Live data from Hacker News

Apps Getting Worse

tbray.org

421–430 of 635 posts

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#421

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…

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don'…

> From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Presumably Spotify makes more money if you listen to artist A instead of artist B, and these changes are all part of the gradual change from an interface designed to let you browse and discover music you like to an interface designed to make you do whatever makes Spotify the most money that day.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron has killed it. Fast browsers have killed it. Saas killed it. There are many problems with Apple’s stores, but I don’t see how this is one.

I can't say this view has it entirely backwards because part of the phenomenon is due to the strengths of the web today and of Electron. But the 'backward' part of the argument is that native Apple software could , but no longer does, provide its own strengths to counter the web and Electron. I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use Electron. H…

Agree. I hate every electron app I use, but even my longtime macOS favorites are beginning to feel only marginally better. They keep spicing up the UI, removing things that used to be reliable constants across applications and hiding more and more things behind ... menus like I'm on a mobile device, revealing or moving UI elements on mouse hover.

Little details like the title bar of of every window behaving the same were great like ten years ago. You always knew if a dot was in the red close button it meant your work wasn't saved. You could drag and drop the tiny icon just like it was an icon in Finder. It was almost always consistent.

Preview used to be a simple app for viewing documents. I welcomed the addition of annotation tools like adding a signature, but why did they axe the standard titlebar behavior? Now you have to hover over the filename of the document and wait almost a second before the title slides to the right and reveals the little icon. How is that possibly an improvement over just leaving it alone? Did they think saving 16px to show a longer filename without ellipses was more valuable?

Notes is kind of a new app in my mind so it hit the scene when macOS was already starting to feel more like an iPhone, but it's still worth talking about. They keep making it more powerful, like adding checklists and tables and such, but they hide the most basic functionality, text formatting, under a flyout menu. I really like the iOS feature to scan documents. The cropping and contrast adjustments are so good that I can usually quickly scan several pages of handwritten homework within a couple minutes. However, exporting a scanned PDF out of a document on macOS is a mess. Right click on the scan and it take seconds for a context menu to appear. At first I thought it must be my computer got hung, but it's like this consistently. How did they ship a product that make something as basic as a context menu hang for several seconds?

I could gripe with more examples, but the overarching feel I get is that macOS is being pushed more and more towards feeling like iOS, the emphasis on programs editing files is disappearing, and one day everything will be sandboxed and I'll have to click through "share" menus to transfer data from one app to another, provided those apps are kind enough to let me import or export.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#423
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don'…

This. There is no better alternative music service, but just yesterday I reinstalled Antennapod for podcasts. Spotify did a great job getting me hooked on some podcast shows, but the UI changed (need more taps and travel from the lowest to the highest button on my phone screen every time I want to use it) and features broke (e.g. it needs internet to list downloaded podcasts such that I can press play on one of them)…

Glad to hear you switched away from listening to podcasts on Spotify. Their attempt to buy up a huge number of podcasts in the last couple of years, which resulted in exclusification of some of those podcasts, is an awful development in the previously free and open podcasting community. I love podcasts and I'd prefer to be able to keep listening to all of my favorite podcasts on whatever app I want.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#424

> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile…

> Mobile developers and front-end developers increasingly don't want to work on technologies that are perceived as outdated, or even to work on someone else's code

Backend folks do this too btw. I’ve seen adoption of Docker, Kubernetes, microservice architectures, Rust, etc. driven more by a desire to use the latest trends than the best tool for the job.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the time it's for inner achievements for the product manager or designers part. Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they have different views. It can also redesigned to match style updates, useful for fashion, travel or wedding sites. Sometimes the menu increases that a list of buttons can't accommodate anymore so it's changed to it's own page or drop-down. Sometimes they want people to be conf…

Most of these sound pretty insane tbh (though some completely sane). > Another is they just changing their ui/ux lead and they have different views. This one specifically irritates me. Even under the assumption that that new lead is correct and the new interface is cleaner and more usable, it still needs to be weighed against the time it takes to retrain users to the new format. You have to deal with what you were gi…

It's not something that's confined to design/UX though.

Bring in a new CTO/tech lead and they'll tell you the current architecture is outdated or the code is spaghetti and needs a rewrite in [insert architecture/language doing the rounds on HN]. Bring in a new project manager and they'll want to introduce [insert Agile framework du jour]. Someone has been hired for presumably a lot of money, and if they just go "meh, it's fine, we just need to tidy things up a bit here and there" people might question why they were hired for a lot of money.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#426
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays. I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their…

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…

As an iOS user who has experienced some of these same issues, I can assure you that nobody at Spotify cares about my platform's app experience either.

The "continuing to play audio after bt disconnect" is particularly obnoxious to me, and has been happening for something like 5 years now. The latest update has trouble just scrolling through my entire Library, because why would anyone have more than a few dozen followed artists!?!?! (I have a couple hundred, and the latest update forced artists, playlists, and albums all to list together into one enormous muddle in Library).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what Spotify is doing with the Android app. They seem to be pushing podcasts really hard and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the app from doing that. I didn't enjoy using it at all. I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.

The pushing of podcasts too much is what got me to leave Spotify too. I tried YouTube music for a while but I wasn't a fan of how my YouTube likes would get mixed up with the YouTube music. Disabling the setting would often get rid of songs too. So I ended up buying a cheap Android phone ($190 USD for a very good phone - 8GB ram, 12gb space): https://www.amazon.com/UMIDIGI-Unlocked-4150mAh-Capacity-Sma... I use Firef…

Newpipe is a good option too.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#428
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.

On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener,…

And so many free podcast apps have been around for over a decade, demonstrating that there are many simple ways to play podcasts right. But I guess they can't get basic music navigation and library curation right either, and that seemed to work pretty well in 2005.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#429

> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile…

I am a seasoned JavaScript dev (15 years now) and I don't mind writing jQuery plugins and dealing with old ES3-5 style code bases.

I am working with an Angular project where everything is just wrong by just enough to make it totally impossible to actually fix properly without massive refactoring. We have lots of imported bits of CSS even though we are using a framework, several libraries that kinda do the same thing just squished in there. Lots of jQuery (yes in an Angular project that screw with angular animations) and generally people didn't RTFM.

The only way to make something that is somewhat reliable is to just delete it and rebuilt each module piece by piece. I don't want to fundamentally change the product. I just want something where I am not constantly fixing bugs that could have been avoided by just RTFM.

The reason nobody wants to work on code-base that isn't their own is that it is frequently either crap, or it is undocumented and partially crap, or there is fundamental problems with it that make working with it painful. I can't lay out forms easily (even though we are using a popular CSS framework) because somebody who is long gone decided to put !important all over a stylesheet and if I remove anything the whole web app breaks. I frequently fix many display problems through deleting code.

As for comments about state-management ...

Your app has a state. If you don't manage it properly it becomes a mess. State management is essential. You might think it is a trend, but it isn't. It is simply good practice because once you start using it the benefits are obvious.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#430
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was wrong with VSCode?

For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The VS Code ecosystem is superb though.

I wonder how much of this is just a psychological effect from knowing it's Electron beforehand.

Sometimes I think I can almost perceive a little bit of slowness compared to e.g. Sublime—but then I lose sight of it.

Certainly in comparison to any similarly fully-featured IDE I've used its feel is notably quicker.

Post reply on HN