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> Software simply does a lot more than it used to. A lot of people are complaining about chat clients. Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go b

by donatj 3y ago

> Software simply does a lot more than it used to. A lot of people are complaining about chat clients. Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go back and use IRC from thirty years ago. Do you remember all those commands? slash-something? So you completely forget AIM/ICQ/MSN existed? They did basically everything modern clients do in a couple megabytes of RAM. Jabber even more so.

alephnerd 3y ago
User Experience matters. In the AIM/ICQ/MSN days, the userbase was much more niche as it was not user friendly. Simple changes like responsiveness or aesthetics help less adept users adopt and use technology. Furthermore, technology is now global. You will need to support more fonts and languages. You will need to test for various different localizations. You will also have to add support and localizations for the less physically able.
- donatj 3y ago
  That seems like a baseless critique. In what way were they any of these less user friendly than what we have today? I suspect you haven't actually used them? I think if anything their interactions were more clearly designed. Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does? OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s. I definitely spoke to people in Japanese on ICQ in 2000/2001
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s Not for all languages. For starters, my ancestral language's Unicode support didn't arrive until 2008. In that same Unicode proposal, support for a language spoken by 22 million people was added as well. Additional blocks line for languages like Laotian, colloquial Khmer, etc weren't added til the 2000s. Also, plenty of languages (eg. Burmese) don't use Unicode fonts and instead use localized non-standardized blocks such as Zawgyi. The internet in the 1990s was designed with the North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in mind. The majority of the world wasn't on the internet yet and hadn't even used a computer. The form factor, usability, and documentation needed simply didn't exist in the 1990s and early 2000s yet. The Internet didn't truly "democratize" until low cost smartphones like Samsung, Oppo, and Xiaomi began entering the market in the early 2010s. > Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does Yes. I was the target age demographic for Snapchat. For people who's primary experience with computers is smartphones (aka the majority of the world) an app like Snapchat or WhatsApp or WeChat or TikTok is easier to use than folders in Windows, MacOS, or Linux, let alone terminal or IRC

by donatj 3y ago

alephnerd 3y ago

User Experience matters. In the AIM/ICQ/MSN days, the userbase was much more niche as it was not user friendly. Simple changes like responsiveness or aesthetics help less adept users adopt and use technology. Furthermore, technology is now global. You will need to support more fonts and languages. You will need to test for various different localizations. You will also have to add support and localizations for the less physically able.

donatj 3y ago
That seems like a baseless critique. In what way were they any of these less user friendly than what we have today? I suspect you haven't actually used them? I think if anything their interactions were more clearly designed. Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does? OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s. I definitely spoke to people in Japanese on ICQ in 2000/2001
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > OS level text rendering was basically solved by this time in the early 2000s Not for all languages. For starters, my ancestral language's Unicode support didn't arrive until 2008. In that same Unicode proposal, support for a language spoken by 22 million people was added as well. Additional blocks line for languages like Laotian, colloquial Khmer, etc weren't added til the 2000s. Also, plenty of languages (eg. Burmese) don't use Unicode fonts and instead use localized non-standardized blocks such as Zawgyi. The internet in the 1990s was designed with the North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in mind. The majority of the world wasn't on the internet yet and hadn't even used a computer. The form factor, usability, and documentation needed simply didn't exist in the 1990s and early 2000s yet. The Internet didn't truly "democratize" until low cost smartphones like Samsung, Oppo, and Xiaomi began entering the market in the early 2010s. > Have you tried the likes of Snapchat where you have to just paw at the screen until you learn what your pawing does Yes. I was the target age demographic for Snapchat. For people who's primary experience with computers is smartphones (aka the majority of the world) an app like Snapchat or WhatsApp or WeChat or TikTok is easier to use than folders in Windows, MacOS, or Linux, let alone terminal or IRC