5 ms·

While not the primary point of this article, I'm constantly amazed how much software collectively sucks. Why can't I just say "hey phone, here is my calender ap

by kilian 15y ago

While not the primary point of this article, I'm constantly amazed how much software collectively sucks. Why can't I just say "hey phone, here is my calender app. Sort it out between the two of you". Or another favorite: Why doesn't outlook give a big, fat warning if you open an attached document, edit it and save it? (it gets saved into the temporary directory, where it and all your edits gets promptly removed.) There are so many tasks on a computer that are just fundamentally broken for a large number of users because they don't get the concept of files in folders and applications that interact with these files. Programmers (myself included) lazily assume this knowledge instead of thinking about what a user might want to do. "I want to listen to a song" shouldn't involve the user picking a nice place on their disk to store this particular song, and ideally the browser and music player just work together to 1) open the song and 2) make it available from within "music" whenever the user wants to hear that song again. This is especially painful when having to explain to others how an overly complicated (which most of the time means dumb) piece of software (windows, itunes, any antivirus) works, and more often than not I resort to "just bring the pc over, and I can do it in five minutes for you". As a developer, I feel shame whenever I have to update my mothers iPhone or reinstall my grandmothers computer because we can't make something that takes their needs into account. (Regarding the last: ever tried globally enlarging text on windows for bad eyesight? It obscures so much text in incorrectly sized buttons that it might as well be non-existent.)

justinvoss 15y ago
I agree, but aren't these fundamentally hard problems? Take your calendar example. You could solve that problem with: * Standardization. Difficult, but possible, if you can convince the entities involved that it's a good idea. * Machine learning. Unreliable, since even a human might have trouble bridging the gap between the phone calendar's idea of an 'appointment' vs the desktop calendar's idea of an 'appointment.' * Future Magic. Only works in Microsoft promo videos. Neither of the two serious solutions seems very good. Is there a better way that I'm missing?
- silverbax88 15y ago
  Actually, most people don't seem to know this, but if you go ALL-Microsoft or ALL-Apple, everything pretty much works. The problem is, most of us don't want ALL anything, because neither company has a perfect solution for everything.
- kilian 15y ago
  Yes, they're hard problems, but most of what we do is a cop-out, or as the OP says "whatever shoddy pile of hacks we’ve cooked up by then". For example, I have to search for some obscure instructions to get my two Google calenders syncing with my iPhone that involves my either adding an "email" account, or manually typing in some ridiculously long "secret" url. Why can't I just open google.com/calendar on my phone and have it say "Hey there, want to add me to your phone's calendar? Click here!"?

by kilian 15y ago

justinvoss 15y ago

I agree, but aren't these fundamentally hard problems? Take your calendar example. You could solve that problem with: * Standardization. Difficult, but possible, if you can convince the entities involved that it's a good idea. * Machine learning. Unreliable, since even a human might have trouble bridging the gap between the phone calendar's idea of an 'appointment' vs the desktop calendar's idea of an 'appointment.' * Future Magic. Only works in Microsoft promo videos. Neither of the two serious solutions seems very good. Is there a better way that I'm missing?

silverbax88 15y ago
Actually, most people don't seem to know this, but if you go ALL-Microsoft or ALL-Apple, everything pretty much works. The problem is, most of us don't want ALL anything, because neither company has a perfect solution for everything.
kilian 15y ago
Yes, they're hard problems, but most of what we do is a cop-out, or as the OP says "whatever shoddy pile of hacks we’ve cooked up by then". For example, I have to search for some obscure instructions to get my two Google calenders syncing with my iPhone that involves my either adding an "email" account, or manually typing in some ridiculously long "secret" url. Why can't I just open google.com/calendar on my phone and have it say "Hey there, want to add me to your phone's calendar? Click here!"?