4 ms·

Some of the worst offenders in this area were the preinstalled apps on Windows 8. Their official OneDrive app had I think 1-2 options to toggle and didn't even

Some of the worst offenders in this area were the preinstalled apps on Windows 8. Their official OneDrive app had I think 1-2 options to toggle and didn't even show how much of the cloud storage was used/free. It was basically a picture viewer but without properly working right click. And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.

loceng 6y ago
Makes me think of a system/application getting attention, reach, that it doesn't deserve - hasn't earned - a negative of the advertising industry as well, one reason I love Tesla is that they don't advertise, any attention they get has been earned.
myth2018 6y ago
> And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers. Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis. I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting. And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast. Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way. Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.
- ehnto 6y ago
  I think this is why the spreadsheet is the killer productivity app. It's just a keyboard enabled information management tool, power users can take a spreadsheet really, really far. Entire businesses rest upon spreadsheets. That is coming from someone who considers the need to use a spreadsheet as a marker that my job scope had gone awry. Love spreadsheets, hate managing information.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    I really wish spreadsheets had a way to loop over rows and columns. Currently I have to create a huge mess of ARRAYFORMULAs whenever I need to apply some computation to all rows. I use my spreadsheets as databases and I want them to calculate new information as soon as I input new data. This use case should not be so hard...
    - ako 6y ago
      vba?
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        http://www.blockpad.net http://www.blockpad.net might fit your use case
      - matheusmoreira 6y ago
        Yeah, using an actual programming language would probably solve all this complexity. I'm using Google Sheets though and I absolutely need everything to be fully functional in the mobile app so I'm not sure how far I can take it with the javascripting. The app doesn't even support editing pivot tables.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    Imagine if Excel had 1 inch padding around any cell, a gray large font on a light gray background, no cell borders and autohiding row and column labels because "cleaner and modern UI" :-) Wouldn't we use Lotus 1 2 3 in some emulator?

loceng 6y ago

Makes me think of a system/application getting attention, reach, that it doesn't deserve - hasn't earned - a negative of the advertising industry as well, one reason I love Tesla is that they don't advertise, any attention they get has been earned.

myth2018 6y ago

> And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers. Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis. I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting. And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast. Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way. Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.

ehnto 6y ago
I think this is why the spreadsheet is the killer productivity app. It's just a keyboard enabled information management tool, power users can take a spreadsheet really, really far. Entire businesses rest upon spreadsheets. That is coming from someone who considers the need to use a spreadsheet as a marker that my job scope had gone awry. Love spreadsheets, hate managing information.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  I really wish spreadsheets had a way to loop over rows and columns. Currently I have to create a huge mess of ARRAYFORMULAs whenever I need to apply some computation to all rows. I use my spreadsheets as databases and I want them to calculate new information as soon as I input new data. This use case should not be so hard...
  - ako 6y ago
    vba?
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      http://www.blockpad.net http://www.blockpad.net might fit your use case
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      Yeah, using an actual programming language would probably solve all this complexity. I'm using Google Sheets though and I absolutely need everything to be fully functional in the mobile app so I'm not sure how far I can take it with the javascripting. The app doesn't even support editing pivot tables.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Imagine if Excel had 1 inch padding around any cell, a gray large font on a light gray background, no cell borders and autohiding row and column labels because "cleaner and modern UI" :-) Wouldn't we use Lotus 1 2 3 in some emulator?