4 ms·
I find it funny that in the age of "User experience" my experience of most software is terrible. I don't use all the programs out there but apart from games, wh
by lbriner 3y ago
I find it funny that in the age of "User experience" my experience of most software is terrible. I don't use all the programs out there but apart from games, which often need to perform well to sell in the first place I have constant problems with Windows, MacOS, MS Office, most web sites, Visual Studio, browsers sometimes, virus scanners, network equipment, fast food touchscreens, Android, tablets etc. it's like we have rushed to quickly to demonstrate our super-powers at the expense of stuff that just works.
I remember when desktop apps were written in desktop frameworks in the days when your PC was a Pentium 90 with 64MB of RAM and they opened quickly, they responded immediately to commands and they felt native. Despite the fact that these apps today do very little of value differently than 30 years ago bu the hardware is 1000s of times more powerful, they seem to make untold "metrics" network connections, they have no snap, they feel like massively incorrect abstractions over the hardware, they create weird user-experience and the people who sell them often don't know how to support them.
I feel we have lost our way as an Industry being seduced by what the spoiled rich companies do and applying it to our own little kingdoms instead of doing what we need to do well. We have created false demons to slay and have ended up with such a mess its actually a little embarrassing.
I guess while we lack any recognised/required industry qualifications, like Law or Medicine, we are just all doing our own things for our own reasons and unreasonably expecting everything to keep getting better. I mean, have you used Azure Devops? Who decided that it was reasonable to make a basic web app into a front-end monster that makes 100s of ajax calls?
- marcosdumay 3y ago> when your PC was a Pentium 90 with 64MB of RAM and they opened quickly, they responded immediately to commands and they felt native Well, no, I don't remember that. I remember them locking all the time (up to the point where moving the mouse made them slower) and taking ages to load. I do agree that it's absurd that the applications that do the same tasks today still take about as long to load and lock about as much, even though computers are 1000s of times more powerful. But they were never fast.
- Jtsummers 3y agoI remember using Word on an early Pentium and being able to type faster than it could keep up with, at a whopping 30wpm at the time. I'd type a paragraph or two, and wait. To make it responsive it had to be the only thing open. And if I could type at my current speed on that thing (~100-120wpm, keyboard dependent) I doubt even that would be enough. We just expected and did less (at once) with computers at the time. If I close everything on my computer today and only run one application, it's pretty damned responsive (unless it's MS Teams).