4 ms·

> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have ha

> My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC You do have some merit to the argument, but your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI, and that matters to some people. It didn't do dynamic language processing to figure out if you've made a grammatical error. It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware. It did not have to use a significantly restricted environment to limit damage when some malware did get through. It didn't even support multitasking. My point is that computers today do so much more, but responsive UI is entirely possible for desktop applications, but the development cost is more than most companies/people are willing to pay.

secura 9y ago
So why have a full pretty UI at the cost of latency? If the latency begins to cross a threshold and begins to be inconvenient or distracting, it is time to step and think that may be the pretty UI is too ahead of its time, and we should stop making the UI prettier than it can be at this time.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  Because some people (including me) loves it. I don't care about a few extra ms for having an interface that's satisfying to watch / use for 12 hours per day. I have to add that most computer I see of my friends are extremely snappy, I don't really see what you are talking about.
- platinumrad 9y ago
  I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. Back in the aqua era of OS X with the super sluggish genie effects and so on, the general public loved it and it was mostly "power users" and professionals who went into the settings to tone down the animations.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    I dunno. Maybe initially, sure, but I've seen countless people use, for example, internet explorer where half the screen was taken up by malware toolbars (I wish I was exaggerating...), which is not pretty, not good UX, not gee-whiz coolness at all. And they never once complained, they just accepted it as the way it is and kept on going.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      And there’s the reason. Users are too forgiving and too passive, because the industry has trained everyone to have incredibly low expectations. Developer and corporate status games select for political skill and self-indulgent overcomplexity, with added spice from dark patterns. There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance. The culture at some companies would have been hugely improved with a few literal angry-users-with-pitchforks moments.
      - hvidgaard 9y ago
        > There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance. Then why do it? I like a good UX just as much as you, and I value simplicity, but people just want "good enough". And that is all there is to it.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    > I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. I think you've built a strawman. People who use computers to get shit done might pay lip service to things looking good, but at the end of the day they want a tool that does the job without a lot of bullshit. To the extent that the kind of person you're talking about exists, they are consumers who live in tablet land and should be ignored for desktop/workstation use cases.
    - platinumrad 9y ago
      I completely ageee that they belong in tablet land but tablets did not exist in the mid 00s. All of my older relatives who now use iPads exclusively all used OS X back then for both ease of use and aesthetic reasons.
fsloth 9y ago
You are repeating the same excuses the industry has pilfered to us for decades. "It didn't do dynamic language processing " Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. Then notify user. Don't rob the system of its low latency just because you want to run the analysis in the same thread because it's "simpler". It's simpler only if low latency is not a fundamental requirement. "It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware" Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis. "your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI," This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  > Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. It's a blocking operation, so doing it in a different thread will not magically mean the requesting application can get it faster. Besides, this is already done in a different thread, but it increases the load of updating the UI. > Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis. Which is already what is happening, but all data in and out needs to monitored. But regardless, it cannot operate in an unsafe unrestricted environment, because that implies full access to the memory. > This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc. As I started to say, you have some merit to the argument, but I simply pointed out that modern UIs require multiple orders of magnitude more computational power to render. And providing a fallback is yet another cost of developing, and for the most part not something people/companies will pay for.

secura 9y ago

So why have a full pretty UI at the cost of latency? If the latency begins to cross a threshold and begins to be inconvenient or distracting, it is time to step and think that may be the pretty UI is too ahead of its time, and we should stop making the UI prettier than it can be at this time.

kowdermeister 9y ago
Because some people (including me) loves it. I don't care about a few extra ms for having an interface that's satisfying to watch / use for 12 hours per day. I have to add that most computer I see of my friends are extremely snappy, I don't really see what you are talking about.
platinumrad 9y ago
I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. Back in the aqua era of OS X with the super sluggish genie effects and so on, the general public loved it and it was mostly "power users" and professionals who went into the settings to tone down the animations.
- dkersten 9y ago
  I dunno. Maybe initially, sure, but I've seen countless people use, for example, internet explorer where half the screen was taken up by malware toolbars (I wish I was exaggerating...), which is not pretty, not good UX, not gee-whiz coolness at all. And they never once complained, they just accepted it as the way it is and kept on going.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    And there’s the reason. Users are too forgiving and too passive, because the industry has trained everyone to have incredibly low expectations. Developer and corporate status games select for political skill and self-indulgent overcomplexity, with added spice from dark patterns. There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance. The culture at some companies would have been hugely improved with a few literal angry-users-with-pitchforks moments.
    - hvidgaard 9y ago
      > There’s no reward for UI/UX/internal simplicity and elegance. Then why do it? I like a good UX just as much as you, and I value simplicity, but people just want "good enough". And that is all there is to it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  > I think you greatly underestimate the number of non-technical people who care more about gee-whiz coolness than responsiveness. I think you've built a strawman. People who use computers to get shit done might pay lip service to things looking good, but at the end of the day they want a tool that does the job without a lot of bullshit. To the extent that the kind of person you're talking about exists, they are consumers who live in tablet land and should be ignored for desktop/workstation use cases.
  - platinumrad 9y ago
    I completely ageee that they belong in tablet land but tablets did not exist in the mid 00s. All of my older relatives who now use iPads exclusively all used OS X back then for both ease of use and aesthetic reasons.

fsloth 9y ago

You are repeating the same excuses the industry has pilfered to us for decades. "It didn't do dynamic language processing " Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. Then notify user. Don't rob the system of its low latency just because you want to run the analysis in the same thread because it's "simpler". It's simpler only if low latency is not a fundamental requirement. "It did not have to continuously scan every data stream for malware" Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis. "your 1984 Mac didn't have half as "pretty" UI," This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc.

hvidgaard 9y ago
> Which could very well do it's stuff in a different thread and execution context given the actual payload such a system needs to transfer from a wordprocessor is trivially small. It's a blocking operation, so doing it in a different thread will not magically mean the requesting application can get it faster. Besides, this is already done in a different thread, but it increases the load of updating the UI. > Which can be considered a one more defect of the system which I forgot to lambast. Sandbox my wordprocessor, let me operate in realtime in unsafe environment and once I'm moving something out of the sandbox, then do the analysis. Which is already what is happening, but all data in and out needs to monitored. But regardless, it cannot operate in an unsafe unrestricted environment, because that implies full access to the memory. > This argument is moot. Pretty UI:s are computationally a tenth or hundredth of the complexity of an AAA title. Unless one does it wrong. And if the system does not provide enough horsepower, provide a backup! Reduce the computational load! Cut the transparencies, freeze the animations, etc. As I started to say, you have some merit to the argument, but I simply pointed out that modern UIs require multiple orders of magnitude more computational power to render. And providing a fallback is yet another cost of developing, and for the most part not something people/companies will pay for.