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> 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 lea

by 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?
flukus 6y ago
> Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting. Visual Studio is the perfect example to me. I begged dad to upgrade the computer to 64/128MB of RAM to get VC++6 to run. It was feature complete then and maybe a bit earlier. Sure supported languages and syntax of come and gone but the core product feature set (editor + intellisense) has not changed in over 20 years, yet the current version takes an order of magnitude more memory and is slower despite having a desktop more powerful than anything I could have imagined back then. > It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast. Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here. Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons I'm using Vim - not only because of the program itself but how I can just combine it with the multiplexer I want, in my preferred terminal emulator, interfacing with other text-based tools. Many things I do regularly would require me to write custom plugins in VS Code. In Vim I can just bind keys to an arbitrary sequence of inputs - something modern applications sorely lack. It's limited, but that limitation severely reduced the complexity of the interface - it's all just a string and bash is, despite all its weirdness, an extremely productive string processing language.

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?

flukus 6y ago

> Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting. Visual Studio is the perfect example to me. I begged dad to upgrade the computer to 64/128MB of RAM to get VC++6 to run. It was feature complete then and maybe a bit earlier. Sure supported languages and syntax of come and gone but the core product feature set (editor + intellisense) has not changed in over 20 years, yet the current version takes an order of magnitude more memory and is slower despite having a desktop more powerful than anything I could have imagined back then. > It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast. Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.

alpaca128 6y ago
> Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here. Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons I'm using Vim - not only because of the program itself but how I can just combine it with the multiplexer I want, in my preferred terminal emulator, interfacing with other text-based tools. Many things I do regularly would require me to write custom plugins in VS Code. In Vim I can just bind keys to an arbitrary sequence of inputs - something modern applications sorely lack. It's limited, but that limitation severely reduced the complexity of the interface - it's all just a string and bash is, despite all its weirdness, an extremely productive string processing language.