131–140 of 423 posts
I find it ludicrous that the developers of an app as insignificant as a screen recorder would think it's necessary to check for updates every 5 minutes. Once a day would surely be sufficient.
You can use that as a hidden way of tracking how many active users you have at any time. Good way of showing adoption and growth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked on a product where there was basically no automated testing, just a huge product surface to click around with a bunch of options. Because of technical debt some of the options would trigger different code paths, but it was up to the developer to memorize all the code paths and test accordingly. After I shipped a bug the Director of Engineering told me I should "test better" (by clicking around the app). This…
Yep, my first job was at a company like that. Huge Windows desktop app built in Delphi. No automated testing of any kind. No testing scripts either. Just a lot of clicking around.
TBH, that was well done for what it was but really called for automation and lacked unit-testing.
Why is nobody talking about what a shady business practice it is that cloud providers don't alert you to this kind of overage by default? Sure, you can set up alerts, but when you go 10x over your baseline in a short period of time, that should trigger an alert regardless of your configured alerts.
In the grand scheme of things, $8k is not much money for a business, right? Like we can be pretty sure nobody at Google said “a-ha, if we don’t notify the users, we will be able sneak $8k out of their wallets at a time.” I think it is more likely that they don’t really care that much about this market, other than generally creating an environment where their products are well known.
I find it ludicrous that the developers of an app as insignificant as a screen recorder would think it's necessary to check for updates every 5 minutes. Once a day would surely be sufficient.
You can use that as a hidden way of tracking how many active users you have at any time. Good way of showing adoption and growth.
Nobody under any circumstances needs usage stats with 5 minute resolution. And certainly not a screen recorder.
I am always kind of a stickler about code reviews. I once had a manager tell me that I should leave more to QA with an offhand comment along the lines of "what is the worst that could happen" to which I replied without missing a beat "We all lose our jobs. We are always one bad line of code away from losing our jobs" The number of times I have caught junior or even experienced devs writing potential PII leaks is abso…
I find it ludicrous that the developers of an app as insignificant as a screen recorder would think it's necessary to check for updates every 5 minutes. Once a day would surely be sufficient.
You can use that as a hidden way of tracking how many active users you have at any time. Good way of showing adoption and growth.
I'm pretty conservative about adopting third-party libraries (due to the long-term issues each one has the potential to cause), but an app updater is probably worth it. It's just tricky, basically one fat edge case, and a critical part of your recovery plan in case of serious bugs in your app. (This bug isn't the only problem with their home-grown updater. Checking every 5 min is just insane. Kinda tells me they aren…
Especially for a Mac-only application where Sparkle (https://sparkle-project.org/) has been around for almost two decades now and has been widely used across all sorts of projects to the point that it's a de facto standard. I'd be willing to bet that almost every single Mac "power user" on the planet has at least one application using Sparkle installed and most have a few.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we're listing complaints... 250MB for a screen recorder update?
That’s pretty much the floor for an Electron app. If you’re a small shop or solo dev, it is real hard to justify going native on three platforms when electron gives it for (near) free. And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle. There are alternatives like Tauri that use the system browser and allow substantially smaller bundles, but they’re not nearly as mature as Electron, and you will get cross pla…
On one hand it's good that the author owns up to it, and they worked with their users to provide remedies. But so many things aren't adding up. Why does your screen recorder need to check for updates every 5 minutes? Once a day is more than enough.
This screams "We don't do QA, we shorts just ship"