3 ms·

This. 2 rules: - Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc) -

by LeonM 5y ago

This. 2 rules: - Always indicate that your application is performing a network action (like showing a spinner, disable forms/buttons while submitting, etc) - Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. Try letting your local development backend return a 500, timeout or a 4xx error every now and then, and check if your frontend handles this in a graceful manner. It should at least give some feedback to the user that the operation failed. You can emulate a slow internet connection in chrome devtools, though I find the experience not accurate. You can also just add a sleep() call somewhere in your local backend. Maybe inject a sleep() into your acceptance environment, and let the test team work through the scenarios with that sleep() call in place. I've seen so many frontends that don't catch errors, and just show the spinner indefinitely. Or worse, show nothing at all. This is extremely confusing to less technical people.

usr1106 5y ago
> Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in full screen. Then Google Meet will forever freeze the shared picture after a couple of minutes without anybody telling so. It's ridiculous that they cannot handle this reasonably, you don't need 30 fps to share a screen of slowly changing text. It's completely user hostile that there is no message for either the sharer or any participant that sharing has frozen and will never recover. This is paid usage of Google Meet.
- kiwijamo 5y ago
  Having used a range of video conferencing systems, your description of Meet lines up with pretty much every Meet session I've been involved with. I'll meet the same group of people on Zoom another time and it usually works much better on Zoom. Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc even on high quality fibre connections Zoom = smooth high-res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor glitches that usually sorts itself out in seconds) even on low quality connections The difference is like night and day, no joke...
  - usr1106 5y ago
    On 4G, which gives me 20 - 40 Mbit/sec uplink I have no major issues with Google Meet. Sharing terminals with red on black font does not work well. Whether Zoom works better I don't know from own experience. I hardly ever use it because my employer has a Google subscription. Well, sharing terminals over telcos is backwards anyway. We did that 20 years ago over 56 kbit/s modem lines using VNC. And the compression was lossless, the result pixel perfect.

by LeonM 5y ago

usr1106 5y ago

> Always catch errors (including timeouts) and give some form of feedback to the user when something went wrong. The worst offender I hit regularly is Google Meet. I use ADSL most of the day because it works just fine for most I do. Which is either local or ssh or looking up technical resources on the net. Even Google Meet works fine (I don't use a cam). Until I share my screen, which contains nothing but text in full screen. Then Google Meet will forever freeze the shared picture after a couple of minutes without anybody telling so. It's ridiculous that they cannot handle this reasonably, you don't need 30 fps to share a screen of slowly changing text. It's completely user hostile that there is no message for either the sharer or any participant that sharing has frozen and will never recover. This is paid usage of Google Meet.

kiwijamo 5y ago
Having used a range of video conferencing systems, your description of Meet lines up with pretty much every Meet session I've been involved with. I'll meet the same group of people on Zoom another time and it usually works much better on Zoom. Meet = glitchy low-res videos, freezing screen sharing, etc even on high quality fibre connections Zoom = smooth high-res video and generally usable screen sharing (with minor glitches that usually sorts itself out in seconds) even on low quality connections The difference is like night and day, no joke...
- usr1106 5y ago
  On 4G, which gives me 20 - 40 Mbit/sec uplink I have no major issues with Google Meet. Sharing terminals with red on black font does not work well. Whether Zoom works better I don't know from own experience. I hardly ever use it because my employer has a Google subscription. Well, sharing terminals over telcos is backwards anyway. We did that 20 years ago over 56 kbit/s modem lines using VNC. And the compression was lossless, the result pixel perfect.