I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read
Logging in.
Things that used to be hard and are now easy
221–230 of 316 posts
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels inline with what I intended. Used sparingly, tables probably weren't that atrocious to figure out. Similarly, deliberate use of semantic tags is likely better. I question if things are deliberate are much better now. But, you provide a convincing and authoritative answer there. Html email feels like a trap. They are about turning up the volume and getting returns. Not about being accessible. Is that not th…
About HTML email, I think it's different in a work context. When I was at Microsoft, some official messages, that were actually important to read, were laid out in the style of an HTML marketing email, complete with heavy abuse of layout tables. Ditto for automated notifications, e.g. about bugs or PRs.
Ah, that makes sense. And feels like a mistake from the department that sent the messages.
My gut is still that better tooling support for standard messages would have helped faster than more primitives in the message. But, I welcome evidence that I'm wrong.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#223I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read
Submit and post a link to submission here. I'll vote it up.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#224Wow! Let me continue :) - Text-to-speech and vice versa, using cloud APIs. - creating a solid objects from 3D models (3d printing) - messaging: pub/sub, message buses (kafka, redis, postgresql channels, rabbitmq etc) - advanced data structures are more available (sets/hashes/etc now in standard libraries of any language, and in many databases) Things that surprisingly still a pain: - scanning documents preserving for…
Elaborate a little bit on what you mean by "preserving formatting"?
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As someone who leans frontend > I would second guess SaaS startups that start by building the infra/data models unless they’re going for a highly technical play Do you not see the problem with these 2 statements. Of course not dealing with non JavaScript is easier for a JavaScript developer. > You can get something in front of your users tomorrow. This is something we’ve been able to do with Rails or Django for nea…
The logical conclusion would be that you need more frontend than backend when you're trying to scale from 0 to 1.
The OP's premise is that you need more frontend. No comment has any information supporting it, and both are disagreeing on it.
If what you take as conclusion is the premise, you have just been a victim of confirmation bias.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a law for "when a thing becomes easier and/or cheaper to do, more of that thing is created, and the mean quality of that thing goes down"? Of course, there are positive effects as well — desktop publishing was responsible for countless design crimes, but it also unlocked some real innovation during print's last stand.
Jevon’s Paradox
[deleted]
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#227> Building cross-platform GUIs, with Electron How about no. I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
> I so want this abomination of a technology uninvented.
Good enough beats perfect almost every time. The real fail is that the major desktop OSes have spent the last 20 years jockeying for a monopoly on how software is made on and distributed their platforms. Apple and MS (and even the Linux desktops to a lesser degree) want me to have to build and maintain completely separate apps for their platforms to unlock all of the capability in their GUI.
You know what I want as a user? I want to be able to buy Affinity Designer and run in on whatever device I have. I don't want to care about Mac, Windows, Linux Chromebook or whatever. I would love to have some real Adobe apps on Linux.
As a software developer, it's about time that we stop having the native vs. whatever universal GUI layer debate, too. I've never seen a single ticket for an Electron app where the user was reporting that my app wasn't MacOS-y or Windows-y enough. I have seen plenty of tickets with native apps where something isn't right with the clipboard, print menu or or some component wouldn't correctly embed on a paste.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jevon’s Paradox
That's a super interesting take in that the normal assumption that "there's more games" is a supply-side statement. But Jevon's would apply a step before that. The "demand" is really the people wanting to write games. When they do that, they then create "supply" in the video game market. Per the parent comment however, Jevon's doesn't address the mean "quality" of games decreasing. Similar things happened to publishe…
The other part has no relation to Jevon's paradox either. Stating that as creating a game becomes "cheaper" people do more of it is the basic behavior of the demand.
Jevon's paradox is about people spending even more on the thing than before the thing got cheaper. If you state "as creating a game started to take less time, people spent more time doing it", that would be a form of Jevon's paradox. But just that "as it started to take less time, people did it more" is not.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#229Writing GUI apps for Apple products. Too many variables to mention, but I wrote my first Apple application in 1986. It took several weeks, and wasn't much to look at. These days, I can spin out a full-fat, shippable app, in a couple of hours. I do that all the time, for my test harnesses.
I wrote plenty of GUI applications for IBM PCs in the '80s. It wasn't difficult with Turbo Pascal.
When Turbo Pascal came to the Mac, it made life MUCH easier. I started with MPW.
What was always difficult, was the toolkit. Apple had MacApp (but not when I started). In fact, the original Adobe Photoshop was a Pascal/MacApp (1.0b9) app.
Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
How is that? There are still plenty of devices with USB A/Headphone jack available. Apple devices are far from the "whole market".