4 ms·

Native is now broken/deteriorating because of the web/online first obsession. I moved house last year and was on a very poor internet connection, 0.5Mbps up, 1

Native is now broken/deteriorating because of the web/online first obsession. I moved house last year and was on a very poor internet connection, 0.5Mbps up, 1Mbps down at best, often unreliable. This made using my computer (Mac's) unbearable! When I turned on the computer and it started up, apps that auto start in the task bar would phone home checking for updates or whatever and block until they timed out / got a response. The computer wasn't usable until all completed due to blocked UI. Opening an application the same. When opening an app it'd phone home to do what ever it does while blocking everything else until complete so can continue with the startup process. The obsession with analytics in apps made latency in apps much higher as I suspect analytics where being sent from the main thread instead of best effort in a background thread pulling from an event queue. Then there's the obsession of packaging a SPA webapp in it's own browser to run locally as a perceived native app, aka Electron. Take Teams/Slack both clunky, unresponsive user interfaces and resource hogs for what they are.

LAC-Tech 5y ago
Windows 10 works pretty well offline, FWIW. And of course you can make linux do almost anything you want it do.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Most everything works fine offline (think: airplane mode) - where it all goes to crap is when there is a connection but it’s slow, high latency, or losing packets. In fact, sometimes it’s worth it to hit airplane mode if your connection is bad until after everything is running.
  - OkGoDoIt 5y ago
    Exactly this. My personal hell recently has been the Audible app on iOS. I walk a lot and listen to audiobooks and often on my walks my cellular connection is not great, one bar or so. The Audible app had a redesign a year or two ago where it now instead of showing your library letting you play whatever you were listening to, it loads a home screen that tries to get you to buy more books, and you can’t do anything else until that finishes loading. But since it fails to load on a crappy connection, I usually end up killing the app, enabling airplane mode, and then re-opening the app. So stupid. For reference, my audiobooks are stored locally, a network connection is not required to continue playing. Yet somehow they have hindered the main functionality of the app by what I can only assume is sloppy coding.
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      Stuff like this is why I still have a portable mp3 player. I just plug it in, put mp3s on it, and it works.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

Windows 10 works pretty well offline, FWIW. And of course you can make linux do almost anything you want it do.

bombcar 5y ago
Most everything works fine offline (think: airplane mode) - where it all goes to crap is when there is a connection but it’s slow, high latency, or losing packets. In fact, sometimes it’s worth it to hit airplane mode if your connection is bad until after everything is running.
- OkGoDoIt 5y ago
  Exactly this. My personal hell recently has been the Audible app on iOS. I walk a lot and listen to audiobooks and often on my walks my cellular connection is not great, one bar or so. The Audible app had a redesign a year or two ago where it now instead of showing your library letting you play whatever you were listening to, it loads a home screen that tries to get you to buy more books, and you can’t do anything else until that finishes loading. But since it fails to load on a crappy connection, I usually end up killing the app, enabling airplane mode, and then re-opening the app. So stupid. For reference, my audiobooks are stored locally, a network connection is not required to continue playing. Yet somehow they have hindered the main functionality of the app by what I can only assume is sloppy coding.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Stuff like this is why I still have a portable mp3 player. I just plug it in, put mp3s on it, and it works.