I recently discovered that Apple has something called "Pages" and "Numbers" - simple apps that serve as alternatives to Word and Excel. They're so straightforward and intuitive that they require no learning curve. They just work. It seems like things like this are no longer possible for Microsoft. They keep producing clunky tools which, although functional, always come with a horribly frustrating UX (as usual). I've…
I use Numbers daily for simple local spreadsheet math / tables. It works for what I need and I'm glad every new Mac comes with it.
It’s because modern devs by and large have zero concept of latency differences. I had to explain to people yesterday why an on-disk temporary table in MySQL was slower than an in-memory one. “But the disk is an SSD,” was an actual rebuttal I got. Never mind the fact that this was Aurora, so the “disk” is a slice of (multiple) SSDs exposed over a SAN…
That is what happens when your dev learnt it from an online course instead of going to college or through proper education. "Anyone can code!"
I wish. I did my undergrad, and now doing my Masters, at a top 10 uni in Poland.
Trust me so much, some of the stuff I learned there was actively harmful. Half of subjects were random fillers, and so on.
I envy Americans so much with that, their CS education seems to be top notch.
I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stop…
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
Man you can still get by with Photoshop CS3 as far as features go.
What's old is new again. Microsoft introduced the "Office Startup Assistant" or "Office Startup Application" (osa.exe) in Office 97, it sat in the system tray and loaded the main office DLLs at startup: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214010329/http://support.mi... OpenOffice.org (predecessor of LibreOffice) copied this feature, which they called "QuickStarter", I don't know exactly when, but no later than 2003: htt…
I came here looking for this. It's an old idea, from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor - precache the binaries. If you ever tried Office 97 on a PC of 10+ years later, it's amazing how fast and lightweight it was. Instant startup, super snappy. And those apps were not lacking in features. 95% of what you need out of a desktop word processor was in Word 97.
A lifetime ago when I was doing MSP work, our law office clients were using the DOS versions of WordPerfect because the Windows version was too slow.
They refused to store files in directories and use good file names (although they were limited to 8.3), so they just scrolled through all their files until they found the right one. But they could open them so fast they didn't care.
In windows you had to use the mouse, click three times, wait for the document to load and render....it was instant under DOS character mode.
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…
we don't have software engineering anymore than the romans had civil engineering
My favorite GNOME developer's hill to die on is their refusal to implement a system tray or work with the rest of the Linux desktop community to create an alternative to the system tray. Don't get me wrong there has been a abuse of the system tray but the refusal to acknowledge that there is a use case for persistent notifications or status indicators is ridiculous. there suggestion is that notifications are the solu…
I am personally so glad Gnome does not have a system tray, on every other DE its a disgusting mess of differently scaled and styled icons.
So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?
> from the days when spinning rust was the limiting factor How did we get back to this though? We have gigabytes/sec with NVMe and stupid fast CPU's with at least 4 cores in even low end models. Yet a text editor takes so long to load we need to load it up on boot... Such a frustrating field to work in.
I know this is such a stereotypical "get off my lawn" statement but we've lost the art of software engineering. It's all about stuffing as many features in as quickly as we can and pushing it out to as many people as possible. Performance is always secondary. Not that I'm that nostalgic for the old days, we would have been doing the exact same thing if we were able to get away with it. But performance restrictions me…
I saw the writing on the wall when I had to install a couple 150MB IDEs to run 101-level Java programs in the mid 2000's. 150 megabytes. MEGABYTES. I could consume about 1 kilobyte per minute of fantasy novel text in uncompressed ASCI, call it 1/8th that fully compressed. That means this compressed binary you're handing me is around 1.2 billion minutes of work (more if ingesting a novel is faster than writing/testing/debugging a program) for what is functionally a text editor, file manager, syntax library, compiler, and debugger. Pretty sure that got done in 150 kilobytes a generation earlier. A generation later, maybe it will be 150 gigabytes.
I use Office software at work daily and I don't understand how that piece of shit can be so fucking slow. It's a serious productivity sink too; I often procrastinate small tasks just because I know half of the time doing it is spent waiting for various part of the office to load and that is somehow very stressful. I realise it is not a huge amount of time per se, but the psychological effect of the piece of crap stop…
The Mac version is even worse.
And it keeps getting worse. I had to downgrade to the Oct. 2024 version in order to get back to a working version.
At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone. And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bund…
Installing linux is multiple times easier and faster than installing windows now too.
You don’t need to install drivers one by one.
Don’t need to download that huge iso and write it to a usb for a long time etc.
Linux just works on both my laptop and desktop just by installing it with the gui