On the Google campus there are at least two wifi networks available, one regular one that provides good connectivity, and one that provides degraded connectivity simulating a 2G cellphone connection. Of course one can simulate this easily with a little effort but I found it a nice touch to make this available to everyone at the push of a button.
Test your product on a crappy laptop
241–250 of 321 posts
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#242If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Explain Gmail.
I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.
I agree that they care. I don't agree that it is fast.
It is comical how long it takes to load on my internet connection. Has gotten better, but that is on my connection side.
My favorite crazy moment lately is just how long it takes to bring up the computer new window on a fresh page load.
It used to be great, mind. Not sure what I'm getting with the additional load times.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#244There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…
Unpopular opinion: Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free. OTOH, obsessing about performance to the exclusion of usability is equally insane. Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.
Idk how CS or Assembly plays into this. I’m a webdev. Self taught. Your points about metrics and nuance are accurate but I fail to see how those are related to CS as a whole.
If stuff is legitimately slow, we should make it faster. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that imo.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for reminding me why I use HTML Gmail instead. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
1. Please consider using a proper mail client: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients 2. Please consider avoiding Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple) as your email provider, due to their mass surveillance practices, both for commercial ad targeting and for US government political policing. There are several other reasonable webmail providers, if you really can't give up the web interface.
Back when I could use emacs for email, I was quite happy. Unfortunately, I have the advanced protection on in my Gmail account, so I haven't figured how to get that back, yet. App passwords aren't allowed on my account.
I have considered moving email accounts, but also don't have enough motivation for all that entails.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you even mean? A website has no business to have minimum system requirements. It's a hypertext document with some optional macros here and there.
Absolutely trivial to demonstrate to be false. I can use websites to videoconferencing. Streaming considered video and audio comes with non trivial loads. I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games. This isn't 1995 and we're way past indulging user lazy choices which have us a decade of internet explorer nightmares. Web is much more…
> I can use websites to videoconferencing.
> I can use websites to compress images, to compute tabulated data on various Excel clones, remotely control devices or play games.
You sure can, but you probably shouldn't. These use cases are much better served by native apps. Shoehorning hypertext documents with macros into being applications will never come close to writing proper applications, in terms of both UX and performance.
I really wish we would undo many of the "advancements" of the web technology. This scope creep needs to stop, yesterday.
I wish there to be an answer to a simple question: when is a web browser finished?
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#247It's not just developers, and it's not just about speed, it's also designers / UX bods who need to heed this. My decently powered work laptop from job 1 has a fairly rubbish screen, which means that a lot of the subtle hover effects, 1 pixel light grey on lighter grey divisions and skinny fonts either aren't visible or are incredibly difficult to see. A good trick if you're working on a large, hi res screen is to hav…
It's because to many, aesthetics > function. This drives me INSANE. If you make a UX that most people can't use for reasons a, b, and c, who CARES how pretty it looks? This is also true for accessibility, especially for older people who are more likely to have reading issues and presbyopia. Everything is designed for 22 year olds with perfect vision and the best hardware.
It's often on the marketing and exec teams. I had to be very firm in some of our UX decisions because yes, it does look a little less polished this way, but a lot of our audience is elderly and they need to be able to read what we're giving them.
And this isn't even getting into how many sites break if you have any accessibility shortcuts or defaults set up on your browser. I'm slightly visually impaired and have pages set to load at 150% zoom (on a 4k monitor) and a minimum font size of 12. It's absurd how many sites that breaks.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#248It's not just developers, and it's not just about speed, it's also designers / UX bods who need to heed this. My decently powered work laptop from job 1 has a fairly rubbish screen, which means that a lot of the subtle hover effects, 1 pixel light grey on lighter grey divisions and skinny fonts either aren't visible or are incredibly difficult to see. A good trick if you're working on a large, hi res screen is to hav…
This is one area that really grinds my gears: the trend in UI design to reduce contrast because full black on full white text is too contrasty. Whatever minor improvement in readability on their quality 3000:1 contrast ratio monitor pales in comparison to the loss in readability on a 200:1 trash TN display. Even on a good display at low brightness low contrast design choices can be infuriating (e.g. phone at min brig…
I honestly don't get why we just don't have options. That's what we did back in the Dark Ages for things like resolutions. Let people set whether they want high or low contrast.
I also feel this re: dark and light modes, as somebody whose astigmatism makes dark mode LESS usable than light mode. I get it, dark mode is awesome for most people. Please don't make it mandatory.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#249However, there maybe another darkside of the story. Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the ga…
Then Roblox and Minecraft came along and showed everyone there was a large audience of kids on crap PCs and Chomebooks who will also play games and have parents who will spend for them.
There always were, there just wasn't the payment infrastructure to hoover up our parents' money in the 90s. I had to behave at computer shows and talk nicely to the adults about building computers before I was bought a video game (or make my parents drive me to a game store). Also they weren't full of micro-transactions.
If there had been ways to buy games online + digital downloads, I would genuinely have feared for my parents' pocketbooks.
Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically no desktop client works as well as the gmail web app (especially when it comes to search). I use the mail client on iOS out of principle but still end up opening the gmail app when I actually need to find something. A state actor will have less trouble breaking into a mail server I run, and I don’t really believe too much in the idea that other countries apart from the US are immune to police overreach. Sig…
At work I use the macOS Desktop edition of Outlook for my work O365 account and I've found searching to be pretty good and quite fast. I'm pretty sure it just searches the local cache hence the speed. It's pretty good at suggesting email addresses when I type someones name so I can usually quickly find emails from a certain person just by typing the first characters of their name and pressing return when it finds the…
Outlook on mac uses Spotlight search internally