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If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

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Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#221

Post by anonymars »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #88
frameset wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a hazy memory, but from 2007-2011 my main computer was a MacBook Pro. I swear in that era, when an app wanted attention it would bounce in the dock endlessly. That was annoying, but it let you finish doing what you were doing until you were ready to switch focus.

I think you’re right - macOS changed this behavior at some point.

People say Microsoft has no UI taste, but they used to be decent. They had sensible guidelines and behaviors

For example for this case, the taskbar icon would blink three times and then remain highlighted. So it would grab your attention, but not hold it, and then you could still easily see at a glance which app it was

At some point, like many other things, it looks like this either was changed or broke/doesn't work consistently. But I thought it was a nice design

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#222

Post by manphone »

zkmon wrote: post #149

> My banking app requires, on average, three FaceID logins before the 3D Secure confirmation view appears. That's a different, equally big problem. Security mafia at every company will continue to rule everything and everyone. They do not have goals or constraints that are tied to productivity and user experience. We are heading to a situation where the security teams are causing much more damage compared to the poss…

That’s a hilarious comment in the world where companies are getting hacked left and right and consumer data is widely available from how many pieces of software have piss poor security. You might work at companies as where dumb bureaucrats have a tight grip on things, but in most of the world, security practices are not holding us back, they simply don’t exist.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#223

Post by cosmic_cheese »

lostmsu wrote: post #148
ndriscoll wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 mi…

I've spent 6 months in KDE after years on Windows, and KDE is crap in both UX and number of bugs. I love the idea of open source, but there's a long journey ahead to even match the state of Windows 2000.

KDE has improved a lot in recent years, but yes I would agree that it still has plenty of rough edges and little unexpected (as in slightly jarring) differences in behavior from major commercial desktops.

I still prefer it over the bloated pile of upsells that Windows has become, but I think there’s still space in the Linux desktop world for a legally-distinct clone of Windows (sans the bad parts). KDE isn’t that, it’s its own thing and is best fit for long time Linux veterans.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#224

Post by classictraffic »

schneems wrote: post #175

Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad: - URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words. - Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content. - I sometimes cannot click…

The pinch to zoom issue is actually a WebKit bug (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305622), although technically the root cause is Reddit using a ton of memory

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#225

Post by stronglikedan »

frameset wrote: post #37

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it wh…

This doesn't happen on Windows. Slack loads in the background and the taskbar icon just pulses when it's ready. I have to switch to it manually from whichever app I'm working in as Slack loads.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#226

Post by pjmlp »

ndriscoll wrote: post #115
frameset wrote: post #37

> I opened Slack on macOS, the icon kept bouncing in the dock for a few seconds. I got impatient, switched to Ghostty, and started typing. Just then, the Slack window appeared, stole focus from Ghostty and the git pull command was sent to the group chat. One of my absolute favourite features on KDE Plasma with Wayland is the global setting to control what can steal focus. It works wonderfully, and I always miss it wh…

Yeah the obvious answer to software getting worse is to switch to FOSS. Use Linux/KDE. It's been great for a long time and only ever gets better. It's as if Windows 7 just continued to slowly iterate and add useful polish. NixOS has a longstanding issue where library loading (and therefore program start, particularly GUI programs that load a lot) is n^2, but programs still all start in ~1 second or less on my n100 mi…

The problem is that I can't still buy a laptop at Media Markt, or similar consumer store, with a Linux distro pre-installed, and if I could, it would be OEM Linux, just like they do with Android, WebOS, Netbooks, whatever.

Outside Internet places like HN, most consumers aren't going to Tuxedo, System 76, or building their own Linux PC.

Thus commercial OS platforms keep winning, and the owners are anyway the ones that sponsor most FOSS projects.

Miss Windows 7 by the way, it was when I gave up on The Linux Desktop.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#227

Post by cosmic_cheese »

ghusto wrote: post #164
cmiller1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is less a "macOS lacks the feature to prevent focus stealing" and more they never even imagined the scenario where it takes time for the app to open. Instead of even considering that a user may add inputs while waiting for launch, potentially signaling that they are no longer requesting focus from the program they clicked on, they simply designed for the optimistic case where there never IS time for the…

As always, Apple has designed for the happy flow, and nothing else. Mac apps have never opened instantly, this is nothing new.

They can open nearly instantly, but they need to be well-built native apps. Lumbering behemoths like Adobe CC or anything Chrome-based is going to be a bit slow, and even smaller apps that pull in a big foreign UI toolkit are going to take a tick or two longer to start.

It’s too bad that the art of building lightweight applications is becoming a lost art.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#228

Post by ratelimitsteve »

alexjplant wrote: post #199
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually had to backpedal on my gaming PC from Kubuntu recently, I'm sad to say. The support for the RTX 5080 is just too rough. Every game install was chased by an hour of debugging with Claude to figure out which version of proton to use, which launch arguments to use, which between-system-and-gpu shim profile to use. I grant: The process is much more enjoyable than doing similar things on Windows. Kubuntu treats…

> Kubuntu treats you like an adult and will tell you what's going on This means so much to me in the modern era. Contrast with the SaaS approach that's also been leaking into Electron apps, etc: - "Something went wrong" - "It's not you - it's us :-(" - "An error occurred" - "Uh-oh..." - "Too many penguins are in the defrobulator" [or whatever "lol so random" 2010 corporate mascot in-joke is applicable] People used to…

I think it was Woz that said something along the lines of 'the problem with making a computer that stupid people can use is that only stupid people will want to use it'. arrogant, no doubt, but also also rather prophetic now that we're in the era of "Whoopsydingdangdoodle, we made a booboo with your request" meaninglessness. I think we've traded being intimidated by computers for being completely agnostic as to how they work and just not caring. They've gotten easier and more reliable, sure, but they've also gotten more opaque, less transparent, less extensible and less fixable because of it. Those of us who grew up in the era where you had to become pretty intimate with the details of how a computer worked in order to get it to do anything at all developed a lot of skills for dealing with issues and now those skills are being intentionally obsoleted by design decisions that remove our ability to actually fix things ourselves by hiding everything about the apps we run except the interface.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#229

Post by Yokohiii »

purpleflashing wrote: post #65

As a non-technical person compared to the rest of HN, I think this has always been the problem of software made for non-technical audiences. The design was driven by programmers’ heuristics and trends in technology stack (e.g. if a company can hire a lot of JS devs bc JS is trending, they will choose JS even regardless of whether JS is the best choice for the problem). There was a brief stint of UX, ergonomics and HM…

I think the UX and stability related quality will drop at such a bottom low, that some crazy companies will revive the arcane practice of UX and even study it with users.

I am not super optimistic that it happens fast, but we will end up in a situation that everything becomes tedious, annoying and broken. Companies who will do it right will inspire the whole ecosystem. It will be satirical to see the full circle happening, but it's inevitable if we want to keep going with digitalization, even if it means to bring back more hardware buttons.

Re: If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

#230

Post by ghusto »

pier25 wrote: post #187
ghusto wrote: post #178

> Software may have been better back in the day, but that was mainly because it was much simpler. ... The bar for “user experience” has kept rising, but everything has become increasingly fragile. It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX. Complexity does not equal quality. In fact, it usually points to poor design. Programs used to be seen as utilities, which enabled the same kind of mentality you hav…

> It was simpler, better, more stable, _and_ had better UX. It had less features too. Now, I do agree doing more doesn't mean that something is necessarily better... but I think the UX difficulty increases exponentially as more features are added.

Absolutely, and in my opinion it's a mistake to keep adding features. My word processor in the 90s did one thing, and it was fine. In fact, there's a niche crowd trying to re-create that experience right now (distraction-free "writerdecks"). All software used to be like that, and I for one was a lot happier with the situation.
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