3 ms·

What makes you think an intern would be able to do this? A few of them might, but I imagine most wouldn't. Being able to make something easy to maintain means k

What makes you think an intern would be able to do this? A few of them might, but I imagine most wouldn't. Being able to make something easy to maintain means knowing what is difficult to maintain. Except for the sharpest, who actively learn from others, the best teacher is experience.

ComputerGuru 7y ago
I fully intended that as hyperbole, but the idea was "use ready-to-use native widgets/controls to represent options/state" with as little "custom" UX as possible. The user-visible Dropbox UI is nothing more than a preferences dialog, the real "app" can be written by experts with 30 years of service and systems software expertise under their belts: it runs as an invisible background service using APIs for which well-supported cross-platform abstractions are readily available for all non-interpreted (and most interpreted) languages (inotify, channels, network io, encryption, compression, database serialization, etc). The preferences and configuration panel is not what anyone thinks of when you say "Dropbox" and does not need to be "let's use css/html to create a custom UI that does not conform to the system ux guidelines so we can shove our branding down users' throats," in turn necessitating "now we need to use a full-blown browser engine to render the UI and an always-running standalone web server to interface with the background service to get backup status and information." I've been using Dropbox since its first public (beta?) release on multiple different platforms, both supported and unsupported. I uninstalled the application three or four days ago when I found that background process lurking on my PC (in addition to the other background Dropbox processes which I did expect to see). If their application is turning into a web app, I can already use my main browser for that.

3 ms·

What makes you think an intern would be able to do this? A few of them might, but I imagine most wouldn't. Being able to make something easy to maintain means k

by Arbalest 7y ago

ComputerGuru 7y ago
I fully intended that as hyperbole, but the idea was "use ready-to-use native widgets/controls to represent options/state" with as little "custom" UX as possible. The user-visible Dropbox UI is nothing more than a preferences dialog, the real "app" can be written by experts with 30 years of service and systems software expertise under their belts: it runs as an invisible background service using APIs for which well-supported cross-platform abstractions are readily available for all non-interpreted (and most interpreted) languages (inotify, channels, network io, encryption, compression, database serialization, etc). The preferences and configuration panel is not what anyone thinks of when you say "Dropbox" and does not need to be "let's use css/html to create a custom UI that does not conform to the system ux guidelines so we can shove our branding down users' throats," in turn necessitating "now we need to use a full-blown browser engine to render the UI and an always-running standalone web server to interface with the background service to get backup status and information." I've been using Dropbox since its first public (beta?) release on multiple different platforms, both supported and unsupported. I uninstalled the application three or four days ago when I found that background process lurking on my PC (in addition to the other background Dropbox processes which I did expect to see). If their application is turning into a web app, I can already use my main browser for that.