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Software Updates

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51–60 of 149 posts

Re: Software Updates

#51
post #17

Software getting worse, just out of my head: - VS2019 removed at least two important features from VS2017 (export of profiler results and the concurrency profiler) - Firefox "new" extension API still means you can't remove the top tab bar from tree style tabs (best FF extension) without hacks - Current Dropbox versions are incredibly invasive. They popup when opening a word document. When pluggin in my Camera. And no…

Newer Dropbox features like smart sync are pretty cool and useful though.

They give you more free disk space with little extra UI.

Re: Software Updates

#52
post #36

Things i tried to keep using way longer than most: -windows 7 (upgraded only for widi support - and i miss them) - skype (i d never upgrade if i could) - photoshop standalone (still use it) - office 2007 ( still use it) - dropbox (no option there) - old reddit - iphone 6 - jquery (plan to avoid npm until it dies of natural causes) - windows movie maker / photos In fact it s getting harder to think of things that are…

> (Ironically, table-based HN has the best responsive behavior for reading text on mobile than any "responsive" site). Until you have a certain nesting depth of comments, then they get condensed pretty hard.

tilt your phone sideways. The thing i like about tables is you can zoom out and see the whole map of comments, instead of re-rendering a responsive site 10 times and losing my eye's cursor. That's a smarter way to use the zoom gesture

Re: Software Updates

#53
post #17

Software getting worse, just out of my head: - VS2019 removed at least two important features from VS2017 (export of profiler results and the concurrency profiler) - Firefox "new" extension API still means you can't remove the top tab bar from tree style tabs (best FF extension) without hacks - Current Dropbox versions are incredibly invasive. They popup when opening a word document. When pluggin in my Camera. And no…

I’m slowly moving away from graphical applications and towards FOSS software. It’s a giant pain but once done, it’s done until I want to mess with it again. Eventually I may get to the point where my whole operating system has a lock file. That would be nice.

> I’m slowly moving away from graphical applications and towards FOSS software.

That's a weird statement. You can move from graphical apps towards text-based ones, or from proprietary software to FOSS, or even from graphical, proprietary apps to text-based, FOSS ones, but the combination you gave mixes up two mainly unrelated factors.

Re: Software Updates

#54
post #36

Things i tried to keep using way longer than most: -windows 7 (upgraded only for widi support - and i miss them) - skype (i d never upgrade if i could) - photoshop standalone (still use it) - office 2007 ( still use it) - dropbox (no option there) - old reddit - iphone 6 - jquery (plan to avoid npm until it dies of natural causes) - windows movie maker / photos In fact it s getting harder to think of things that are…

Only anecdotal, but I suspect you didn't keep using old.reddit.com longer than most (of the hold-outs that ever did).

Re: Software Updates

#55
post #36

Things i tried to keep using way longer than most: -windows 7 (upgraded only for widi support - and i miss them) - skype (i d never upgrade if i could) - photoshop standalone (still use it) - office 2007 ( still use it) - dropbox (no option there) - old reddit - iphone 6 - jquery (plan to avoid npm until it dies of natural causes) - windows movie maker / photos In fact it s getting harder to think of things that are…

Only anecdotal, but I suspect you didn't keep using old.reddit.com longer than most (of the hold-outs that ever did).

true. and only a few months ago, reddit was trying to force us to the new system by conveniently "forgetting" our saved setting

Re: Software Updates

#56
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just stable APIs but part of that is consistency of signatures, methods and usage. APIs used to be cleaner and more atomic, today they seem like very leaky abstractions and breaking changes seem to be all the rage. Previously, breaking changes were seen as a serious thing as it meant the API signatures/functionality was missing and needed to be broken. Today, breaking changes is just part of the "move fast a…

> Stable consistent APIs don't help lock-in I do not think this is true, Windows has a lock-in on desktop explicitly because it has a stable API that allowed it to amass a huge library of software that keeps people relying on it to get that software working. For the largest majority of people, Windows' worth is its stable API (even if they do not realize it).

True but in terms of development platforms for Microsoft, it is constant churn.

When they have a monopoly or near monopoly like Microsoft does with the desktop and Windows, less need for churn to keep people on it but lack of competitors. Azure has gone through lots of churn because of heavy competition.

Maybe competition, which is good, causes all this breaking software changes but change is good as well. Software change should just be a little more stable and developer/engineer/product/designer led not just the money/marketing/oversight pushed.

Unfortunately standards get wrecked when platforms are going for lock-in and control, Microsoft/Google etc are all to blame for that. It isn't the engineers pushing for that mostly. Standards at least promote some level of stable APIs, but they don't lock-in and so big fish and sharks eat them up and break them.

Re: Software Updates

#57
post #50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a regional thing. I'm German and things are often shittier versions here than anywhere else. I haven't had a phone conversation that felt like a latency under .5 seconds in 5+ years.

With fear of starting a fire here, are you using an Android phone? I'm asking, because whenever I hear people complain about phone software that just breaks, it's almost always Android, and with good reason: They have to support a lot more phones than iOS, and Android is a lot more open. So I just wanted to air the idea that you could try with an iPhone. iOS may lack some of the feature Android users are used to, but…

In android, radio stack is chipset specific and the OS interacts with it via RIL, provided by chipset vendor. It has nothing to do with "has to support a lot more phones than iOS"; in both systems the OS does not touch the audio streams, just routes them from/to input/output.

Re: Software Updates

#58
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stable consistent APIs don't help lock-in I do not think this is true, Windows has a lock-in on desktop explicitly because it has a stable API that allowed it to amass a huge library of software that keeps people relying on it to get that software working. For the largest majority of people, Windows' worth is its stable API (even if they do not realize it).

True but in terms of development platforms for Microsoft, it is constant churn. When they have a monopoly or near monopoly like Microsoft does with the desktop and Windows, less need for churn to keep people on it but lack of competitors. Azure has gone through lots of churn because of heavy competition. Maybe competition, which is good, causes all this breaking software changes but change is good as well. Software c…

I find it curious that you left Apple out.

Re: Software Updates

#59
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only anecdotal, but I suspect you didn't keep using old.reddit.com longer than most (of the hold-outs that ever did).

true. and only a few months ago, reddit was trying to force us to the new system by conveniently "forgetting" our saved setting

OK, this is embarrassing (†) but I didn't even realise there was an option other than manually editing the url to "old." :-| Your comment has probably done more for my productivity today than anything else that will happen — thanks!

(†) I'd like to put it down to only having tried it during that period of time you're referring to, so I will :)

Re: Software Updates

#60
Actually this would be cool as a real generatable graph. Who would you create this?

I’m thinking with access to the git repo as well as the relevant package manager you could get pretty close.

Good way to illustrate upgrade requirements to a product owner.

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