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This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rende

This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples. "This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level." No. Shit, really? Get out of town. Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry. These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? I do, and it wasn't fun then, it was a detriment to doing what you wanted. It wasn't a rite of passage, it was a huge pain in the ass. So yeah, things are slower now, and I wanna go fast. But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened, and while things feel slower, computers are now open to a much wider audience and are much more usable now. These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment.

lordleft 7y ago
There's definitely some cherry-picking of history going on.
- eggy 7y ago
  Really, because two co-workers have told me they spent weekends trying to configure a printer and downgrading a graphics driver to get their graphics working again. Yes, they are engineers (mechanical, not software), but I have had my share of issues like this, and I started programming in 1978 on a Commodore PET. I do prefer lightweight interfaces, and my wife can't get my Maps app working while I am driving because she has a Samsung and I have a Blackberrry (KeyOne). Things look prettier, and there are a lot of advertisements, but I relate to a lot of these "cherry picked" rants.
burntoutfire 7y ago
Most of the old nonsense you listed is specific to PCs. Amigas (for example) were much friendlier.
- andoma 7y ago
  Yup, Amiga's Autoconf [0] was ahead of its time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
svnpenn 7y ago
> Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? Literally all of these are still a thing...
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  Which? I can't remember the last time any of these happened to me. What "hardware compatibility issues" have you experienced lately?
  - ModernMech 7y ago
    Just yesterday I couldn't connect my laptop to a new classroom projector with a USB-C input. When I selected "Duplicate Display" it caused my whole system to hang unresponsive. Works fine in other rooms with HDMI to USB-C. I have no idea what is wrong. My new iPhone XS doesn't connect to my car's bluetooth, while the 4 year old phone I replaced does. My wife's iPhone 8 does. I'm stuck using an audio cable like it's 2003 again.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      That reminds me of a situation at work. A new coworker couldn't connect to the internet when he had a an Apple Thunderbolt display connected to his ~2014-2015 MB Pro via thunderbolt. Mystifying. Even more mystifying was corporate IT going "oh yeah just don't use it".
      - tristor 7y ago
        That's probably because he had his network connection priorities ordered so that the TB networking had priority and there wasn't a valid route on the connected network to the TB display. That's very likely a fixable problem, as I have encountered similar and resolved it.
- 7y ago
magduf 7y ago
>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You still have to waste a lot of time doing this crap. Last time I set up a printer for my mom, it was a PITA: I had to download drivers, install some giant pile of crap software, go through a bunch of screens of garbage, etc. Needless to say, her computer runs Windows 10. By contrast, when I wanted to print to that same printer with my own laptop (running Linux Mint), it was simple: there was absolutely no extra software to install, and all I had to do was go to my Settings->Printers, search for printers on the network (took a few seconds), notice that it found the (WiFi) printer, verify it was an HP and whatever model, and then it was done. Things could be much faster and simpler than they are now. They aren't, because it's not profitable for various actors for it to be, and because most users accept this. Most users are happy to have gigabytes of malware and spyware on their systems, wasting CPU cycles reporting their behavior back to Microsoft or their printer vendor or whoever, and that's a big reason things are so much slower than in 1983. So if I'm being "elitist" to point out that spyware is a bad thing, then I'll happily accept that moniker.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  Last printer I had to configure on my Linux machine required finding a downloading a hidden mystery bash script from the manufacturer's website and running it with root permissions. Not exactly "plug and play" or "safe"
  - magduf 7y ago
    Then you got the wrong printer. Some manufacturers do a good job of supporting Linux (HP is probably the best actually; their drivers all ship standard in most distros), others don't bother.
    - therealdrag0 7y ago
      > Then you got the wrong printer. And so did your mom. Many printers can plug-n-play on windows.
gridlockd 7y ago
If you had used a Mac or an Amiga, you wouldn't have those bad memories. Instead, you would fondly remember an era when software was pristine. There also was a time when people just started to use C++ and software was much buggier. I wouldn't even say software today feels much slower across the board, but it definitely far more wasteful, given the resources. You can see a lot of software that essentially does the same things as it did 20 years ago, but (relatively) much slower. Try using some older versions of e.g. Adobe software, you'll see how snappy it feels.
huebomont 7y ago
Yes, I remember all these things, because they're almost all still a thing. But now with a shitty React front-end.
- toddmorey 7y ago
  Pretend the modern web made computers worse and then try Figma in the browser. It's glorious. Granted it's not written in React but it really shows what the web can be. It's BETTER than any desktop equivalent I've tried. It requires zero installation. Plugins are added instantly. It has native collaboration. It's scary fast. I'm not at all nostalgic about the old days.
  - tomtheelder 7y ago
    It's okay. The functionality is great, but that's pretty unrelated to it being a webapp. I often run into slowdowns when using it on my medium spec'ed laptop. It sometimes gets pretty bad. It consistently feels slower than using native desktop apps. The zero installation is definitely a perk, though a minor one. Plugins adding instantly and native collaboration aren't functions of it being a web app. The trade seems to be a still quite noticeable performance hit vs no installation. It's probably the single best serious web app I've ever used, and I'd still trade it for a high quality desktop app if I could.
  - huebomont 7y ago
    In my opinion, people have had their expectation dragged way down by shitty web apps so Figma feels good. It doesn't beat what tools like Photoshop used to feel like before their UI got rewritten in HTML and whatever fuckery they're doing now.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; it gives almost no affordances for exploration and cross-referencing. > Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours. As someone who builds their own PC every couple years: it still does. It's actually worse now, due to the amount of products on the market and price segregation involved. Two PCs ago, I didn't have to use two parts compatibility tools, several benchmarking sites and a couple of friends, and didn't have to write CSS hacks for electronics stores, just to be able to assemble a cost-effective PC. > But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You don't? Printer drivers are only slightly less garbage than they were, but now there's also less knobs to turn if things go wrong. When my Windows 10 doesn't want to talk to a printer or a Bluetooth headset, all I get to see is a stuck progress bar. Bottom line: I agree 100% with the author that one of the primary functions of a computer is enabling easy cross-referencing of information. This ability has been degrading over the past decades (arguably for business reasons: the easier it is for people to make sense of information, the harder it is for your sales tactics to work). > These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment. That I don't get. Is it "elitist" now to point out that the (tech) "elite" can actually handle all this bullshit, but it's the regular Joes and Janes that get the short end of the stick?
- Arnt 7y ago
  What makes Google Maps bad? My computer in 1983 didn't have a map application at all, how can Google Maps possibly be bad compared to that? And if I had had a map application (I'm sure they existed) it would have taken several minutes to load from cassette tape. That's not faster than Google Maps, either perceptually or objectively.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
gameswithgo 7y ago
>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened The slowness is orthogonal to all those things that have improved. We can put the fast back just fine while keeping those things.
- themacguffinman 7y ago
  I don't think you can, not really. Practically all the slowdown you see comes from increasing levels of abstractions, and basically all good abstractions have a performance cost. Abstractions in general buy you faster development and more reliable/stable software. UI abstractions buy you intuitive and easy to use UX. All of these benefits define the modern era of software that has spawned countless valuable software programs, and it's naive to think you can skip the bill.
blfr 7y ago
Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. OP gave examples. Could you provide a couple of examples as well?
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  I would actually say that Microsoft Office suite was really good (up until recently when they started trying to funnel you into their cloud storage). But even with that blemish, the UX is still pretty good. Hitting the alt key let's you access any menu with just a few keystrokes that show up when you hit the alt key so they don't have to be memorized. I can also work a hell of a lot of magic in Excel without ever touching my mouse, and not needing to memorize every keyboard shortcut I need. I wish every app and desktop in every OS followed a similar standard for keyboard shortcuts. Macros/VBA is still awful, but overall, despite the horrifying computational abuse I put office suite through, it's actually very stable! And, it's fast enough once it loads. It's still pretty slow to load though.
  - LudwigNagasena 7y ago
    Microsoft Teams has one of the worse UX I've had experienced. It's amazing that a company can't make an app for its own platform that feels native.
toddmorey 7y ago
I do wish shortcuts on web apps would be more universally implemented and more universally discoverable. I wish browsers had a common hotkey that would show available shortcuts, for example. The biggest problem with his argument is that, done correctly, a mouse augments the keyboard and does not replace it. If you've ever seen a good print production artist, that person can absolutely FLY around a very visual program like InDesign... without leaving the keyboard.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  I wish people stopped using the browser like it's an OS.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  Webapp need to stop implementing some shortcuts, if not most. It annoys me to no end when a site hijacks ctrl+f and presents their own crappy sesrch rather than just letting me search the page with Firefoxs built in search, which actually works.
- tartoran 7y ago
  I second this. Once one learns the keyboard shortcuts and builds the habit to learn shortcuts in general they won't be encumbered by small visual tasks like aiming lots of boxes like in menus and sub menus. These interactions micro-dent the flow. When I use the keyboard to navigate I'm not even consciously thinking what shortcuts to press, it happens naturally. I also noticed that I don't even know the shortcuts and have to think a bit before telling someone what shor-cut i use, my fingers remember them. All this said, the software has to have a good shortcut flow in mind. Not all software offers this benefit.
flohofwoe 7y ago
You forgot to mention that computers have become at least ten-thousand times faster in the meantime. There really isn't a single objective reason why we should wait for anything at all for longer than a few milliseconds on a modern computing device to happen. I actually think that this is just a sign that things are only optimized until they are "fast enough", and this "fast enough" threshold is a human attribute that doesn't change much over the decades. PS: the usability problems you mention have been specifically problems of the PC platform in the mid- to late-90s (e.g. the hoops one had to jump through when starting a game on a PC was always extremely bizarre from the perspective of an Amiga or AtariST user, or even C64 user).
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  I don't disagree... but in the old days, I hardly ever remember having more than 1 to 2 apps open at a time. Maybe 3 if was feeling crazy. ...Right now, I've spotify, Word, Excel, Exchange, emacs, slack, mattermost, pycharm, and matlab, acrobat, and firefox (20+ tabs)... all open at once.
  - lucideer 7y ago
    I (unlike most, I think) still today don't keep a lot of apps open. This is less about performance, and more some irrational OCD sense of comfort. And it doesn't improve performance. I actually think the one thing that has improved performance-wise is concurrency. Our computers can now do many more things at once than before. But all of those things are slower, regardless of whether you're doing 50 or just 1.
simias 7y ago
I'm not convinced by your argument because the examples you cite of things having improved since these times have hardly anything to do with having a text interface feeling sluggish. There's no contradiction here, you could have the best of both world (and if you eschew web technologies you generally get that nowadays). Are these modern Electron apps chugging along using multi-GB of RAM and perceptible user input latency because they're auto-configuring my printer in the background? Can twitter.com justify making me wait several seconds while it's loading literally megabytes of assets to display a ~100byte text message because it's auto-configuring my graphic card IRQ for me? No, these apps are bloated because of they're easier to program that way. Justifying that using user convenience is a dishonest cop-out. If you rewrote these apps with native, moderately optimized code there's nothing that would make them less user-friendly. On the other hand they'd use an order of magnitude less RAM and would probably be a few orders of magnitude faster. It's fine to say that developer time is precious and it's fine to do it that way but justifying it citing printer drivers of all things is just absurd.
webmobdev 7y ago
> Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry. Can you give us examples of the "good ones" for the "bad" examples he cited. > These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. No, he is saying that certain paradigms made computers fast in the past and instead of adopting and working progressively on them, we have totally abandoned them. He is not advocating embracing the past, wart and all, but only of what was good. He is not asking us to ditch Windows or Macs or the web and go back to our DOS / Unix era.
- fwsgonzo 7y ago
  The original Kinetix 3D Studio MAX was NOT as slow as the current AutoDesk products. It had a loading time, but I can live with that. With the speed of the M.2 SSDs we have today and everything else I really wonder why it got like this. Maybe it's the transition to protected mode that did all this? Now everything has to be sanitized and copied between address spaces. But then again, Win95 were also protected mode. I don't know... :)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gsich 7y ago
>But some apps have incredible UX. Name 10. Some variety (Android, Windows, Linux, GUI, CLI) preferred.
excerionsforte 7y ago
About printers, it depends on manufacturer. Some printers are easy to setup. I know at the places I used to work whenever I went to printer setup and network I would see the printer very easily. They say the fastest code is the code not written. I say the best printing is not needing it. I don't have a printer since I only need to print things every once in a while (few times a year). Whenever I need to print, I grab my usb stick put what I need on it and drive off to FedEx or UPS and print out what I need. Point and click, very simple. Cost of printers haven't justified buying one for me since it is a couple cents per year.
danShumway 7y ago
> These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet, and I don't remember the speed. Maybe I'm just too young and things were magically faster in the 80s? Maybe I was born just slightly before everything took a giant nosedive and became crap? There are lots of things that annoy me about modern computers, but none of them take upwards of 2-3 minutes to boot any more. I remember loading screens in front of pretty much every app on my computer. A lot of my modern apps I use don't even have loading screens at all. I remember clicking buttons on apps and just kind of waiting, while the entire computer froze, for an operation to complete. Sometimes I'd start to do something complicated and just walk away and grab a snack because I literally couldn't use my computer while it ran. There were entire joke websites like Zombocom set up to riff on how bad the loading screens were on the web back then. I would wait literally 10-15 minutes for Java apps like Runescape to load on a dial-up connection, despite the fact that the actual game itself played fine over that connection, and the delay was just due to dropping a giant binary that took no intelligent advantage of caching or asset splitting. I can't imagine waiting 10-15 minutes for anything today. I got a low-key allowance out of going to other people's houses and defragging their computers. Do you remember when Windows would just get slower over time because there was an arcane instruction you had to run every year or so to tell it to maintain itself? > On the library computer in 1998 I could retry searches over and over and over until I found what I was looking for because it was quick Now I have to wait for a huge page to load, wait while the page elements shift all over, GOD FORBID i click on anything while its loading What library were you going to in 1998? I also did library searches, and they were insanely slow, and prone to the exact same "don't click while it loads" behavior that the author is decrying here. And that's if I was lucky, sometimes the entire search engine would just be a random Java app that completely froze while it was loading results. And forget about giving me the ability to run multiple searches in parallel across multiple tabs. Whatever #!$@X cookie setup or native app they were wired into could never handle that. The modern database search interfaces I have today are amazing in comparison. I have annoyances, but you couldn't pay me to go back in time. A lot of those interfaces were actively garbage. Again, maybe I'm just too young and everything took a nosedive before I was born. But even if that's the case, it seems to me that interfaces are rapidly improving from that nosedive, not continuing to slide downwards. The computing world I grew up in was slow.
_bxg1 7y ago
Agreed. Comparing UI responsiveness to yesteryear can be an interesting case study - examining precisely why things feel slower, to see whether they can be made better - but more often than not the answer is, "because we traded a bit of efficiency for an enormous wealth of usability, and iterability, and compatibility, that people never could have dreamed of back then". Rants like this post are willfully ignorant of the benefits that a technological shift can have for millions of actual humans, simply because it offends the author's personal sensibilities.
kova12 7y ago
I was about to say same thing. I remember I had to recover some files off the diskette, and oh boy it was frustrating. That feeling when you start copying a megabyte-size file and just sit there staring at the screen for five minutes - we forgot how bad it used to be.
chubot 7y ago
For a better comparison, I ran Windows XP in VirtualBox on a Macbook Air last year to interface with some old hardware. I was surprised that it ran in something like 256 MB of RAM. And everything was super fast and responsive out of the box. I consider OS X less janky than Windows or Linux these days, but Windows XP blew it out of the water. Try it -- it's eye opening. The UI does basically 100% of what you can do on OS X, yet it's considerably more responsive on the same hardware, with the handicap of being virtualized, and having fewer resources.
wutwutwutwut 7y ago
> Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Maybe my memory is bad but I seem to have the same issues today, just in different shapes. The operating system choose to update itself in the middle of me typing a document and then 15 minutes later while in a conference meeting the app decides that a new version is immediately required. Then I open up a prompt and the text is barely readable because the screen DPI is somehow out of sync with something else and now the anti-aliasing (?) renders stuff completely broken. According to Google there are 31 ways to solve this but none of them works on my PC. Then all the Visual Studio addins decide to use a bit much memory so in the middle of the debug process the debugger goes on a coffee break and the just disappear. In the afternoon I need to update 32 NPM dependencies due to vulnerabilities and 3 had simply disappeared. Weird.
0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago
> to a much wider audience and are much more usable now. Doctors hate their life because of computers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha..., but maybe you'll think the article is too old to be true or maybe you will quibble about the headline. Why not believe something true instead?
gdubs 7y ago
The endless configuration pain you mention pretty perfectly describes anytime I try to dip into a modern framework and find myself spending hours and hours updating ruby or python or some random node module until all the dependencies finally align and I can write a single productive line of code. Or when I spend 10 minutes fighting various websites just to get a dumb TV streaming site to login with the app it’s connected to. I have to agree with the general premise: despite the phenomenal power of computers today, they generally feel just as irritating as they always have.
II2II 7y ago
Yes, it is a rant. Yes, the examples are terrible and there are plenty of counter examples. Yet there is also some truth to what is being said. There is clearly going to be added complexity to address what we expect of modern computers. It is going to have a negative performance impact. If it isn't carefully planned, it is going to have a negative impact on UX. Yet there is also a reasonable expectations for things to improve. The extra overhead in hardware and software should, in most cases, be more than compensated by the increase in performance of hardware. The UX should improve as we learn from the past and adapt for the future. In many cases, we do see tremendous improvements. When a limitation is treated as a problem that needs to be addressed, we have seen vast improvements in hardware and software performance. Arguably, the same applies to UX. (Arguably, because measuring UX is much more opinionated than quantitative.) Yet so much of what we get is driven by other motivations. If inadquate consideration is given to performance or UX, then the experience will be degraded.
gcpwnd 7y ago
Pick a web app that can render without JS. Then remove all JS and they will render 5x faster. Some aspects of computers got better, sure. But the web is at an super shitty state. I mean were here posting on a website that has bare mininum design and features. Why is that? Twitter and reddit are absolutely horrible in terms of usability and performance. If you know that they could do better makes tham even worse. It is an attack on humanity. You can try to find excuses in unrelated things like noted, but that wont change anything.
dragontamer 7y ago
> Remember autoexec.bat files? I don't know if autoexec.bat was the most annoying thing from the 90s. (Although it was certainly annoying...) My example of choice would be ISA, specifically configuring IRQs. That's why UARTs back in the day are faster than USB: because your CPU would INSTANTLY software interrupt as soon as that ISA voltage changed. While today, USB 2.0 is poll-only, so the CPU effectively only asks USB once-per millisecond if "any data has arrived". (I think USB 3.0 has some bidirectional travel, but I bet most mice remain to be USB 2.0) -------- For the most part, today's systems have far worse latency than the systems of the 80s. But two points: 1. Turns out that absolute maximum latency wasn't very useful in all circumstances. The mouse updated far quicker in the 80s through the Serial port than today... but the difference between a microsecond delay from a 80s-style Serial port and a modern-style USB millisecond update routine (traversing an incredibly complicated, multilayered protocol) is still imperceptible. 2. The benefits of the USB stack cannot be understated. Back in ISA days, you'd have to move jumper pins to configure IRQs. Put two different hardware on IRQ5 and your computer WILL NOT BOOT. Today, USB auto-negotiates all those details, so the user only has to plug the damn thing in, and everything autoworks magically. No jumper pins, no IRQ charts, no nothing. It just works. Heck, you don't even have to turn off your computer to add hardware anymore, thanks to the magic of modern USB. ------- Adding hardware, like soundcards, new Serial Ports (to support mice/gamepads), parallel ports (printers), etc. etc. before plug-and-play was a nightmare. PCI and USB made life exponentially easier and opened up the world of computers to far more people. Every now and then when I visit my parents... I find my dad's old drawer of serial-port gender-changers, null modems, baud-rate charts, 7n1 / 8n1 configuration details and say... "thank goodness computers aren't like that anymore".

lordleft 7y ago

There's definitely some cherry-picking of history going on.

eggy 7y ago
Really, because two co-workers have told me they spent weekends trying to configure a printer and downgrading a graphics driver to get their graphics working again. Yes, they are engineers (mechanical, not software), but I have had my share of issues like this, and I started programming in 1978 on a Commodore PET. I do prefer lightweight interfaces, and my wife can't get my Maps app working while I am driving because she has a Samsung and I have a Blackberrry (KeyOne). Things look prettier, and there are a lot of advertisements, but I relate to a lot of these "cherry picked" rants.

burntoutfire 7y ago

Most of the old nonsense you listed is specific to PCs. Amigas (for example) were much friendlier.

andoma 7y ago
Yup, Amiga's Autoconf [0] was ahead of its time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig

svnpenn 7y ago

> Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? Literally all of these are still a thing...

jakelazaroff 7y ago
Which? I can't remember the last time any of these happened to me. What "hardware compatibility issues" have you experienced lately?
- ModernMech 7y ago
  Just yesterday I couldn't connect my laptop to a new classroom projector with a USB-C input. When I selected "Duplicate Display" it caused my whole system to hang unresponsive. Works fine in other rooms with HDMI to USB-C. I have no idea what is wrong. My new iPhone XS doesn't connect to my car's bluetooth, while the 4 year old phone I replaced does. My wife's iPhone 8 does. I'm stuck using an audio cable like it's 2003 again.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    That reminds me of a situation at work. A new coworker couldn't connect to the internet when he had a an Apple Thunderbolt display connected to his ~2014-2015 MB Pro via thunderbolt. Mystifying. Even more mystifying was corporate IT going "oh yeah just don't use it".
    - tristor 7y ago
      That's probably because he had his network connection priorities ordered so that the TB networking had priority and there wasn't a valid route on the connected network to the TB display. That's very likely a fixable problem, as I have encountered similar and resolved it.
7y ago

magduf 7y ago

>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You still have to waste a lot of time doing this crap. Last time I set up a printer for my mom, it was a PITA: I had to download drivers, install some giant pile of crap software, go through a bunch of screens of garbage, etc. Needless to say, her computer runs Windows 10. By contrast, when I wanted to print to that same printer with my own laptop (running Linux Mint), it was simple: there was absolutely no extra software to install, and all I had to do was go to my Settings->Printers, search for printers on the network (took a few seconds), notice that it found the (WiFi) printer, verify it was an HP and whatever model, and then it was done. Things could be much faster and simpler than they are now. They aren't, because it's not profitable for various actors for it to be, and because most users accept this. Most users are happy to have gigabytes of malware and spyware on their systems, wasting CPU cycles reporting their behavior back to Microsoft or their printer vendor or whoever, and that's a big reason things are so much slower than in 1983. So if I'm being "elitist" to point out that spyware is a bad thing, then I'll happily accept that moniker.

TremendousJudge 7y ago
Last printer I had to configure on my Linux machine required finding a downloading a hidden mystery bash script from the manufacturer's website and running it with root permissions. Not exactly "plug and play" or "safe"
- magduf 7y ago
  Then you got the wrong printer. Some manufacturers do a good job of supporting Linux (HP is probably the best actually; their drivers all ship standard in most distros), others don't bother.
  - therealdrag0 7y ago
    > Then you got the wrong printer. And so did your mom. Many printers can plug-n-play on windows.

gridlockd 7y ago

If you had used a Mac or an Amiga, you wouldn't have those bad memories. Instead, you would fondly remember an era when software was pristine. There also was a time when people just started to use C++ and software was much buggier. I wouldn't even say software today feels much slower across the board, but it definitely far more wasteful, given the resources. You can see a lot of software that essentially does the same things as it did 20 years ago, but (relatively) much slower. Try using some older versions of e.g. Adobe software, you'll see how snappy it feels.

huebomont 7y ago

Yes, I remember all these things, because they're almost all still a thing. But now with a shitty React front-end.

toddmorey 7y ago
Pretend the modern web made computers worse and then try Figma in the browser. It's glorious. Granted it's not written in React but it really shows what the web can be. It's BETTER than any desktop equivalent I've tried. It requires zero installation. Plugins are added instantly. It has native collaboration. It's scary fast. I'm not at all nostalgic about the old days.
- tomtheelder 7y ago
  It's okay. The functionality is great, but that's pretty unrelated to it being a webapp. I often run into slowdowns when using it on my medium spec'ed laptop. It sometimes gets pretty bad. It consistently feels slower than using native desktop apps. The zero installation is definitely a perk, though a minor one. Plugins adding instantly and native collaboration aren't functions of it being a web app. The trade seems to be a still quite noticeable performance hit vs no installation. It's probably the single best serious web app I've ever used, and I'd still trade it for a high quality desktop app if I could.
- huebomont 7y ago
  In my opinion, people have had their expectation dragged way down by shitty web apps so Figma feels good. It doesn't beat what tools like Photoshop used to feel like before their UI got rewritten in HTML and whatever fuckery they're doing now.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Huh. I'd say the examples are perfectly good and on-point. While dealing with autoexec.bat and random BSODs wasn't fun, it's entirely orthogonal to the fact that a DOS-era POS still offers orders of magnitude better UX than current-era browser POSes, or than most web apps for that matter. It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; it gives almost no affordances for exploration and cross-referencing. > Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours. As someone who builds their own PC every couple years: it still does. It's actually worse now, due to the amount of products on the market and price segregation involved. Two PCs ago, I didn't have to use two parts compatibility tools, several benchmarking sites and a couple of friends, and didn't have to write CSS hacks for electronics stores, just to be able to assemble a cost-effective PC. > But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. You don't? Printer drivers are only slightly less garbage than they were, but now there's also less knobs to turn if things go wrong. When my Windows 10 doesn't want to talk to a printer or a Bluetooth headset, all I get to see is a stuck progress bar. Bottom line: I agree 100% with the author that one of the primary functions of a computer is enabling easy cross-referencing of information. This ability has been degrading over the past decades (arguably for business reasons: the easier it is for people to make sense of information, the harder it is for your sales tactics to work). > These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment. That I don't get. Is it "elitist" now to point out that the (tech) "elite" can actually handle all this bullshit, but it's the regular Joes and Janes that get the short end of the stick?

Arnt 7y ago
What makes Google Maps bad? My computer in 1983 didn't have a map application at all, how can Google Maps possibly be bad compared to that? And if I had had a map application (I'm sure they existed) it would have taken several minutes to load from cassette tape. That's not faster than Google Maps, either perceptually or objectively.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago

gameswithgo 7y ago

>But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened The slowness is orthogonal to all those things that have improved. We can put the fast back just fine while keeping those things.

themacguffinman 7y ago
I don't think you can, not really. Practically all the slowdown you see comes from increasing levels of abstractions, and basically all good abstractions have a performance cost. Abstractions in general buy you faster development and more reliable/stable software. UI abstractions buy you intuitive and easy to use UX. All of these benefits define the modern era of software that has spawned countless valuable software programs, and it's naive to think you can skip the bill.

blfr 7y ago

Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. OP gave examples. Could you provide a couple of examples as well?

Enginerrrd 7y ago
I would actually say that Microsoft Office suite was really good (up until recently when they started trying to funnel you into their cloud storage). But even with that blemish, the UX is still pretty good. Hitting the alt key let's you access any menu with just a few keystrokes that show up when you hit the alt key so they don't have to be memorized. I can also work a hell of a lot of magic in Excel without ever touching my mouse, and not needing to memorize every keyboard shortcut I need. I wish every app and desktop in every OS followed a similar standard for keyboard shortcuts. Macros/VBA is still awful, but overall, despite the horrifying computational abuse I put office suite through, it's actually very stable! And, it's fast enough once it loads. It's still pretty slow to load though.
- LudwigNagasena 7y ago
  Microsoft Teams has one of the worse UX I've had experienced. It's amazing that a company can't make an app for its own platform that feels native.

toddmorey 7y ago

I do wish shortcuts on web apps would be more universally implemented and more universally discoverable. I wish browsers had a common hotkey that would show available shortcuts, for example. The biggest problem with his argument is that, done correctly, a mouse augments the keyboard and does not replace it. If you've ever seen a good print production artist, that person can absolutely FLY around a very visual program like InDesign... without leaving the keyboard.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
I wish people stopped using the browser like it's an OS.
mrweasel 7y ago
Webapp need to stop implementing some shortcuts, if not most. It annoys me to no end when a site hijacks ctrl+f and presents their own crappy sesrch rather than just letting me search the page with Firefoxs built in search, which actually works.
tartoran 7y ago
I second this. Once one learns the keyboard shortcuts and builds the habit to learn shortcuts in general they won't be encumbered by small visual tasks like aiming lots of boxes like in menus and sub menus. These interactions micro-dent the flow. When I use the keyboard to navigate I'm not even consciously thinking what shortcuts to press, it happens naturally. I also noticed that I don't even know the shortcuts and have to think a bit before telling someone what shor-cut i use, my fingers remember them. All this said, the software has to have a good shortcut flow in mind. Not all software offers this benefit.

flohofwoe 7y ago

You forgot to mention that computers have become at least ten-thousand times faster in the meantime. There really isn't a single objective reason why we should wait for anything at all for longer than a few milliseconds on a modern computing device to happen. I actually think that this is just a sign that things are only optimized until they are "fast enough", and this "fast enough" threshold is a human attribute that doesn't change much over the decades. PS: the usability problems you mention have been specifically problems of the PC platform in the mid- to late-90s (e.g. the hoops one had to jump through when starting a game on a PC was always extremely bizarre from the perspective of an Amiga or AtariST user, or even C64 user).

jonnycomputer 7y ago
I don't disagree... but in the old days, I hardly ever remember having more than 1 to 2 apps open at a time. Maybe 3 if was feeling crazy. ...Right now, I've spotify, Word, Excel, Exchange, emacs, slack, mattermost, pycharm, and matlab, acrobat, and firefox (20+ tabs)... all open at once.
- lucideer 7y ago
  I (unlike most, I think) still today don't keep a lot of apps open. This is less about performance, and more some irrational OCD sense of comfort. And it doesn't improve performance. I actually think the one thing that has improved performance-wise is concurrency. Our computers can now do many more things at once than before. But all of those things are slower, regardless of whether you're doing 50 or just 1.

simias 7y ago

I'm not convinced by your argument because the examples you cite of things having improved since these times have hardly anything to do with having a text interface feeling sluggish. There's no contradiction here, you could have the best of both world (and if you eschew web technologies you generally get that nowadays). Are these modern Electron apps chugging along using multi-GB of RAM and perceptible user input latency because they're auto-configuring my printer in the background? Can twitter.com justify making me wait several seconds while it's loading literally megabytes of assets to display a ~100byte text message because it's auto-configuring my graphic card IRQ for me? No, these apps are bloated because of they're easier to program that way. Justifying that using user convenience is a dishonest cop-out. If you rewrote these apps with native, moderately optimized code there's nothing that would make them less user-friendly. On the other hand they'd use an order of magnitude less RAM and would probably be a few orders of magnitude faster. It's fine to say that developer time is precious and it's fine to do it that way but justifying it citing printer drivers of all things is just absurd.

webmobdev 7y ago

> Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry. Can you give us examples of the "good ones" for the "bad" examples he cited. > These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. No, he is saying that certain paradigms made computers fast in the past and instead of adopting and working progressively on them, we have totally abandoned them. He is not advocating embracing the past, wart and all, but only of what was good. He is not asking us to ditch Windows or Macs or the web and go back to our DOS / Unix era.

fwsgonzo 7y ago
The original Kinetix 3D Studio MAX was NOT as slow as the current AutoDesk products. It had a loading time, but I can live with that. With the speed of the M.2 SSDs we have today and everything else I really wonder why it got like this. Maybe it's the transition to protected mode that did all this? Now everything has to be sanitized and copied between address spaces. But then again, Win95 were also protected mode. I don't know... :)

deleted 7y ago

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gsich 7y ago

>But some apps have incredible UX. Name 10. Some variety (Android, Windows, Linux, GUI, CLI) preferred.

excerionsforte 7y ago

About printers, it depends on manufacturer. Some printers are easy to setup. I know at the places I used to work whenever I went to printer setup and network I would see the printer very easily. They say the fastest code is the code not written. I say the best printing is not needing it. I don't have a printer since I only need to print things every once in a while (few times a year). Whenever I need to print, I grab my usb stick put what I need on it and drive off to FedEx or UPS and print out what I need. Point and click, very simple. Cost of printers haven't justified buying one for me since it is a couple cents per year.

danShumway 7y ago

> These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured. More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet, and I don't remember the speed. Maybe I'm just too young and things were magically faster in the 80s? Maybe I was born just slightly before everything took a giant nosedive and became crap? There are lots of things that annoy me about modern computers, but none of them take upwards of 2-3 minutes to boot any more. I remember loading screens in front of pretty much every app on my computer. A lot of my modern apps I use don't even have loading screens at all. I remember clicking buttons on apps and just kind of waiting, while the entire computer froze, for an operation to complete. Sometimes I'd start to do something complicated and just walk away and grab a snack because I literally couldn't use my computer while it ran. There were entire joke websites like Zombocom set up to riff on how bad the loading screens were on the web back then. I would wait literally 10-15 minutes for Java apps like Runescape to load on a dial-up connection, despite the fact that the actual game itself played fine over that connection, and the delay was just due to dropping a giant binary that took no intelligent advantage of caching or asset splitting. I can't imagine waiting 10-15 minutes for anything today. I got a low-key allowance out of going to other people's houses and defragging their computers. Do you remember when Windows would just get slower over time because there was an arcane instruction you had to run every year or so to tell it to maintain itself? > On the library computer in 1998 I could retry searches over and over and over until I found what I was looking for because it was quick Now I have to wait for a huge page to load, wait while the page elements shift all over, GOD FORBID i click on anything while its loading What library were you going to in 1998? I also did library searches, and they were insanely slow, and prone to the exact same "don't click while it loads" behavior that the author is decrying here. And that's if I was lucky, sometimes the entire search engine would just be a random Java app that completely froze while it was loading results. And forget about giving me the ability to run multiple searches in parallel across multiple tabs. Whatever #!$@X cookie setup or native app they were wired into could never handle that. The modern database search interfaces I have today are amazing in comparison. I have annoyances, but you couldn't pay me to go back in time. A lot of those interfaces were actively garbage. Again, maybe I'm just too young and everything took a nosedive before I was born. But even if that's the case, it seems to me that interfaces are rapidly improving from that nosedive, not continuing to slide downwards. The computing world I grew up in was slow.

_bxg1 7y ago

Agreed. Comparing UI responsiveness to yesteryear can be an interesting case study - examining precisely why things feel slower, to see whether they can be made better - but more often than not the answer is, "because we traded a bit of efficiency for an enormous wealth of usability, and iterability, and compatibility, that people never could have dreamed of back then". Rants like this post are willfully ignorant of the benefits that a technological shift can have for millions of actual humans, simply because it offends the author's personal sensibilities.

kova12 7y ago

I was about to say same thing. I remember I had to recover some files off the diskette, and oh boy it was frustrating. That feeling when you start copying a megabyte-size file and just sit there staring at the screen for five minutes - we forgot how bad it used to be.

chubot 7y ago

For a better comparison, I ran Windows XP in VirtualBox on a Macbook Air last year to interface with some old hardware. I was surprised that it ran in something like 256 MB of RAM. And everything was super fast and responsive out of the box. I consider OS X less janky than Windows or Linux these days, but Windows XP blew it out of the water. Try it -- it's eye opening. The UI does basically 100% of what you can do on OS X, yet it's considerably more responsive on the same hardware, with the handicap of being virtualized, and having fewer resources.

wutwutwutwut 7y ago

> Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Maybe my memory is bad but I seem to have the same issues today, just in different shapes. The operating system choose to update itself in the middle of me typing a document and then 15 minutes later while in a conference meeting the app decides that a new version is immediately required. Then I open up a prompt and the text is barely readable because the screen DPI is somehow out of sync with something else and now the anti-aliasing (?) renders stuff completely broken. According to Google there are 31 ways to solve this but none of them works on my PC. Then all the Visual Studio addins decide to use a bit much memory so in the middle of the debug process the debugger goes on a coffee break and the just disappear. In the afternoon I need to update 32 NPM dependencies due to vulnerabilities and 3 had simply disappeared. Weird.

0xdeadbeefbabe 7y ago

> to a much wider audience and are much more usable now. Doctors hate their life because of computers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha..., but maybe you'll think the article is too old to be true or maybe you will quibble about the headline. Why not believe something true instead?

gdubs 7y ago

The endless configuration pain you mention pretty perfectly describes anytime I try to dip into a modern framework and find myself spending hours and hours updating ruby or python or some random node module until all the dependencies finally align and I can write a single productive line of code. Or when I spend 10 minutes fighting various websites just to get a dumb TV streaming site to login with the app it’s connected to. I have to agree with the general premise: despite the phenomenal power of computers today, they generally feel just as irritating as they always have.

II2II 7y ago

Yes, it is a rant. Yes, the examples are terrible and there are plenty of counter examples. Yet there is also some truth to what is being said. There is clearly going to be added complexity to address what we expect of modern computers. It is going to have a negative performance impact. If it isn't carefully planned, it is going to have a negative impact on UX. Yet there is also a reasonable expectations for things to improve. The extra overhead in hardware and software should, in most cases, be more than compensated by the increase in performance of hardware. The UX should improve as we learn from the past and adapt for the future. In many cases, we do see tremendous improvements. When a limitation is treated as a problem that needs to be addressed, we have seen vast improvements in hardware and software performance. Arguably, the same applies to UX. (Arguably, because measuring UX is much more opinionated than quantitative.) Yet so much of what we get is driven by other motivations. If inadquate consideration is given to performance or UX, then the experience will be degraded.

gcpwnd 7y ago

Pick a web app that can render without JS. Then remove all JS and they will render 5x faster. Some aspects of computers got better, sure. But the web is at an super shitty state. I mean were here posting on a website that has bare mininum design and features. Why is that? Twitter and reddit are absolutely horrible in terms of usability and performance. If you know that they could do better makes tham even worse. It is an attack on humanity. You can try to find excuses in unrelated things like noted, but that wont change anything.

dragontamer 7y ago

> Remember autoexec.bat files? I don't know if autoexec.bat was the most annoying thing from the 90s. (Although it was certainly annoying...) My example of choice would be ISA, specifically configuring IRQs. That's why UARTs back in the day are faster than USB: because your CPU would INSTANTLY software interrupt as soon as that ISA voltage changed. While today, USB 2.0 is poll-only, so the CPU effectively only asks USB once-per millisecond if "any data has arrived". (I think USB 3.0 has some bidirectional travel, but I bet most mice remain to be USB 2.0) -------- For the most part, today's systems have far worse latency than the systems of the 80s. But two points: 1. Turns out that absolute maximum latency wasn't very useful in all circumstances. The mouse updated far quicker in the 80s through the Serial port than today... but the difference between a microsecond delay from a 80s-style Serial port and a modern-style USB millisecond update routine (traversing an incredibly complicated, multilayered protocol) is still imperceptible. 2. The benefits of the USB stack cannot be understated. Back in ISA days, you'd have to move jumper pins to configure IRQs. Put two different hardware on IRQ5 and your computer WILL NOT BOOT. Today, USB auto-negotiates all those details, so the user only has to plug the damn thing in, and everything autoworks magically. No jumper pins, no IRQ charts, no nothing. It just works. Heck, you don't even have to turn off your computer to add hardware anymore, thanks to the magic of modern USB. ------- Adding hardware, like soundcards, new Serial Ports (to support mice/gamepads), parallel ports (printers), etc. etc. before plug-and-play was a nightmare. PCI and USB made life exponentially easier and opened up the world of computers to far more people. Every now and then when I visit my parents... I find my dad's old drawer of serial-port gender-changers, null modems, baud-rate charts, 7n1 / 8n1 configuration details and say... "thank goodness computers aren't like that anymore".