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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#361

Post by actually_a_dog »

antisthenes wrote: post #360
actually_a_dog wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of pure UI, I agree. There were a few peaks in Windows UI/UX: 3.0, 98, XP, and Windows 10. Since then, the trend has been toward more and more bloat. But, if the long-term trend continues, maybe Windows 15 will clean things up again. :)

Windows 10 is not a peak in any sense. It's a continuation of the downward trend that Windows 8 started. It's the version of Windows that normalized ads in the OS, unreasonable amounts of telemetry and horrible flat UI.

Ugh. Maybe I was thinking of Vista? It’s been a while, after all....

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#362

Post by HKH2 »

dmitriid wrote: post #56
flenserboy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is where OSS could really shine - make clones of old programs and give them modern features while keeping the old-school, actually-working interfaces . Rather than cloning the current (or near-current) iteration of Office, make a file-compatible version that's a snap to use and avoids as much interface fluff as possible. Applications are for work, and should facilitate work. Imagine a Word 5-equivalent WP (and n…

OSS doesn't have money for good design, because good design costs money and commitment. Both are the things OSS projects struggle with.

Also, why bother with GUIs when you've got a CLI and a decent-sized keyboard?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#363

Post by leppr »

grishka wrote: post #340
leppr wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your unprovoked comment about not having a job read like you were desiring one.

I am indeed desiring one, but I'm too picky. And it's not for the money, but rather mostly for socialization (I'm lonely af). Maybe I'd work at a startup, but there aren't many of those that would want an open-source app, and there are even fewer that do something legitimately useful instead of inventing a problem and then heroically solving it. I worked at VKontakte (Russian social network) and was the only Android…

I would suggest the crypto industry, specifically DeFi. Reasoning:

* It's (mostly) all open-source.

* It's self-directed. Don't like a team? There are a dozen others waiting scrambling for developers that you can join with no bureaucracy nonsense. Want to work alone? The tools are mostly mature enough that you can release products as a one man team.

* You seem to have disinterest or even aversion towards money, from its role in tricking people into mindless jobs. DeFi is about the roots of what money is, voluntary transfer of value between people, which is something I think everybody can agree is fundamentally good.

* You can have a huge impact.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#364

Post by godelski »

sflicht wrote: post #343
smichel17 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a short case study. I am the maintainer of Red Moon, a FLOSS screen filter app for Android. Over a period of several years, the location of the toggle has moved from a switch at the top, to a switch and a floating action button (FAB), back to just a switch, and will soon move to just a FAB. I can provide more detail later if someone would like, but the short of it is: 1) As other features changed (permission p…

What is wrong with having a lot of settings? I absolutely hate that Twitter does not let me turn off their "features", but rather only lets me say "see less often" (which of course does nothing because I told Twitter not to track my preferences etc, but probably doesn't do anything for anyone anyway, except maybe provide a datapoint for some poorly thought out ML algorithm they put in place).

I like a lot of settings but I'm also okay with them being buried a bit. Advanced users tend to not care about going 5 layers deep to get what they want.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#365

Post by DanTheManPR »

blowski wrote: post #19

This article sounds rather ‘truthy’. On HN, you’re always getting to get some upvotes for saying “technology used to be so much better, amirite?! Bloody product managers ruining everything!”. But it’s harder than that. Apps need to keep up to date with operating systems, technology changes, business changes. Take The Economist mentioned. Maybe they noticed an uptick in cancellations, so the change was designed to ste…

In The Economist case, the app update is making me seriously consider cancelling. UI can be subjective... but what's not is the unresponsiveness and lack of reliability in the audio playback. It's not acceptible for these to degrade with new releases.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#366

Post by mastazi »

benrapscallion wrote: post #269
mattbk1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a perfect world, all of those would work in an RSS reader.

NewsBlur can do this for YouTube videos.

Right! I was curious about how they do it and found out that Youtube actually has RSS feeds! At least according to this and a few other pages I've found https://danielmiessler.com/blog/rss-feed-youtube-channel/

Also, I can see that for other services like Twitter, there are indeed third party providers that can create feeds https://rss.app/blog/how-to-create-twitter-rss-feeds

Also Reddit subreddits and users: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss

For podcasts, just don't use Spotify and instead get the RSS feed of the podcast you like

So, yeah I'm now thinking of going to my RSS reader (which I currently only use for news) and adding all sorts of stuff.

Thank you for posting your comment :-)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#367

Post by mung »

I used to really like Adobe apps. But every year the apps get slower. Every year they change some part of the UI and sometimes don't provide an option to do it the 'legacy' way. Photoshop has changed keyboard shortcuts and reasoning behind their undo shortcuts; Indesign always centres on the selected object if you zoom out with the keyboard; Acrobat makes saving a step-by-step process... I could probably cite 20 better examples if I could be bothered.

And yet, YET, they flatly refuse to make their apps do proper mac full screen.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#368

Post by baron816 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

The 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 play…

Some things I miss:

Liking/saving all the songs of an album. You used to be able to do that with one click and they would be added to your liked songs play list. Now you either have to like all the songs individually, or like the album and not have it appear in liked songs.

Being able to search through all the artists for songs you’ve liked/saved. You can now only follow an artist. You can’t just browse through all the artists you’ve liked before, which makes it hard to go back to song you liked years ago before they made the “follow” change.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#369

Post by pshc »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #252
pshc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS developers wanted to rewrite everything in Swift Swift is hardly new anymore... are you going to maintain an ObjC codebase in perpetuity?

Yes? Why not? What's the objective benefit of rewriting something already working into a different language?

You could or not, it's a tradeoff. Not sure what your criteria for "objective" is. In iOS-land you gotta keep up with the changes every year or your app will show its age. You could continue to do this in ObjC year after year but it's increasingly tough to hire ObjC devs, and Swift offers the possibility of a gradual transition rather than a full on rewrite. Not to mention the quality of life improvements.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#370

Post by x0x0 »

slig wrote: post #333
x0x0 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been hot garbage. From breaking audio playback over bluetooth (who would possibly use spotify in the car while also using google maps! What a rare use case!) to incorrect song substitution on playlists, continuing to play audio after bt disconnect, etc. There's a 2 click guaranteed crasher in the version from a month ago on stock android on a pixel. Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android. I…

>Clearly nobody at Spotify uses or cares about android I bet that they all use macOS and their app macOS is really really shitty as well.

They removed back / forwards navigation with the keyboard when they redid artist pages yet again. It's only super annoying!
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