built-in doomsday. If they ever get popular enough to be meaningfully on the radar of the company whose app they're replacing, they'll be attacked both legally ("you're violating our TOS by using this app") and technically (removing API access or obfuscating internal APIs / pages to prevent scraping). Efforts like youtube-dl are a constant arms race between google making cha…

I think these hypothetical apps should be based on html embeds. The big tech companies are not going to remove the ability to do web embeds of their posts/videos/tweets, because embeds are good for bringing traffic in.

With those services that don't have RSS (Youtube does), you will still need a little scraping just to discover the URL of new tweets/posts in a given channel. But it would be just basic scraping and probably more manageable compared to something like youtube-dl.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#619

Post by pantulis »

largbae wrote: post #392
azalemeth wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want new features. I do want cross platform, native apps (Linux, MacOS and Android for me). I've yet to find a good solution that "just works".

I just came to this thread and searched for Evernote specifically to upvote or add this. Evernote evolved from a perfect extension of my private memory available rapidly and anywhere I needed it into a bloated collaboration suite. I would be surprised if any customer asked for it. I canceled the service but will gladly pay twice as much for an Evernote Classic that gets back to basics and does those well.

Well the "collaboration suite" features are now slowly being phased out or at least dont receive that much attention. Their new calendar integration and task management features are small steps but I think they are intriguing at least.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#620

Post by drumttocs8 »

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…

Worse than that is offline functionality (on Android, at least). If I don't have good cell service, my "offline", "downloaded" albums just won't load up, and it's infuriating.
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