I remember hearing a talk by Bill Gates a long time ago where he said the biggest competitor for Word was previous versions of the program. That is no longer true with forced updates. Granted, there are many reasons why it is not practical these days for old versions to be a competitor, but that would be a good message to companies that some of their new "innovations" may not have been a good idea.
Apps Getting Worse
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Re: Apps Getting Worse
#22The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…
What was wrong with VSCode?
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#23The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…
how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#24One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me oth…
My Prime Video experience on Apple TV in the UK mirrors this. I knew exactly what I wanted to watch but I simply could not figure out how to get the app to show it to me. The search feature returned and endless feed of results, none of which matched.
Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV right now:
- The Grand Tour
- The Grand Tour presents: Lochdown
- The Grand Tour (again? must be a different season?)
- The Grand Tour (yes, again)
- The Tomorrow War
- The Office
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
And just for fun, let's list the next 9:
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- The Office (again)
- Borat 2
- South Park
- South Park (again)
- South Park (again)
It's baffling to me that table-stakes features like this can be completely neglected for a product which is obviously a massive capital investment. I do think I understand now why it is that my friend with Prime Video watches The Office almost all of the time...
Edit: Apparently searching for "stand-up comedy live" or simply "comedy live" does show the type of content the search implies. I'd be keen to have someone explain what non-live stand-up comedy looks like to justify the difference in interpretation. Perhaps they could also tell me about how "stand-up" carries zero usable information...
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#25The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…
There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on the Mac, but for iOS.
In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#26[deleted]
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#27Firefighters are heroes for fighting fires. The fire marshall who prevents fires is treated as a waste of money or a pest. Basically same thing here. Companies don’t promote those who preserve good things. They want new things.
This is also sort of baked into human nature. We adapt to things, the flip side of which is taking them for granted. That makes it easier to justify "improvements." Human beings are not good at leaving things alone.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#28>>As for iPhoto, I never used it much, but my eighty-something mother did, and took lots of great photos with the Sony RX100 I gave her when I gave up on pocket cams. She’s not geeky but has a Bachelor’s in the sciences and is really smart. At some point they broke iPhoto so she couldn’t figure out how to do anything, and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried to get her fixed up, but she doesn…
It’s happening to me now. My family has thousands of photos, and both the Apple and Google offerings make the process of dealing with them more complex than needed. Sharing photos is pretty unintuitive as well.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#29The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop.
It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first.
The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly playlist? Sometimes it's near the top, sometimes it's in this "Made for you" section. Sometimes you have to click "See All" next to that to find it.
I mean moving shit around when you update your software is bad enough. Spotify moves shit around every time you boot the app!
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#30One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me oth…
Heh. I am so sick of all the movie apps and how hard it is to find which one has what, plus the fact that they all only have American superhero movies, that I started renting discs again. Turns out there's someone in my country that rents movies via snail mail. I suspect it's just someone with a very large collection trying to recoup some of the money spent on it. It works really well.
I love it -- the fellow countryman picked up, dusted off, and re-used the good business model that Netflix discarded so long ago. It's great.