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What a weird site and product. Why is text selection broken on what should be such a simple page? Why does the cookie banner say "we partner with Google", that'

What a weird site and product. Why is text selection broken on what should be such a simple page? Why does the cookie banner say "we partner with Google", that's a weird way of describing using GA. Why would a developer link to their Softpedia page when they have their own download, mirrors like that seem to have been unnecessary for a decade or more. The copy is all just a bit weird, way too much "personality", and not in a charming or endearing way. As for the actual product, it's not really a combination of features that I could see wanting as a developer. For installing system software... perhaps... but I don't tend to get that from PyPI or NPM, and in those cases I'd need to know it's not going to mess up the development environments for those ecosystems, and there's nothing of that mentioned on the page. This strikes me as a labour of love from an individual that has received or taken in little to no feedback throughout the process – another piece of software that comes to mind for being in a similar position is Calibre, although in that case it seems to be strong resistance to feedback rather than lack of it. This sort of development process can produce great technical achievements, but in my experience, rarely results in good products.

johannes1234321 3y ago
> Why does the cookie banner say "we partner with Google", that's a weird way of describing using GA. That seems to be a common way to describe such usage to make it sound more positive. The truth of "we are exposing your data to Google to gain a bunch of mostly useless statistics while helping them to surveil all your online activity" doesn't sound so good.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  "This site uses Google Analytics to inform service improvements" is quite positive. It's the "partner" bit that I thought was particularly strange. I don't partner with my local coffee shop each morning. It comes across as bigging-up what's actually happening so far beyond reality that it's somewhat comical.
heavyset_go 3y ago
I looked at the website and product and cannot relate to this post at all. Seems like a run of the mill landing page for an app, and the app looks pretty decent. I find it hard to complain about any of it beyond how text selection is broken, which is bad.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I went back to read more to see if I had missed the mark, and jesus it gets worse and worse. The page for WingetUI isn't too bad in terms of actual info, but it's a mess in terms of the language. It mixes different voices, contains way too much detail in some sentences just making everything harder to parse, and has strong opinions that just read weirdly, like having a dark theme "to prevent your from burning your eyes. [sunglasses-emoji]". But navigating on to other pages on the site, things get worse. There are things that are jokes that are highlighted as such, and then there are things that should be jokes given the context, but appear to be dead serious. If the site was satire, pick a type of satire! There's a "project" that is literally Google in an iframe. Typos galore. I don't get it. I guess the author is just a bit over-confident and lacking in feedback loops.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    Okay, yeah, that's bad.
- ptx 3y ago
  The links at the bottom are implemented with divs with onclick events instead of actual links, for some reason.
lucideer 3y ago
The author's seeming eccentricity does come through in the copy, but to me that made it seem less corporate / more old-school, rather than putting me off (though also preparing me for potentially some similarly eccentric design-choices in the actual product if I ever used it - no Windows installs these days though so I'll have to keep it in mind for the future). On the other hand, I had a look at the sourcecode after you commented on text selection and it is... bizarre. The author has gone to absolutely enormous effort to prevent text selection - even if you disable all the (multiple layers of) CSS protections there's further JS events preventing you from seeing selected text (it still gets selected & you can copy but you have no way of knowing where you selection begins or ends). Given everything is on Github under GPL, I can only think that this must've been done as a "let's see if I can" type of personal code experiment on their personal website, rather than any deliberate effort to obscure anything. Which is cool in a way I guess...
pdntspa 3y ago
But Calibre is a fantastic piece of software whos innovation would be smothered by a proactive feedback process

johannes1234321 3y ago

> Why does the cookie banner say "we partner with Google", that's a weird way of describing using GA. That seems to be a common way to describe such usage to make it sound more positive. The truth of "we are exposing your data to Google to gain a bunch of mostly useless statistics while helping them to surveil all your online activity" doesn't sound so good.

danpalmer 3y ago
"This site uses Google Analytics to inform service improvements" is quite positive. It's the "partner" bit that I thought was particularly strange. I don't partner with my local coffee shop each morning. It comes across as bigging-up what's actually happening so far beyond reality that it's somewhat comical.

heavyset_go 3y ago

I looked at the website and product and cannot relate to this post at all. Seems like a run of the mill landing page for an app, and the app looks pretty decent. I find it hard to complain about any of it beyond how text selection is broken, which is bad.

danpalmer 3y ago
I went back to read more to see if I had missed the mark, and jesus it gets worse and worse. The page for WingetUI isn't too bad in terms of actual info, but it's a mess in terms of the language. It mixes different voices, contains way too much detail in some sentences just making everything harder to parse, and has strong opinions that just read weirdly, like having a dark theme "to prevent your from burning your eyes. [sunglasses-emoji]". But navigating on to other pages on the site, things get worse. There are things that are jokes that are highlighted as such, and then there are things that should be jokes given the context, but appear to be dead serious. If the site was satire, pick a type of satire! There's a "project" that is literally Google in an iframe. Typos galore. I don't get it. I guess the author is just a bit over-confident and lacking in feedback loops.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Okay, yeah, that's bad.
ptx 3y ago
The links at the bottom are implemented with divs with onclick events instead of actual links, for some reason.

lucideer 3y ago

The author's seeming eccentricity does come through in the copy, but to me that made it seem less corporate / more old-school, rather than putting me off (though also preparing me for potentially some similarly eccentric design-choices in the actual product if I ever used it - no Windows installs these days though so I'll have to keep it in mind for the future). On the other hand, I had a look at the sourcecode after you commented on text selection and it is... bizarre. The author has gone to absolutely enormous effort to prevent text selection - even if you disable all the (multiple layers of) CSS protections there's further JS events preventing you from seeing selected text (it still gets selected & you can copy but you have no way of knowing where you selection begins or ends). Given everything is on Github under GPL, I can only think that this must've been done as a "let's see if I can" type of personal code experiment on their personal website, rather than any deliberate effort to obscure anything. Which is cool in a way I guess...

pdntspa 3y ago

But Calibre is a fantastic piece of software whos innovation would be smothered by a proactive feedback process