141–149 of 149 posts
Although I think the title is misleading. I was expecting something more technical, as most "how X works" articles and videos tend to be.
"Zoom's UI is bad" would be more descriptive. Even "How Zoom doesn't work" would be more accurate to the content.
Zoom has great video and audio. I think good echo cancellation, video that copes well with the network, lower latencies - we don't experience that directly but the after effect is you feel subjectively better about the experience. I think picking each part of the UX apart is secondary to making the key feature work well.
People video chat with non-technical people (elderly parents, etc) and it really sucks when you have to go through these sort of awful experiences just to get two people communicating.
I was surprised they didn't mention that after clicking 'Leave Meeting', a popup comes up with a 'Leave Meeting' button in it, that actually leaves the meeting. This inevitably means in every single Zoom meeting that everyone says goodbye and then spends a few awkward seconds actually leaving the meeting.
-> Click on link in calendar
-> Accept confirmation that the link is taking you offsite (Google's fault, admittedly)
-> Accept browser pop-up to allow me to open zoom app on MacOS
-> Then start with all of the other audio shenanigans listed at the start of the article.
Even with my zoom settings configured so that I don't need to confirm my audio settings every meeting, this is still far too many steps. There are likely ways to avoid the calendar-link steps by using the zoom desktop client's built-in scheduling calendar better, but I don't want to keep zoom running in the background all day (for a variety of reasons).
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I have to say, I've found both Google Meet and Discord to be more reliable in the "just works" department (despite neither being perfect). My experience with Zoom was a job interview where the link kept asking me to install a browser plugin, even though I already had, even if I clicked a link that was apparently a web fall back. I think I had to use a phone dial in in the end
I wonder if you might have been sent a WebEx link? That doesn’t sound like Zoom. AFAIK Zoom doesn’t use browser plugins but WebEx definitely does.
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10 years ago is about when Microsoft purchased Skype... If I remember correctly they received money from the government to do it and then stopped using the P2P supernodes model and switched to their own servers to track users more easily... It used to work great, I wish the pre-MS source code would get leaked.
> they received money from the government to do it Got a source for this? Not that I find it hard to believe.
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Yes. From my experience (as a user), webrtc is good for up to 4 people, and is rarely supported for more than 8. Reason is that few laptops can cope with many more incoming and outgoing videostreams in parallel. Also, when in our company we tried using webrtc for standups, we often faced issues when participant A couldn't hear participant B, but participant C could hear them both. All that with video working in all d…
It really depends on your configuration (server-side configuration also plays an important role). Jitsi has an excellent webrtc server-side SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit) which does a seamless job at redirecting multi-layer VP8/H264 streams to the most appropriate user. Each jitsi browser instance tells webrtc to encode and send multiple spatial layers of the same video stream (at different qualities), allowing user…
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Zoom does just work - I've used hangouts/meet, skype, whereby/appear.in, discord, talky Of all those Zoom had the best balance of stability/resource use/call joinability I find meet a PITA to set up and invite random people WebRTC browser chat is great for rooms >= 6 people and is my preferred choice But zoom works pretty well from 1:1 up to 500:1 and is very easy to join Don't get me wrong, I hate the Zoom client bu…
I have to say, I've found both Google Meet and Discord to be more reliable in the "just works" department (despite neither being perfect). My experience with Zoom was a job interview where the link kept asking me to install a browser plugin, even though I already had, even if I clicked a link that was apparently a web fall back. I think I had to use a phone dial in in the end
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Where did you see it stopped working on Linux? What kind of misinformation is that? More relevant is that it went from a p2p network structure to full centralized under Microsoft.
The Qt version worked. Then they released a terrible Electron version around 2016. You couldn't make video calls in the Linux version. This constitutes not working. I stopped using it. I just installed the snap now and it seems a lot better and it seems to support video calls on Linux (didn't try to call anyone since everyone I know left skype). Too little too late. Looks like they stole the remaining credit out of m…
That was in 2016. That situation did not last something like 3 years. Indeed there was a time where the electron client was dysfunctional but that did not last more than half a year.
Again, what about Zoom's remote control feature (or annotate/whiteboard)? Is any competitor doing that?
In fact, Teams seems to have better (although still not good) UX and connection reliability as well, at least for corporate meetings. There’s generally no P2P possible from behind “enterprise” security gear or VPNs, so Zoom suffers a bit falling back while Teams blissfully just works via TCP/443 or a browser.