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No. Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design and I hate it. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if there's a choice between doin
by rossy 10y ago
No. Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design and I hate it. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if there's a choice between doing something two different ways, rather than adding an option, the developer should pick the solution that fits 90% of their target audience and ignore the remaining 10%. The problem with that is that every time you make that decision, you ignore a different 10%, and eventually your software is only suitable for users who stay inside the box that the developers made for them, not the long tail of users with niche use cases. I think open source devs don't "get" this because they tend to write software to scratch their own itches and they often have their own niche use cases. Maybe the reason they had to scratch their own itch in the first place was because other software was too inflexible to fit their needs.
Of course, some open source projects do have this philosophy, and when they start removing options, I switch to something else. GNOME is a good example. I wish the current version of Nautilus (GNOME Files?) had half the options of the file managers that forked from earlier versions of Nautilus (Nemo and Caja,) because I actually use those options.
- wai1234 10y agoThis. How useful would hammers be if they ONLY drove nails?
- teh_klev 10y ago> Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design Here's a Slack example of this. We moved from HipChat to Slack and two of the "options" we as a team dearly miss are: 1. Being able to set a status that reflects what we're doing if unable to chat for the time being, not just a binary online or away. Now I have to inform the team I'm on a conf call or will "brb - making lunch" in a chat room which distracts everyone. HipChat was pretty flexible that way, it's a small thing, but for our team hugely important, especially for remote workers. 2. Being able to specify how long I'm AFK before setting me to "Away". Sometimes I take calls on my mobile (we have apps for our internal SIP/asterisk stuff) and I like to wander around when chatting because it stretches my legs. But I find annoying that on longer calls Slack assumes after 30 mins of no activity I'm "Away" and "grey blobs" me making it look like I'm completely offline. Unfortunately the "Snooze notifications" don't cut it because it still doesn't let me convey, at-a-glance, why I'm deferring your messages. From googling around it seems these are common gripes that Slack don't see as a priority to fix. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things Slack does well, but as paying customers, not addressing these two issues causes some low level resentment.