Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got inexplicably angry just reading that
Because its a bunch of overpaid managers measuring dicks and talking about small design choices that will inevitably trickle down to the average programming intern to implement.
Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
171–180 of 294 posts
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#172I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
Its been a few months since I used the Android calendar app, but I'm pretty sure if you turn the device into Landscape it'll change to month view.
I just went and checked. Surprisingly, they added the month view to portrait and brought back the week view (who had the idea that "week" has 5 days is beyond me). If you turn your device to landscape position however, you get only the week view, with no ability to change it.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. For me Google+ was the turning point. It started before that, but if you drew a line graph of Quality of Products for Google I think you'd see the Google+ rollout event on that line without it being pointed out. I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they pu…
Google products used to be simple and usable. Now they are all fucked up. Seems like that their QA department went on a permanent vacation. I have actually written to them about my issues and I'm waiting for a response ever since.
Good luck with the waiting. Notoriously bad at customer support as well.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#174I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services. I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightw…
Google puts out free or cheap services and devices because they're trying to draw users to their platform, which gathers metrics about usage. These feed into the services, but they also feed in to Google's need to be a better advertising platform. Although we think of Google as the company behind the eponymous search engine and Android phone, it's actually an advertiser. I'm not sure if it's still in the 95% range, but it's still high. I have a 7" Nexus tablet which (for the time) was a great tablet at an insanely good price. But I knew I was essentially giving up information about what I read, what I listen to, and what apps I used in exchange for the free services and discounted device.
In contrast my Apple devices aren't cheap, and there is less collection of data with the intent of selling my attention to third party advertising clients, but they are more expensive and I pay an iCloud subscription fee. For the most part the Mac software doesn't suck and works reasonably well. I don't love everything about it but it's more appealing than Picasa for photos. I do pay for extra storage on Google to back up my pictures (over 100 gigs of family photos). But I am definitely paying more Apple in a direct sense (buying computers and phones + iCloud) than to Google (Google Play and 1 device). Apple's margin on hardware is high, but they make a quality product (for the most part).
What I give Google is information about myself, my work, my family, the music I listen to, the books I read, and anything and everything I ever searched for. They're pretty open and transparent about this, and I pretty much understand what I'm turning over in exchange for their free stuff. See the Google dashboard on you. If there's an application or service hosted by Google, I pretty much understand their intent is to extract data from that service or application.
That works for most people, even though they really don't understand this exchange or think about it. Free is a powerful lure and most consumers have come to expect not to pay anything at all for software and services. That's why they download a free game and keep playing it even when they find out it sends the contents of their address book off to some weird holding company. It's also why they get suckered into free games (because 4.99 is just too expensive on an App store) and then spend multiples of that amount in in-game purchases. It's why they're willing to turn over even extremely intimate details of their life for free e-mail or messaging services.
But the incentive for Google is not to make great software or hardware because that's how they make their money. Their incentive is to roll out services which help them collect information to feed their need for information about your tastes and behaviors. If that photo app you're using doesn't really give them more information, there's no incentive to make it better. Apple has an incentive to make software good enough to support their device/computer sales. Microsoft (arguably) has an incentive to make software good enough for manufacturers to license it. Apple and Microsoft, no matter how much people love to shit on them, actually have more straight forward, simple motives. They have an actual financial incentive to care about the quality of the product they deliver because you are paying them (directly or indirectly).
tl;dr Google only makes software good enough to draw you in to collect data. Other vendors are selling yous something and therefore have an interest in making that thing better.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#175I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
Yep. For me Google+ was the turning point. It started before that, but if you drew a line graph of Quality of Products for Google I think you'd see the Google+ rollout event on that line without it being pointed out. I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they pu…
The place which is hilariously broken is that on the Google play store, I cant give star ratings to movies / music that I like to get a more customized experience because doing so requires you to publicly disclose on Google+ that you liked / disliked that movie/song.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#176Sometimes I use the classic version of Gmail just because it loads the whole page in less than 1 second and I can read my e-mail in another 0.5 seconds. With the "modern" version I have to stare at a blank screen with a stupid progress bar for about 2-3 seconds before seeing anything.
I don't understand why this is OK. I don't understand why people listen to Google's advice on making fast websites when one of their main websites has a fucking loading bar.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#177I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
I think the last UI decision google got right was the search box on the main page.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#178"You can fucking strip the leading $ and commas you piece of shit mother fucking asshole terrible programmers." That sounds sensible, but now you've just broken it for every country that uses comma as a decimal mark.
My favourite was a recent banking webform which refused to recognise "0". Apparently it's not a real number. When I got through to support, they explained I had to leave the box blank to represent zero... Mind: Blown.
It's because the data will eventually need to be fed into a mainframe that predates the Arabic numeral system.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> less features and control Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.
ps for the downvoter: My comment is entirely serious. Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101: The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address, rather a google tracking link. Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gma…
About the link thing, DDG uses it as well, but it presents it as "Redirect - Prevent sharing of your search with sites you click on". Although in case of DDG, you can disable that.
Re: Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
#180I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issu…
Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November. Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main fu…
> Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory.
The only thing that makes Android usable in a sane way for me is custom ROMs and Titanium Backup's app freezing.
To continue the parent link's sentiments, it's like someone built an operating system at a company that employed such talented people that no one wanted to work on usability minutia. (Note: design is NOT usability)