381–390 of 402 posts
Will it be like signal now... it's supposed to be a web app but it still needs to update every single time i sit down at my computer. And after every update there is not a single perceptible change.
As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and exp…
I made Facebook and FB Messenger for Windows. It was considered a complete failure by management as it never got above 1% of the usage by windows users vs the website.
And the start menu tile BS wasn't impactful except for the narrowly avoided multibillion dollar GDPR fine Facebook almost fell headfirst into when they declared "mission accomplished" and I realized they forgot the apps existed and escalated, just before the deadline.
I deserved a bonus for finding that, yet it didn't even register on my PSC.
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> So you're saying that it is impossible for a large company to somehow use native toolkits to draw text bubbles and emojis?? One weird thing about software development is that there are plenty of things which motivated individual developers can achieve which large companies can't even write the requirements for, let alone achieve.
Hacker News just recreated startups from first principles! /s But seriously folks, this is why there will always be room for startups. Megacorps are slow lumbering beats that suffer from entropy and signal loss at every edge on the graph. The example here is that some marketing function gets the signal from Zuck to put Lego duplo characters everywhere because metaverse. Of course 90% of the company knows its dead on…
True. I work for one and its terrible. My work is 95% jumping through hoops imposed by other teams, restrictions put in for political reasons by substandard business 'leaders', and often even keeping vendors happy (really why should we care, we are their customers not the other way around :( )
5% is doing actual improvement. And meanwhile HR want me to show I'm making a difference to the company. Well yeah 5%.
I hate it a lot but the pay is good and a permanent contract with 20 years service is valuable (if I'd get made redundant I'd get more than a year's severance so I'm definitely not leaving on my own for something that may not work out)
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> Meta would have been better off doing like Telegram and just using Qt. Qt would certainly be the better choice. However, since Meta already has a web version of the WhatsApp client, the WebView2 path was an easy and inexpensive option. After all, MS itself paved the way with Teams, Visual Studio Code, and Outlook.
VS Code is Electron not WebView2
There are far too few people who truly advocate for the user, and it is this dereliction that has fuelled the race to the bottom.
It's not a matter of native libraries versus x-platform solutions versus W3, it's about valuing UX over DX at EVERY TURN. It's about educating yourself as to the resource and performance consequence of the technologies you are advocating for.
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> It's not a skill issue, it's an organizational issue. We can say that for the majority of companies with large teams that already have this. Everyone knows Meta is no different. In this case, it's a skill issue to ship low quality software which is what whoever that team at Meta just did and knowingly approved. > The engineers at Meta are world class but they're nerfed by organizational constraints. That doesn't me…
It is a management failure 100%. It doesn’t matter how good you engineers are when they are punished for doing good work and rewarded for shipping garbage.
The Pidgin plugin for WhatsApp uses very little ram, if people are looking for low-ram alternatives. Although doesn't support calling. (disclaimer, I help out a little with that plugin, amongst others for Pidgin-
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"RAM is not really something you explicitly ration." It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation at all. That’s like saying “oh well we landed on the moon with a turd burger of a computer so that means I shouldn’t need more than 8kb of memory!” Okay but I’m not trying to land on the moon, I’m trying to have an HD group video call and maybe play Cyberpunk in 4K later. Let me ask you, how much did that 8MB of RAM cost you back in the day? I bet it was more than the $10…
I have more memory so i can do more things, not so I can do the same things only slightly slower than I could before.
I feel this trend is going to stick for the upcoming years! It's not just Meta, every big player there is adopting this mentality. Take Microsoft for instance, they have been pushing heavily what they called the New Outlook , which is basically a web-based client mirroring Outlook on the web (OWA) , packed into an EXE file (not sure if it is Electronized or not)! Then, they renamed the real native Outlook app as Clas…
The old Outlook was way better. Every user in our org has been complaining about this.