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Things that used to be hard and are now easy

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Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#71

Post by anthk »

grishka wrote: post #24
adwn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then create an open source cross-platform GUI framework/toolkit that's technologically superior to Electron and also at least as easy and convenient to use and deploy, and people will dump Electron in droves. I mean, please do ! I would be delighted about an efficient, cross-platform, cross-language, convenient GUI toolkit. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm tired of people complaining about Electron without offe…

Cross-platform GUIs shouldn't exist. That's it. They always inevitably are worse then native ones.

QT5.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#72

Post by kingcharles »

umvi wrote: post #54
theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

Logging into an online account on a computer you don't normally use when you don't have your phone. This can range from "had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops" to impossible if you haven't saved backup codes ahead of time (Google). My wife lost her phone when we were on vacation and it was literally impossible for us to login into her Google account in order to use find my Android. We were trying to login on a r…

> I pity the fool who loses their phone in the age of 2FA.

This keeps me awake at night. Especially as it is no longer possible to contact humans at a lot of sites to prove who you are. I went to jail for eight years, when I got out I could only access two of the thousands of accounts I had made over the previous 20 years.

> My wife lost her phone when we were on vacation and it was literally impossible for us to login into her Google account in order to use find my Android.

This is a really frustrating situation.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#73

Post by toomanydoubts »

umvi wrote: post #54
theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

Logging into an online account on a computer you don't normally use when you don't have your phone. This can range from "had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops" to impossible if you haven't saved backup codes ahead of time (Google). My wife lost her phone when we were on vacation and it was literally impossible for us to login into her Google account in order to use find my Android. We were trying to login on a r…

That's why you always copy the secret recovery codes for the 2FA(which may not be helpful if you left your notebook in your home country during vacantions).

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#74

Post by rightbyte »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #12
grishka wrote: post #8

> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.

But it's the only reason Discord, Slack, VS Code, and other apps exist on operating systems other than Windows/MacOS.

The reason being those are proprietary tools.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#75

Post by paulgb »

grishka wrote: post #20
dysoco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are built by large teams with a lot of backing, and still suffer from many issues (mainly performance; Slack crawls very badly, VSCode and Discord not so much); I think it's gotten easier but still wouldn't call it "easy".

Yeah. Slack and Discord sure have enough resources to build three dedicated native apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Slack has been through several full rewrites yet still works terrible. At this point it must be nothing but stubbornness. It's definitely not an informed engineering decision.

> It's definitely not an informed engineering decision.

I think it's more likely that they are evaluating the engineering decision by different criteria than you do. The people in most organizations that make the Slack buying decision probably don't know what Electron is. And frankly, Electron Slack works just fine on any modern Windows/Mac business laptop I've used it on.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#76

Post by noobermin »

theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

The worst part is when people somehow think all these things necessarily must follow from the things that are easier rather than suggesting we could have the good things without the worse off things.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#77

Post by grishka »

stargrazer wrote: post #61
grishka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cross-platform GUIs shouldn't exist. That's it. They always inevitably are worse then native ones.

It is as thought browser/javascript is the only thing out there now. Or at least appears to be implied in the comments. Just wanted to state that in other worlds, like C++, there exist tools like wxWidgets which provide cross platform GUI.

I know, of course. But at least on macOS, I can usually instantly tell when something is using a cross-platform UI library. Even if controls look native, they're usually laid out wrong and don't follow platform's conventions.

There are examples of the opposite, of course. IntelliJ IDEs, despite using modified Swing GUI, feel native-ish to me because Jetbrains put in enough effort to replicate macOS native behaviors.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#78

Post by kingcharles »

cm2187 wrote: post #64
wackget wrote: post #31

Eh... I'd argue against quite a lot of those being "easier" than doing things manually. Docker is a prime example. It's supposedly easier to spin up a docker container for a basic web server stack, but to be honest I'd rather install PHP/MySQL and an SSL certificate manually, rather than spend time finding a decent container from a trustworthy source, and then spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how and why it's be…

In .net, mandatory async/await for new API is also making things that were easy harder. Async introduces multithreading where there wasn’t, breaks call stacks (debugging harder), deadlocks in certain conditions but not others (asp or winform vs console), forces you to handle what happens if the user interacts with the UI before your function is done executing, etc.

This is definitely true. Just trying to download a file can become an async chain hell-hole.. it's asyncs all the way down!

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#79

Post by noobermin »

titzer wrote: post #65
theden wrote: post #19

Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now: * Privacy online * Google search for niche or exact matches * Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet * Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive * SEO before it got hacked to hell * Barrier…

> Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine The dongles. OMG. It's worse than the parallel printer age. I cannot recall another period in history where I needed a dongle so often . USB-C only on Macbooks was such a huge design mistake. Especially in the era of USB-A! Soooooo many things are still USB-A. All for a little more thinness! It's really grating.

USB C and the removal of headphone jacks are an example of how not everything in American society is "market driven" but can easily be imposed on the whole market and consumers by a single big player.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#80

Post by xxs »

wackget wrote: post #31

Eh... I'd argue against quite a lot of those being "easier" than doing things manually. Docker is a prime example. It's supposedly easier to spin up a docker container for a basic web server stack, but to be honest I'd rather install PHP/MySQL and an SSL certificate manually, rather than spend time finding a decent container from a trustworthy source, and then spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how and why it's be…

indeed, concurrency being 'easy', nice one. Concurrency is only 'easy' if there is no shared mutable state.
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