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Software Disenchantment (2018)
121–130 of 504 posts
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These days, I think most users will lose more time and be more frustrated by poor UI design, accidental inputs, etc. than any performance characteristics of the software they use. I’m willing to bet that a significant percentage of my accidental inputs are due to UI latency.
Virtually all of my accidental inputs are caused by application slowness or repaints that occur several hundred milliseconds after they should have. I want all interactions with all of my computing devices to occur in as close to 0ms as possible. 0ms is great; 20ms is good; 200ms is bad; 500ms is absolutely inexcusable unless you're doing significant computation. I find it astonishing how many things will run in the…
How about the i-am-about-to-press-this-button-but-wait-we-need-to-rerender-the-whole-page. At which point you misclick or not at all. Especially some recent shops and ad heavy pages use this great functionality ;)
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These days, I think most users will lose more time and be more frustrated by poor UI design, accidental inputs, etc. than any performance characteristics of the software they use. I’m willing to bet that a significant percentage of my accidental inputs are due to UI latency.
Virtually all of my accidental inputs are caused by application slowness or repaints that occur several hundred milliseconds after they should have. I want all interactions with all of my computing devices to occur in as close to 0ms as possible. 0ms is great; 20ms is good; 200ms is bad; 500ms is absolutely inexcusable unless you're doing significant computation. I find it astonishing how many things will run in the…
This happens to me all the time starting pipelines in Gitlab. Which typically results in unwanted merges to master which then need to be reverted.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#124This article really resonates with me. But my biggest complaint is everything is _so_ buggy! I won't name any names, but I find many major pieces of software from large, well known companies are just riddled with bugs. I also feel like you almost need to be a programmer to think of workarounds "hmm, ok, so clearly it's in a bad state. If I had coded this, what boundaries would likely cause a complete refresh?" My wif…
I think both are true depending on the software. But yes it's unfortunately too easy to run into bugs daily even if one does not use new apps every day.
The reason for unreliability is probably the same reason why things are slow: developers and project managers who don't care about the users and/or who are not incentivized to improve performance and reliability.
If you think that "not caring about the users" is too harsh, consider that users do suffer from e.g. unoptimized web pages or apps that use mobile data in obscene quantities. This has a direct consequence on people's wallets or loss of connectivity which is a huge pain.
As developers we can all try to instill "caring about the users" into our team's priorities.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#125I was in Rome recently, and google maps were basically unusable on EDGE (dsepite pre-downloading the area before the trip). We'd wait a minute (or more) for a timetable of a bus stop and a route of the bus to be show on the map. Try planning a route in an unfamiliar area with this slow an UI when you are standing outside and there's no place to sit and rest, and you need to click around on a bunch of stops just to se…
I've found OSMAnd~ on F-Droid to be a good offline-only alternative, but it certainly has much worse efficiency problems than GMaps.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why were you using EDGE if there’s dense 4G coverage in Rome ?
Replace Rome with the German countryside and you'll still just have EDGE. Sites like Hacker News or https://i.reddit.com are still perfectly usable. In contrast to the 'modern' Reddit UI that that takes a couple of seconds to load even on my home WiFi.
It would be nice to have a maps/routing service that could just produce a basic HTML page with text directions from a given point A to another given point B.
Bonus points if it also lists the before and after streets at direction changes so people know if they missed a turn.
This could be implemented as a proxy to either of the maps apps (Google, Apple, OpenStreetMap)
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#127An unpopular but effective short-term solution: Developers ought to use five year old hardware for development and testing tasks. FWIW, my work laptop and mobile phone are both 2015 models and I feel they're completely adequate for running all the software I've written.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#128Long ago I watched a documentary about the early Apple days, when management was encouraging their developers to reduce boot times by 10 seconds. The argument was that 10 seconds multiplied by the number of boot sequences would result in saving many human lives worth of time.
Edit: found a link with the same story: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt
The software world needs more of this kind of thinking. Not more arguments like "programmer's time is worth less than CPU time", which often fail to account for all externalities.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#129An unpopular but effective short-term solution: Developers ought to use five year old hardware for development and testing tasks. FWIW, my work laptop and mobile phone are both 2015 models and I feel they're completely adequate for running all the software I've written.
Good point, and I do that periodically.
But I believe that's not the problem here, or at least not so much as the business being very impatient and just never respecting objections from the programmers that the quality of the software suffers due to far too tight deadlines.
Re: Software Disenchantment (2018)
#130> Modern text editors have higher latency than 42-year-old Emacs.
Hmmm. Let's think about this.