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> Central to Olivetti’s philosophy — and also to the designers that it hired — was that technology needed to be humanistic, not domineering Today's Google is v
by ungzd 9y ago
> Central to Olivetti’s philosophy — and also to the designers that it hired — was that technology needed to be humanistic, not domineering
Today's Google is very bad at this. Their every product is creepy, cold, dumbed-down and surveilance-based. Maybe they are trying to somewhat fix that by visual aesthetics? Their hardware surely look great, and UIs in Android look good too, but UIs in their web apps look dull and authoritarian.
Google Photos is just "we exfiltrate all your photos and use machine learning on them". Its UI is like designed for monkeys. Compare that to Flickr or their old Picasaweb. Few buttons, no functionality except "we get your photos now you can look on them". I have lots of photos dated in future (from old camera which had bad clock) and there's no way to fix it (except to edit date on each photo).
Google+ was so cold and dead and creepy. Modern Youtube is just a stupid TV. Most "account settings" pages look like I'm viewing them on giant phone. They are saying "you don't need desktop computer, just use phone, you need only play and pause buttons". Their design is highly political. It feels more like eastern bloc's high modernism, not like Olivetti.
- icebraining 9y agoI have lots of photos dated in future (from old camera which had bad clock) and there's no way to fix it (except to edit date on each photo). Select the photos, click on the "more options" button (the three dots), then on Edit Date & Time. There you can change their dates, and even choose between setting a fixed datetime for all or keep the relative time differences between each other.
- agildehaus 9y ago> I have lots of photos dated in future (from old camera which had bad clock) and there's no way to fix it (except to edit date on each photo). You've been able to batch edit timestamps for over a year. https://plus.google.com/+GooglePhotos/posts/3ABHACR7QhA https://plus.google.com/+GooglePhotos/posts/3ABHACR7QhA
- ungzd 9y agoIn order to do this I have to select photos for specific day and there's no way to do it. On my computer these old photos are in directories named with date, one directory per day, but in Google Photos this information is lost, they are entirely random (these photos really have random dates, camera clock was randomizing each time I switched it on). Simple script would solve that but Google Photos has no public API because public APIs are so 2006. There's no way to reupload photos with fixed EXIFs too.
- eradicatethots 9y agoIt sounds to me like you are projecting this authoritarian idea into these uis Truly, what more ui should a photos appo have? Any addition would just be clutter. Compare to iOS photos ui- they’re very similar, but you wouldn’t call iOS photos authoritarian, because it’s not your goal! Or maybe I’m missing something authoritarian about these uis
- ungzd 9y agoiOS photos is something like ACDSee or Windows Explorer, not like Flickr. Maybe it syncs something, but it's primarily local photo viewer.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ajross 9y ago> creepy, cold, [...] and authoritarian [...] designed for monkeys [...] highly political You lost me completely. The complaint about photo dates seems reasonable. The rest sounds like the description of a video game enemy and not software UI design.
- jdc0589 9y ago> Their every product is creepy, cold, dumbed-down and surveilance-based. Aside from the always on listening for "ok google" crap that can (supposedly) be disabled, is there anything else you are referencing? Im genuinely curious.
- agildehaus 9y agoEcho does this, as does the upcoming Apple Homepod, yet nobody complains about it every Apple/Amazon thread like they do with Google. How else do you build a home assistant? It's not sending your data to Google during this period. If it did record/transmit, that would be a fairly easy thing to detect, yet nobody has.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoYou could build a home assistant to respond to something after a button press. Alexa records everything after the wake word. You can see it in the alexa app.
- dannyr 9y agoGood luck using an Assistant where you have to press the button before you can use it. Major reason why these Assistants are successful is operating them hands-free.
- phailhaus 9y ago> Alexa records everything after the wake word. ...yes? I mean, that's obvious. How else is it supposed to respond to you after you ask for something?
- jononor 9y agoRobots reading all your emails, analyzing all your images and documents? Tracking your searches, your video watches, and most non-search webpage visits too (via embedded Analytics)?
- CydeWeys 9y agoIt's weird to me that you're choosing Google Photos as your example, as that's one of my very favorite apps of all time. Possibly #1. It does its job amazingly well, it solves an important and hard problem that has bedeviled me for over a decade (photo storage/indexing/retrieval/querying across multiple devices), and it's slick. Picasa and Flickr were more about photo sharing, and required way more involvement to use. Google Photos is about managing your collection of photos across all devices and the web, and it's amazing at it.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoWhen you hate a company, it's easy to make up reasons to hate their products, especially if you aren't worried about using an internally consistent decision algorithm.
- remir 9y agoI disagree. Google is much more "humanistic" today than it was years ago when they had a more "bare bone" design approach.
- ungzd 9y ago"Humanistic" in sense "marketed for the masses" and "knows what you need and what you don't need". Old Google was more "technical" but more neutral.
- pokemongoaway 9y agoYou made me realize it might be dangerous to have pictures of sensitive documents in Google Photos, even with dual factor authentication... There's not much info on the extent of this "machine learning."