19 ms·

Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

402 points by sagargv 11y ago

spapin 11y ago
10 years ago, you would have to pay a photographer to develop the photos and go to a fucking post office, then your mom would wait a week to receive them.
- mariusz79 11y ago
  Nope. you're wrong. 10 years ago you could do all of this from your fucking home, just like you can do it now. The only difference is - you did not have to deal with all that Javascript bs.
  - ryanmcdonough 11y ago
    Ah yes, I'll just develop my own photos at home - seems like a good idea for everyone in the world to do.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      FYI: ten years ago, we had e-mail, Flickr, Smugmug, web galleries, halfway decent digital cameras. Also, the thread starter was setting up a straw man, no one said that developing photos yourself was better. Just that the experience of many web applications is not so good. (Personally, I use BTSync's and/or Dropbox's photo sync, so that it shows up as a file on my machines. Sharing works fine as well, especially since Dropbox has the family-friendly Carousel that pulls photos of regular Dropbox.)
      - spapin 11y ago
        Make it twenty then, I am not picky.
- tlunter 11y ago
  And he should be able to just plug his phone into his computer and pull the images right off with MTP. Don't know why that's so hard.
  - jodrellblank 11y ago
    See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524440
    - tlunter 11y ago
      Works for me whenever I need to use it. Little more annoying for when I just want to my phone as a disk, but it still works.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    MTP? The digital camera I got in 2005 was USB mass storage.
    - tlunter 11y ago
      Android uses MTP
- dudifordMann 11y ago
  10 years ago, which is still 2005, you had print kiosks in places like target where, you could plug in your digital camera or SD/Compact Flash cards and print them out, 10 years before that, you had a "guaranteed" flow of how to obtain your photos: take the snapshot, take in film to a photo lab for development, at which point you thought about how many copies you might want. you may have lost some in the lab, but the flow worked, and it was the same at every photo lab. Regardless of the time period, he's annoyed how the "ease of use and simple flow" is not so easy, and doesn't seem to flow. Some of it may be not being familiar with the "way they want you to use their products" (poor UX in my opinion). But that's what kills me about today's app centered smartphone web, everything is a unique little microcosm that is slightly different than the others in a way that is obnoxious. Perhaps it is the difference between being a consumer of content and a producer. As a producer of content I would like to think I have control over how I can obtain and distribute it, but technically you end up acting as a consumer of the product that "allow you" to produce... end rant
- anentropic 11y ago
  there were digital cameras 10 years ago
- Mtinie 11y ago
  10 years ago you could print the photos on an inkjet or color laser printer at home. But this was a costly proposition in both time and money. Ink and toner being more expensive by weight than...a whole bunch of luxury goods[1]. You would still have to visit the post office and she'd have to wait for delivery, so you're right about that. Is the photo storage and sharing market ripe for a (re)disruption? --- [1] http://www.npr.org/2012/05/24/153634897/why-printer-ink-is-the-other-black-gold http://www.npr.org/2012/05/24/153634897/why-printer-ink-is-t...
- kyllo 11y ago
  What are you talking about? Picasa (which is now Google Photos) has been around since 2002.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  If you had developed your photos 10 years ago using analogic methods, your negatives are still usable, and your positive (if they were not too exposed to the sun thus conserved normally) would still be there. Whereas if you already had a digital camera, the raw are either lost because the media has decayed, you forgot backup, or worse to index your database. Your positive have all turned yellow unless you spent 10 times more in ink and paper per photo. In 10 years you probably will have migrated these photo to the cloud and you will both have to pay a recurring costs for life to keep your data (that will die with you), or the photo will die with the service. In 20 years, you will be more likely to find the old documents made on papers by your ancestors than any of your digital productions to your grand kids. And if you still have them entropy will win. You will not be able to find the relevant piece of data. Analogic photo is the only long term low cost solution for now.
  - icehawk 11y ago
    My experience has been the exact opposite. Minimal effort in backing up the digital copies makes them easier to access than the film I have from the same period since it's slowly decaying in a box 1,000 miles away.
    - SFjulie1 11y ago
      I also remember an astronomic "observatoire" buying lifetime guaranteed ISO9600 CD as a secondary backup of jpeg encoded pictures in the early 2000's (if you look at it all choices that were legits) that discovered 2 years after the primary backup failed (HD) that the secondary also failed. Whereas microfilms are still less expensive then and now, and still guaranteed to be more durable with less operational costs. Those who sacrifice a cheap reliability for the illusion of an expensive ease of use deserve neither one, nor the other. Benjamin Franklin
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Fucking bullshit, 100 years ago you would have got off your ass and SHOWN the baby to your mom. Little by little, we abstract ourselves away.
  - linschn 11y ago
    100 years ago, the mother would have died from blood loss and septic shock and the baby from a diarrhea a few weeks later. Also, the baby's father would be in the trenches somewhere in the North of France and the baby's grandmother would have 3 years to live before the 1918 flu kills her. I'm good now ;)
- amyjess 11y ago
  10 years ago was 2005. I had a Fujifilm digital camera which saved photos to an xD card. I'd plug it into my computer's USB port, it registered as a mass-storage device, and I'd pull the photos. If I wanted to send them privately, I could email them. If I wanted to share them with the public, I'd throw them up on a web host and link them from my LiveJournal (I was actually hosting my own site at the time, through a server in my living room, but any of the gazillion free webhosts at the time would've worked). There were other options, too. My cousin used Ophoto. I think Flickr was around then. Facebook Photos came out about 9 years ago, I think, so I wouldn't have long to wait.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mahouse 11y ago
Whoa, I'm reading through the entire blog. I'm in love with that guy. 😍
- angersock 11y ago
  cbloom is too legit to quit. He has a pretty impressive resume.
Kenji 11y ago
He's right. What surprises me is the readiness of people to put up with that shit. I'm not sure if their patience with horrible design is just a result of their ignorance.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware, or most of the mobile apps being useless and ugly and broken. I think most of the people just don't expect anything better, blindly accepting whatever is there because they can't imagine that technology could actually be good. I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.
  - _lce0 11y ago
    I've seen many times where users have incredibly patience with tedious things --like entering their git password all the time, instead of setting auth keys. I think it's a mix of both ignorance of better options, and familiarity with the status-quo.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Because they don't have a choice, so they don't expect anything else. Only the technical folks know how and where to buy a clean computer. Hell, the first computer the younger generation bought themselves was most likely already loaded with a ton of such crap, and that sets the baseline of their expectations.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        > Because they don't have a choice Then set up a company that make fresh PC with windows installs without crapware and you have a business model right there. Choice is just a matter of people starting doing it. Or you know, buy a Linux computer (sure, the choice is not great there either, but it's something that a few manufacturers offer online: Lenovo, System75 and a couple others).
userbinator 11y ago
In the same spirit and tone: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
elliott34 11y ago
"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic or something very stable and non-computer related, so I could just work away in my shop and not have to ever touch this fucking demon box." What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good physical labor in the lab.
- VLM 11y ago
  "Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic" I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was correct on its parallel path. Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use, straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the public hates them. The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs" "Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core, practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our products"
tomphoolery 11y ago
"I don't keep any cookies or browse history" Why not? "I get the numeric code sent to me. I go to Google Voice on my computer" This seems like it defeats the purpose of 2FA. Am I wrong? Isn't 2FA supposed to work by proving that you own a device for which it was set up on? "always download all the images made by Google Charts because that service will die at some point" Probably. If it matters to you, learn some JavaScript and build stuff in highcharts. And next time, never rely on a service that you don't pay for. Also, it's clear by this post you hate Google, especially its suite of exceptionally shitty products, and not the Web.
- pp19dd 11y ago
  Regarding image-google-chart, and other google APIs: I was going to voice my support for this complaint, as I have a number of still popular projects that use it (and will need fixes or updates), but I had to rethink that. Conclusion: free lunch is over. Some of us developers are learning that we can't rely on a free (or even paid) service for any long term.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > Conclusion: free lunch is over. Some of us developers are learning that we can't rely on a free (or even paid) service for any long term. I totally agree. SaaS is ephemeral. Personally I don't expect to see a SaaS site being active for more than two-three years, because the goal of most startups is to get bought, at which point they'll happily let the product die or turn into a piece of crap. If I use a third party service, I do that with an expectation that my project is temporary and will die/get superseded faster than the service it relies on.
- harperlee 11y ago
  Upvote for "never rely on a service that you don't pay for"; I think that idea needs to be said out loud more often.
  - waps 11y ago
    How exactly does paying come into the picture here. I'd bet that, for example, FoundationDB's customers would disagree with you.
eklavya 11y ago
Calm the fuck down and get her fucking telegram :D
harel 11y ago
Phone -> USB Cable -> Computer. Transfer images via said cable. Select images, put in email and send to mum. Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.
- Aoyagi 11y ago
  It's still a pain if said device doesn't support USB OTG and you have to deal with MTP.
  - a_bonobo 11y ago
    Sometimes USB isn't an option: The USB interface on my old Samsung Galaxy S2 broke (seems to be a common problem), now the connection just charges, data transfer is borked under Windows and Linux. So I thought it would be "easy" to use WLAN for that - Samsung itself wants you to use "Kies", proprietary software which works only under Windows. Once I had located the right old version for my apparently-too-old phone, I started to back up my photos. But Kies decides to be super-duper-slow and downloads with 1 kb/s, so it predicts about 48 hours of copying. Luckily there's sftp on the play store, with that and scp under Fedora it took 5 minutes. It's like they want you to hate them.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I used https://www.airdroid.com/ https://www.airdroid.com/ for that; it gives you reasonable, LAN-speed downloads.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Just for file transfers, I really like SuperBeam. It does just one thing, it's really fast (the WiFi direct connection is fantastic) and the PC software is just a file that you run, no installation or other crap necessary.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
talles 11y ago
> login bullshit that DTA can't handle Pardon my ignorance, but what's a DTA?
- _asciiker_ 11y ago
  The DownThemAll extension, pretty great.
  - Nemcue 11y ago
    It's honestly quite sad that it's been — what 10 years now? — and we still can't properly pause and resume a download from a browser. I remember using DTA for the first time back in the day and going "Oh wow, nice!". It just such a basic facility to provide. Resumable downloads should be available in all browsers. But no, doing some user profile shit that no one wants: that's what they spend time on.
josephpmay 11y ago
It's funny. He seems to hate all Google products yet is fully absorbed in the Google universe.
- rmk2 11y ago
  Why is that funny, really? Some of his grievances can really only materialise because he uses the products. I have never had many of these problems, because I use none of these products. The point is that he wants to use "all Google products", yet they are in such a state as to make that impossible, at least for him. Somebody who would use them if they could use them is a much worse case for Google (or any other company, for that matter) than somebody who rejects them without an actual will to use them.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Aoyagi 11y ago
Yes please! I'm so tired of all the annoying bloat all over the web that makes (not only) older browsers die just thinking about visiting the sites. It looks like the "progress" nowadays is going for "more complex and resource-demanding with less features and control".
- Goladus 11y ago
  > less features and control Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.
  - Goladus 11y ago
    ps for the downvoter: My comment is entirely serious. Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101: The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address, rather a google tracking link. Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gmail image viewer (which conveniently has interfaces with a bunch of other google apps I don't care about). Now you might think the google image viewer is nice, but personally I liked my once-upon-a-time ability to just look at images directly in my browser with a single click. So I gain nothing, google gains everything. They are wresting control of how I access my files, every step of the way.
    - Aoyagi 11y ago
      About the link thing, DDG uses it as well, but it presents it as "Redirect - Prevent sharing of your search with sites you click on". Although in case of DDG, you can disable that.
    - derf_ 11y ago
      Greasemonkey script to restore direct links: https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408 https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408 It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.
andybak 11y ago
I just managed to bulk select and download 100 photos from Google Photos within 15 seconds of trying.
- millzlane 11y ago
  Did you use Google drive too?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  And just recently, I couldn't. The presence of the option to download pictures is random and seems to depend on whether this is your album or it was created by someone else and shared with you. Most of the time I need to download something it's the latter, and the option to download doesn't show up there.
mikegerwitz 11y ago
You, sir, have made my Monday morning.
eCa 11y ago
> Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking Google Fixed it. (But I agree with regards to Maps Classic, it is superior to the new maps in almost all ways (for me, at least).)
- basicallydan 11y ago
  Heh, I see your point but he does move on a little bit to other things :)
RankingMember 11y ago
I think a lot of us have had thoughts like these, but damn man, reading that was like watching Lewis Black - you think you're witnessing someone having a stroke/heart attack.
basicallydan 11y ago
He's just saying what we're all thinking, people!
dheera 11y ago
Sometimes I use the classic version of Gmail just because it loads the whole page in less than 1 second and I can read my e-mail in another 0.5 seconds. With the "modern" version I have to stare at a blank screen with a stupid progress bar for about 2-3 seconds before seeing anything.
- elchief 11y ago
  But AJAX!
- ZoFreX 11y ago
  I don't understand why this is OK. I don't understand why people listen to Google's advice on making fast websites when one of their main websites has a fucking loading bar.
M8 11y ago
And the web is completely "open" and unlike "walled" proprietary platforms you have no choice of a programming language whatsoever (PS: fuck your transpilation).
rnernento 11y ago
Can Marissa Mayer fix Yahoo maps? Google maps have become unusable on most of my devices, I thought I was alone...
- rootuser 11y ago
  The new google maps is an abomination and should be aborted.
- kafei 11y ago
  bing is decent on mobile.
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Bing maps is decent on non-mobile, too, somewhat to my surprise. I've stopped using Google maps entirely. (I have never made much use of google maps on my phone, actually, since it constantly nags me to log in to a google account, which I refuse to do.)
- panglott 11y ago
  I've mostly switched over to the Apple Maps app at home, Google Maps is such a brick. Not sure yet what to use on Windows, where Google Maps is still semi-functional if weird-looking.
Lancey 11y ago
There's tons of problems with Google's services. They make radical changes that bloat them and slow them down. They cut services that people find useful because they're not as big as something like Maps or Gmail, or even for no reason at all. But no matter how much you complain, either on a blog post or to Google themselves, if you just come back to them at the end of the day you've changed nothing at all. Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.
- junto 11y ago
  Photo provider switching is hard these days because many people have 100's of GB of photos and video.
  - ascagnel_ 11y ago
    Dropbox offers 1TB of storage for $10/mo (or $100/yr), and their "Carousel" app isn't terrible. And you get direct access to the damn files on all your devices (regardless of platform). It's a much better service than what Apple or Google offers for these reasons alone.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Yes, but for many, moving around hundreds of gigabytes of data is something that will take a day or two on their connection, which is enough of a barrier that they'll deal with crap instead.
RankingMember 11y ago
This reminds me of Bill Gates' email documenting his experiencing trying to install and run Windows MovieMaker (read from the bottom): http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...
- austenallred 11y ago
  I got inexplicably angry just reading that
  - Lord_Zero 11y ago
    Because its a bunch of overpaid managers measuring dicks and talking about small design choices that will inevitably trickle down to the average programming intern to implement.
    - Turing_Machine 11y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    This bit from Ian Mercer made my blood boil: >>"One of the biggest issues today is that WU provides no way to promote a download to an end-user. We want to promote MM2 and WMP98 to end-users as something new and cool that they can get for Windows. Three lines of text describing it buried under "Windows XP" in a page that the user has to purposefully go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-side piece proactively display a bubble "Look! Cool, new features for Windows XP" and the option to display a much richer "advertisement" for the feature if the user wants to read more?" If Windows Update did these types of pop-up promotions I would throw my computer out the window.
- return0 11y ago
  well they sure fixed that it's now a snap to install.
hudo 11y ago
One of the best blogs ever! Quote: "I have a pretty strict rule about not using computers in the evening time. (because computers inevitably make me furious and want to smash things and then I can't sleep)." Can't stop reading posts ...
- hudo 11y ago
  http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/02-01-15-fucking-fuck-fucking-web.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/02-01-15-fucking-f...
  - mring33621 11y ago
    I think cbloom's "finishing team" idea is great.
- angersock 11y ago
  He's probably one of the world's leading experts on practical compression.
lewispb 11y ago
The new Apple Photos app + iPhone 6 = works, flawlessly
- junto 11y ago
  Hi NSA here. Would you mind uploading less dick pics and more photos of you girlfriend's fantastic tits please?
- Gigablah 11y ago
  Funny, I was about to complain how I need two different applications to manage the files on a single device, how the drag and drop idiom is inconsistent across the two, and how I ended up having to use a completely different method (airdrop) just to get a photo from my macbook onto my iPhone so that I could paste it into a messaging app.
- Fastidious 11y ago
  Could you elaborate on this? Before you reply, let us pretend you have uploaded--from your computer--128 GB of photos and videos to iCloud. Let me know.
Synergyse 11y ago
Google+ Photos now sync to Google Drive. Install the Drive Sync client, take a photo, it shows up on your computer as a file.
- tdkl 11y ago
  OP didn't say if he uses Linux, Google Drive is particularly awesome there.
edem 11y ago
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issue with picture downloads: I had the same problem and after 20 minues of searching I managed to find where can I download my FUCKING pictures: - go to Google Drive - Click "Apps" - Click "More" - Click "Photos" - Click "All photos" And here comes the tricky part: - At the top left corner hold your left mouse button and drag a box around all your photos - Unselect the ones you dont't want to download - Click "More" - Click "Download" That's it just 9 easy steps.......no comment
- ebbv 11y ago
  Yep. For me Google+ was the turning point. It started before that, but if you drew a line graph of Quality of Products for Google I think you'd see the Google+ rollout event on that line without it being pointed out. I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.
  - edem 11y ago
    Google products used to be simple and usable. Now they are all fucked up. Seems like that their QA department went on a permanent vacation. I have actually written to them about my issues and I'm waiting for a response ever since.
    - gchokov 11y ago
      Good luck with the waiting. Notoriously bad at customer support as well.
      - wyattshacker 11y ago
jdg1 11y ago
"You can fucking strip the leading $ and commas you piece of shit mother fucking asshole terrible programmers." That sounds sensible, but now you've just broken it for every country that uses comma as a decimal mark.
- intrasight 11y ago
  But they know you locale and could do the right thing. Is not at all hard.
  - awkward 11y ago
    That's assuming users aren't resetting their locale. It's not uncommon for non english users to assume that the english version of a site is the real deal and their version is an inferior localization done by some backbenchers at whatever company made it. For example, here's a story about how the majority of power users in Poland use an english keyboard with specialized key bindings, because using a polish keyboard marks you as a n00b: https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-curious-case-of-disappearing-polish-s-fa398313d4df https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-curious-case-of-disappeari...
    - angersock 11y ago
      It's. Lazy. Programming.
      - awkward 11y ago
        Yes. And folks have been trained to think that everyone not coding for en-us is double lazy.
        angersock 11y ago
        There are several different ways, say a currency dropdown, that could hint on how to parse free-text input. However, blaming the user for doing what makes sense is not helpful.
ddoolin 11y ago
I couldn't even get past the first few paragraphs. This writing is just awful.
vdaniuk 11y ago
The fact that this post is currently #3 on HN homepage and has ~100 comments in support is a strong indication to limit investment of time and effort in HN as a source of knowledge and HN community as a source of rational discussion. EDIT: 50 -> 100 comments. That rule about avoiding gratuitous negativity is obviously not working.
- faceplanter 11y ago
  Lighten up, everyone likes a good rant once in a while (especially as good as this one). Not every link on HN can be to a white paper or similar.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Banalities, myopia, lack of perspective, bad boring writing, pandering to misconceptions does not make a good rant.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Or maybe, just maybe, it suggests that the author is right and said out loud what many of us secretly think.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Feeling hate and spreading hate towards technology domain that is known as "web" and its ecosystem because of trite and banal grievances with some of the products of some corporations is "right"? If that is so I don't want to be a member of a toxic community that lacks meaningful perspective on the evolutionary, path-dependent origins of problems with "web technologies".
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      You call it "spreading hate", and I'll say that anyone for whom the brokenness of the web and mobile is not self-evident is suffering from a heavy case of Stockholm syndrome. It takes having a "meaningful perspective on the evolutionary, path-dependent origins of problems" to notice how insanely fucked up web/mobile is on so many levels - from absurd amount of crap we have to deal with as users to the fashion show IT industry is. The first step to fixing a problem is noticing and admitting it.
lazyant 11y ago
Try sharing photos you have in your iPhone while travelling to someone with a PC (I wasn't able to do it).
- Brakenshire 11y ago
  I'd really like a kind of local dropbox, to make the sending and syncing of files directly from one computer/smartphone to another incredibly easy. I suppose that's what bluetooth is supposed to do, but 90% of the time I try to use it for that purpose it fails, either because of glitches or lack of speed.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- prawn 11y ago
  I can't even get Airdrop working between my iPhone (latest model) and MBP (recent model, latest software). It's infuriating.
- geggam 11y ago
  funny... my blackberry still shares files easily... perhaps its the icrap ?
rwallace 11y ago
User-facing software in general tends to hit a quality ceiling pretty early on based on the unwillingness of the developers to make further improvements. Contrary to the commenter who talked about NASA and the space shuttle software, this is actually a matter of willingness, not ability. I've filed half a dozen reports on bugs that would have been trivial to fix, and been refused every time. I've seen developers go out of their way to reduce the quality of their software and break things that used to work. On the bright side, this means most domains of user-facing software still have open opportunities even when they should be thoroughly mature. If only there were more hours in a human lifespan, I'd love to fork Chromium or Firefox and just start fixing things at the browser end.
discordianfish 11y ago
As much as I hate almost everything, I always ask myself what's the baseline for those assumptions? How easy should it be to do the mentioned tasks? Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom. Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty. I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some tasks to be much more laborious than others.
- gtirloni 11y ago
  It took longer, but it was not nerve wrecking. There is little thought given to quality and usability. We're churning out features and half-cooked solutions and moving on to the next fun thing. It might be OK in the past but today we depend much more on these systems and there is no way back.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  There's this, and then there's purposeful degradation. A lot of the problem TFA describes were already solved properly years ago. There was a much better experience getting photos from your phone in pre-smartphone era, where you could just hook it up to your computer via the USB-to-some-propertiary-port cable and it would register as mass storage device. Web used to be much cleaner and better to use than it is now.
snarfy 11y ago
The space at the end of the password entry was found in QA testing. Since we are an agile shop and run two week sprints that bug was left in and put on the backlog to be prioritized later. Gotta release every two weeks, even if it's utter crap. As long as the PBIs are completed, who cares about the users? It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.
- andrewstuart2 11y ago
  A minor soapbox of mine: agile doesn't say anything about release cycle. What it says is that the goal is working software, not released software. Software can be working but not released until it's working well.
  - collyw 11y ago
    Any criticism of Agile, and the definition changes.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      The definition of Agile is the Agile Manifesto. It doesn't change.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's sort of like religion. The definition of Christianity is the Bible. The amount of Christian religions that actually care about what's written in the Book is minuscule.
        dragonwriter 11y ago
        > The definition of Christianity is the Bible. The closest thing actually within Christianity to this is a relatively new idea ("new" in the context of how long Christianity has existed) particular to a subset of Protestant Christianity, and generally rejected by the rest of Christianity, to wit, the doctrine of sola scriptura. [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura
profinger 11y ago
Oh my god I hear this, so much! I am so SICK of the horrid usability in favor of stupid fancy shit on the web! I'm so glad I'm not the only one!
prottmann 11y ago
Be glad that google is not the perfect company, all other would have no chance ;)
dash2 11y ago
Guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E "You are sitting in a chair, IN THE SKY."
- mkawia 11y ago
  It's still frustrating ,because google did the hard part(storing 8 gb plus data) and mess up the easy part it's angering.
  - Nemcue 11y ago
    It's because Google was and is still an engineering organisation. For the most part they still don't understand UX or design, and when they do it's in some incredibly maligned product that no one wants.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I'm willing to bet on the opposite. I think it's engineers who understand how the product should work to be useful, but it's the sales and design people which screw this up because "hey, it's cooler / more shiny / will attract new people".
      - Nemcue 11y ago
        Ah, yes — because engineers left to their own devices make products that are highly functional and polished. Much like game studios left to their own devices by publishers make super popular game classics.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  There's a difference. The hard parts are done. The easy parts are broken. We know they can do better, but they do crap, and this literally looks like them saying "fuck you users, we'll shit on you because we can get more money this way". Want some examples? Random things we had better 60 years ago than today: kettles, shoes, clothes, watches, utensils, furniture. There's a purposeful downgrading going on.
profinger 11y ago
To make things worse, people half ass the "mobile web" even harder! This is to the point where, when you click through a search engine result to a website and DON'T get forwarded to their garbage mobile site you are impressed! Also, don't forget the zip code or phone number boxes that have the format as a "placeholder" type text in the textboxes on mobile that repeatedly force your keyboard to reset so that they can format you phone number for you.
superbaconman 11y ago
I was really happy with my nexus 4, but after the last update the phone started acting up. I was really happy with my Toshiba CB2, but after the last update the laptop started acting up. The only reason I haven't lost my mind is that my Macbook Pro, after the last three updates, has been acting up. :(
theandrewbailey 11y ago
About 2 months ago, I went to my grandma's funeral, and snapped some pics of family and friends with my new DSLR. After two weeks, I realized that I wanted to share all these photos. I discovered OneDrive has a ridiculously easy interface for photos: upload folders of jpegs. I thought the web interface for looking at them was sexy too, with the photos featured prominently (not much text, no comments). It even has a "Download All" button! I sent a public view link to everyone. Damn, Microsoft is getting things right these days.
agounaris 11y ago
Amen!!
GnarfGnarf 11y ago
And these people want to be driving our cars?
- Istof 11y ago
  They would take detours to drive by stores that you might like... even if your pregnant wife is having a baby on the back seat.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
skizm 11y ago
Note to self. Make app that easily downloads, zips, and sends photos.
allendoerfer 11y ago
The requested magic with payment inputs is tricky. Commas and periods are both used for thousands and decimals sometimes interchangeably within the same country.
z3t4 11y ago
I think it's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail from regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get a better understanding about the product(s). About sharing images, I find setting up a FTP-server is the simplest solution. Most file-browsers have FTP built in and allows features like drag 'n drop. The problem with usability in free services like Google, is that they earn more money the more time you spend on the site. So if it takes ten minutes to do something that should take five seconds. Their metrics will show one hundred times more earning from the slow and tedious version. Guess what version they want you to use!?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I think it's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail from regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get a better understanding about the product(s). I have my pet theory - the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction. Your CEO has a marketing team that probably outsources some of its work to marketing companies, which come up with asinine ideas of promoting your product. The CEO gets reports with (probably a little fudged) numbers saying the sales are going up, and he has little idea that your company is now shitting on its users in order to get more money from them.
matt_morgan 11y ago
I have to save this for my wife, and my coworkers, so they know I'm not the only one.
cycleash 11y ago
You should improve your vocabulary sagargv. Seriously.
DominikR 11y ago
The one thing I hate most is setting up my Google or Apple account on a new iOS/Android device. I use a very long generated password with all kinds of special characters so what does Google do after you successfully entered the username/password on the device during the native setup flow? It opens a WebView where you have to enter it AGAIN! And why do I have to enter my Apple ID password after every single OS update again? I can't imagine what security concern prompted them to do this to us.
cycleash 11y ago
You should hate your vocab too @sagargv. Seriously.
lcfcjs1 11y ago
User experience has always taken a back seat at Google.
aepearson 11y ago
Dude, can we be friends? Because I feel like we'd get along - asshole.
andor 11y ago
Is the new time picker widget in Android 5 more efficient for anybody? It makes me angry every time I have to use it, please just give me a numeric keypad instead!
Istof 11y ago
I Still love the Web but we need at the very least something like a distributed open search engine / cache engine...
d23 11y ago
From the comments: > It's so much worse than that though. It's not for no reason, they actually call this is a best practice. Everyone's browser already has jQuery cached if you load it from jQuery's site, right? So yeah, just load all seventeen of your random javascript things from their original sites. Now your site is fast because all those pages are already in everyone's cache! Uh, what "best practice" site did that come from? W3Schools? I'm not a web dev anymore, but the best practice recommendation as far as I know has always been to combine and minify assets into as few requests as possible. Unfortunately most of the web still sucks and doesn't do this.
dmak 11y ago
I have similar frustrations with most of Google's products. I hate the maps the most. Between the iOS and the web version, it can be so difficult to find the same data.
SilvaR 11y ago
Brilliant. Oh the irony... I had to receive a code via SMS just to be able to sign in and leave a comment on that blog.
gurushackers 11y ago
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402 points by sagargv 11y ago

10 years ago, you would have to pay a photographer to develop the photos and go to a fucking post office, then your mom would wait a week to receive them.

mariusz79 11y ago
Nope. you're wrong. 10 years ago you could do all of this from your fucking home, just like you can do it now. The only difference is - you did not have to deal with all that Javascript bs.
- ryanmcdonough 11y ago
  Ah yes, I'll just develop my own photos at home - seems like a good idea for everyone in the world to do.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    FYI: ten years ago, we had e-mail, Flickr, Smugmug, web galleries, halfway decent digital cameras. Also, the thread starter was setting up a straw man, no one said that developing photos yourself was better. Just that the experience of many web applications is not so good. (Personally, I use BTSync's and/or Dropbox's photo sync, so that it shows up as a file on my machines. Sharing works fine as well, especially since Dropbox has the family-friendly Carousel that pulls photos of regular Dropbox.)
    - spapin 11y ago
      Make it twenty then, I am not picky.
tlunter 11y ago
And he should be able to just plug his phone into his computer and pull the images right off with MTP. Don't know why that's so hard.
- jodrellblank 11y ago
  See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524440
  - tlunter 11y ago
    Works for me whenever I need to use it. Little more annoying for when I just want to my phone as a disk, but it still works.
- amyjess 11y ago
  MTP? The digital camera I got in 2005 was USB mass storage.
  - tlunter 11y ago
    Android uses MTP
dudifordMann 11y ago
10 years ago, which is still 2005, you had print kiosks in places like target where, you could plug in your digital camera or SD/Compact Flash cards and print them out, 10 years before that, you had a "guaranteed" flow of how to obtain your photos: take the snapshot, take in film to a photo lab for development, at which point you thought about how many copies you might want. you may have lost some in the lab, but the flow worked, and it was the same at every photo lab. Regardless of the time period, he's annoyed how the "ease of use and simple flow" is not so easy, and doesn't seem to flow. Some of it may be not being familiar with the "way they want you to use their products" (poor UX in my opinion). But that's what kills me about today's app centered smartphone web, everything is a unique little microcosm that is slightly different than the others in a way that is obnoxious. Perhaps it is the difference between being a consumer of content and a producer. As a producer of content I would like to think I have control over how I can obtain and distribute it, but technically you end up acting as a consumer of the product that "allow you" to produce... end rant
anentropic 11y ago
there were digital cameras 10 years ago
Mtinie 11y ago
10 years ago you could print the photos on an inkjet or color laser printer at home. But this was a costly proposition in both time and money. Ink and toner being more expensive by weight than...a whole bunch of luxury goods[1]. You would still have to visit the post office and she'd have to wait for delivery, so you're right about that. Is the photo storage and sharing market ripe for a (re)disruption? --- [1] http://www.npr.org/2012/05/24/153634897/why-printer-ink-is-the-other-black-gold http://www.npr.org/2012/05/24/153634897/why-printer-ink-is-t...
kyllo 11y ago
What are you talking about? Picasa (which is now Google Photos) has been around since 2002.
SFjulie1 11y ago
If you had developed your photos 10 years ago using analogic methods, your negatives are still usable, and your positive (if they were not too exposed to the sun thus conserved normally) would still be there. Whereas if you already had a digital camera, the raw are either lost because the media has decayed, you forgot backup, or worse to index your database. Your positive have all turned yellow unless you spent 10 times more in ink and paper per photo. In 10 years you probably will have migrated these photo to the cloud and you will both have to pay a recurring costs for life to keep your data (that will die with you), or the photo will die with the service. In 20 years, you will be more likely to find the old documents made on papers by your ancestors than any of your digital productions to your grand kids. And if you still have them entropy will win. You will not be able to find the relevant piece of data. Analogic photo is the only long term low cost solution for now.
- icehawk 11y ago
  My experience has been the exact opposite. Minimal effort in backing up the digital copies makes them easier to access than the film I have from the same period since it's slowly decaying in a box 1,000 miles away.
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    I also remember an astronomic "observatoire" buying lifetime guaranteed ISO9600 CD as a secondary backup of jpeg encoded pictures in the early 2000's (if you look at it all choices that were legits) that discovered 2 years after the primary backup failed (HD) that the secondary also failed. Whereas microfilms are still less expensive then and now, and still guaranteed to be more durable with less operational costs. Those who sacrifice a cheap reliability for the illusion of an expensive ease of use deserve neither one, nor the other. Benjamin Franklin
madaxe_again 11y ago
Fucking bullshit, 100 years ago you would have got off your ass and SHOWN the baby to your mom. Little by little, we abstract ourselves away.
- linschn 11y ago
  100 years ago, the mother would have died from blood loss and septic shock and the baby from a diarrhea a few weeks later. Also, the baby's father would be in the trenches somewhere in the North of France and the baby's grandmother would have 3 years to live before the 1918 flu kills her. I'm good now ;)
amyjess 11y ago
10 years ago was 2005. I had a Fujifilm digital camera which saved photos to an xD card. I'd plug it into my computer's USB port, it registered as a mass-storage device, and I'd pull the photos. If I wanted to send them privately, I could email them. If I wanted to share them with the public, I'd throw them up on a web host and link them from my LiveJournal (I was actually hosting my own site at the time, through a server in my living room, but any of the gazillion free webhosts at the time would've worked). There were other options, too. My cousin used Ophoto. I think Flickr was around then. Facebook Photos came out about 9 years ago, I think, so I wouldn't have long to wait.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mahouse 11y ago

Whoa, I'm reading through the entire blog. I'm in love with that guy. 😍

angersock 11y ago
cbloom is too legit to quit. He has a pretty impressive resume.

Kenji 11y ago

He's right. What surprises me is the readiness of people to put up with that shit. I'm not sure if their patience with horrible design is just a result of their ignorance.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware, or most of the mobile apps being useless and ugly and broken. I think most of the people just don't expect anything better, blindly accepting whatever is there because they can't imagine that technology could actually be good. I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.
- _lce0 11y ago
  I've seen many times where users have incredibly patience with tedious things --like entering their git password all the time, instead of setting auth keys. I think it's a mix of both ignorance of better options, and familiarity with the status-quo.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > It's similar to the patience people have to put up with ads, or crapware People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Because they don't have a choice, so they don't expect anything else. Only the technical folks know how and where to buy a clean computer. Hell, the first computer the younger generation bought themselves was most likely already loaded with a ton of such crap, and that sets the baseline of their expectations.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      > Because they don't have a choice Then set up a company that make fresh PC with windows installs without crapware and you have a business model right there. Choice is just a matter of people starting doing it. Or you know, buy a Linux computer (sure, the choice is not great there either, but it's something that a few manufacturers offer online: Lenovo, System75 and a couple others).

userbinator 11y ago

In the same spirit and tone: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

elliott34 11y ago

"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic or something very stable and non-computer related, so I could just work away in my shop and not have to ever touch this fucking demon box." What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good physical labor in the lab.

VLM 11y ago
"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic" I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was correct on its parallel path. Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use, straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the public hates them. The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs" "Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core, practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our products"

tomphoolery 11y ago

"I don't keep any cookies or browse history" Why not? "I get the numeric code sent to me. I go to Google Voice on my computer" This seems like it defeats the purpose of 2FA. Am I wrong? Isn't 2FA supposed to work by proving that you own a device for which it was set up on? "always download all the images made by Google Charts because that service will die at some point" Probably. If it matters to you, learn some JavaScript and build stuff in highcharts. And next time, never rely on a service that you don't pay for. Also, it's clear by this post you hate Google, especially its suite of exceptionally shitty products, and not the Web.

pp19dd 11y ago
Regarding image-google-chart, and other google APIs: I was going to voice my support for this complaint, as I have a number of still popular projects that use it (and will need fixes or updates), but I had to rethink that. Conclusion: free lunch is over. Some of us developers are learning that we can't rely on a free (or even paid) service for any long term.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Conclusion: free lunch is over. Some of us developers are learning that we can't rely on a free (or even paid) service for any long term. I totally agree. SaaS is ephemeral. Personally I don't expect to see a SaaS site being active for more than two-three years, because the goal of most startups is to get bought, at which point they'll happily let the product die or turn into a piece of crap. If I use a third party service, I do that with an expectation that my project is temporary and will die/get superseded faster than the service it relies on.
harperlee 11y ago
Upvote for "never rely on a service that you don't pay for"; I think that idea needs to be said out loud more often.
- waps 11y ago
  How exactly does paying come into the picture here. I'd bet that, for example, FoundationDB's customers would disagree with you.

eklavya 11y ago

Calm the fuck down and get her fucking telegram :D

harel 11y ago

Phone -> USB Cable -> Computer. Transfer images via said cable. Select images, put in email and send to mum. Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.

Aoyagi 11y ago
It's still a pain if said device doesn't support USB OTG and you have to deal with MTP.
- a_bonobo 11y ago
  Sometimes USB isn't an option: The USB interface on my old Samsung Galaxy S2 broke (seems to be a common problem), now the connection just charges, data transfer is borked under Windows and Linux. So I thought it would be "easy" to use WLAN for that - Samsung itself wants you to use "Kies", proprietary software which works only under Windows. Once I had located the right old version for my apparently-too-old phone, I started to back up my photos. But Kies decides to be super-duper-slow and downloads with 1 kb/s, so it predicts about 48 hours of copying. Luckily there's sftp on the play store, with that and scp under Fedora it took 5 minutes. It's like they want you to hate them.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I used https://www.airdroid.com/ https://www.airdroid.com/ for that; it gives you reasonable, LAN-speed downloads.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Just for file transfers, I really like SuperBeam. It does just one thing, it's really fast (the WiFi direct connection is fantastic) and the PC software is just a file that you run, no installation or other crap necessary.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago

talles 11y ago

> login bullshit that DTA can't handle Pardon my ignorance, but what's a DTA?

_asciiker_ 11y ago
The DownThemAll extension, pretty great.
- Nemcue 11y ago
  It's honestly quite sad that it's been — what 10 years now? — and we still can't properly pause and resume a download from a browser. I remember using DTA for the first time back in the day and going "Oh wow, nice!". It just such a basic facility to provide. Resumable downloads should be available in all browsers. But no, doing some user profile shit that no one wants: that's what they spend time on.

josephpmay 11y ago

It's funny. He seems to hate all Google products yet is fully absorbed in the Google universe.

rmk2 11y ago
Why is that funny, really? Some of his grievances can really only materialise because he uses the products. I have never had many of these problems, because I use none of these products. The point is that he wants to use "all Google products", yet they are in such a state as to make that impossible, at least for him. Somebody who would use them if they could use them is a much worse case for Google (or any other company, for that matter) than somebody who rejects them without an actual will to use them.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Aoyagi 11y ago

Yes please! I'm so tired of all the annoying bloat all over the web that makes (not only) older browsers die just thinking about visiting the sites. It looks like the "progress" nowadays is going for "more complex and resource-demanding with less features and control".

Goladus 11y ago
> less features and control Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.
- Goladus 11y ago
  ps for the downvoter: My comment is entirely serious. Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101: The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address, rather a google tracking link. Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gmail image viewer (which conveniently has interfaces with a bunch of other google apps I don't care about). Now you might think the google image viewer is nice, but personally I liked my once-upon-a-time ability to just look at images directly in my browser with a single click. So I gain nothing, google gains everything. They are wresting control of how I access my files, every step of the way.
  - Aoyagi 11y ago
    About the link thing, DDG uses it as well, but it presents it as "Redirect - Prevent sharing of your search with sites you click on". Although in case of DDG, you can disable that.
  - derf_ 11y ago
    Greasemonkey script to restore direct links: https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408 https://gist.github.com/astanin/3782408 It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.

andybak 11y ago

I just managed to bulk select and download 100 photos from Google Photos within 15 seconds of trying.

millzlane 11y ago
Did you use Google drive too?
TeMPOraL 11y ago
And just recently, I couldn't. The presence of the option to download pictures is random and seems to depend on whether this is your album or it was created by someone else and shared with you. Most of the time I need to download something it's the latter, and the option to download doesn't show up there.

mikegerwitz 11y ago

You, sir, have made my Monday morning.

eCa 11y ago

> Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking Google Fixed it. (But I agree with regards to Maps Classic, it is superior to the new maps in almost all ways (for me, at least).)

basicallydan 11y ago
Heh, I see your point but he does move on a little bit to other things :)

RankingMember 11y ago

I think a lot of us have had thoughts like these, but damn man, reading that was like watching Lewis Black - you think you're witnessing someone having a stroke/heart attack.

basicallydan 11y ago

He's just saying what we're all thinking, people!

dheera 11y ago

Sometimes I use the classic version of Gmail just because it loads the whole page in less than 1 second and I can read my e-mail in another 0.5 seconds. With the "modern" version I have to stare at a blank screen with a stupid progress bar for about 2-3 seconds before seeing anything.

elchief 11y ago
But AJAX!
ZoFreX 11y ago
I don't understand why this is OK. I don't understand why people listen to Google's advice on making fast websites when one of their main websites has a fucking loading bar.

M8 11y ago

And the web is completely "open" and unlike "walled" proprietary platforms you have no choice of a programming language whatsoever (PS: fuck your transpilation).

rnernento 11y ago

Can Marissa Mayer fix Yahoo maps? Google maps have become unusable on most of my devices, I thought I was alone...

rootuser 11y ago
The new google maps is an abomination and should be aborted.
kafei 11y ago
bing is decent on mobile.
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Bing maps is decent on non-mobile, too, somewhat to my surprise. I've stopped using Google maps entirely. (I have never made much use of google maps on my phone, actually, since it constantly nags me to log in to a google account, which I refuse to do.)
panglott 11y ago
I've mostly switched over to the Apple Maps app at home, Google Maps is such a brick. Not sure yet what to use on Windows, where Google Maps is still semi-functional if weird-looking.

Lancey 11y ago

There's tons of problems with Google's services. They make radical changes that bloat them and slow them down. They cut services that people find useful because they're not as big as something like Maps or Gmail, or even for no reason at all. But no matter how much you complain, either on a blog post or to Google themselves, if you just come back to them at the end of the day you've changed nothing at all. Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.

junto 11y ago
Photo provider switching is hard these days because many people have 100's of GB of photos and video.
- ascagnel_ 11y ago
  Dropbox offers 1TB of storage for $10/mo (or $100/yr), and their "Carousel" app isn't terrible. And you get direct access to the damn files on all your devices (regardless of platform). It's a much better service than what Apple or Google offers for these reasons alone.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes, but for many, moving around hundreds of gigabytes of data is something that will take a day or two on their connection, which is enough of a barrier that they'll deal with crap instead.

RankingMember 11y ago

This reminds me of Bill Gates' email documenting his experiencing trying to install and run Windows MovieMaker (read from the bottom): http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangatesmoviemaker.pdf http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/files/library/2003Jangat...

austenallred 11y ago
I got inexplicably angry just reading that
- Lord_Zero 11y ago
  Because its a bunch of overpaid managers measuring dicks and talking about small design choices that will inevitably trickle down to the average programming intern to implement.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  This bit from Ian Mercer made my blood boil: >>"One of the biggest issues today is that WU provides no way to promote a download to an end-user. We want to promote MM2 and WMP98 to end-users as something new and cool that they can get for Windows. Three lines of text describing it buried under "Windows XP" in a page that the user has to purposefully go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-side piece proactively display a bubble "Look! Cool, new features for Windows XP" and the option to display a much richer "advertisement" for the feature if the user wants to read more?" If Windows Update did these types of pop-up promotions I would throw my computer out the window.
return0 11y ago
well they sure fixed that it's now a snap to install.

hudo 11y ago

One of the best blogs ever! Quote: "I have a pretty strict rule about not using computers in the evening time. (because computers inevitably make me furious and want to smash things and then I can't sleep)." Can't stop reading posts ...

hudo 11y ago
http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/02-01-15-fucking-fuck-fucking-web.html http://cbloomrants.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/02-01-15-fucking-f...
- mring33621 11y ago
  I think cbloom's "finishing team" idea is great.
angersock 11y ago
He's probably one of the world's leading experts on practical compression.

lewispb 11y ago

The new Apple Photos app + iPhone 6 = works, flawlessly

junto 11y ago
Hi NSA here. Would you mind uploading less dick pics and more photos of you girlfriend's fantastic tits please?
Gigablah 11y ago
Funny, I was about to complain how I need two different applications to manage the files on a single device, how the drag and drop idiom is inconsistent across the two, and how I ended up having to use a completely different method (airdrop) just to get a photo from my macbook onto my iPhone so that I could paste it into a messaging app.
Fastidious 11y ago
Could you elaborate on this? Before you reply, let us pretend you have uploaded--from your computer--128 GB of photos and videos to iCloud. Let me know.

Synergyse 11y ago

Google+ Photos now sync to Google Drive. Install the Drive Sync client, take a photo, it shows up on your computer as a file.

tdkl 11y ago
OP didn't say if he uses Linux, Google Drive is particularly awesome there.

edem 11y ago

I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously? Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this. Anyway back to your issue with picture downloads: I had the same problem and after 20 minues of searching I managed to find where can I download my FUCKING pictures: - go to Google Drive - Click "Apps" - Click "More" - Click "Photos" - Click "All photos" And here comes the tricky part: - At the top left corner hold your left mouse button and drag a box around all your photos - Unselect the ones you dont't want to download - Click "More" - Click "Download" That's it just 9 easy steps.......no comment

ebbv 11y ago
Yep. For me Google+ was the turning point. It started before that, but if you drew a line graph of Quality of Products for Google I think you'd see the Google+ rollout event on that line without it being pointed out. I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.
- edem 11y ago
  Google products used to be simple and usable. Now they are all fucked up. Seems like that their QA department went on a permanent vacation. I have actually written to them about my issues and I'm waiting for a response ever since.
  - gchokov 11y ago
    Good luck with the waiting. Notoriously bad at customer support as well.
    - wyattshacker 11y ago

jdg1 11y ago

"You can fucking strip the leading $ and commas you piece of shit mother fucking asshole terrible programmers." That sounds sensible, but now you've just broken it for every country that uses comma as a decimal mark.

intrasight 11y ago
But they know you locale and could do the right thing. Is not at all hard.
- awkward 11y ago
  That's assuming users aren't resetting their locale. It's not uncommon for non english users to assume that the english version of a site is the real deal and their version is an inferior localization done by some backbenchers at whatever company made it. For example, here's a story about how the majority of power users in Poland use an english keyboard with specialized key bindings, because using a polish keyboard marks you as a n00b: https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-curious-case-of-disappearing-polish-s-fa398313d4df https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-curious-case-of-disappeari...
  - angersock 11y ago
    It's. Lazy. Programming.
    - awkward 11y ago
      Yes. And folks have been trained to think that everyone not coding for en-us is double lazy.
      - angersock 11y ago
        There are several different ways, say a currency dropdown, that could hint on how to parse free-text input. However, blaming the user for doing what makes sense is not helpful.

ddoolin 11y ago

I couldn't even get past the first few paragraphs. This writing is just awful.

vdaniuk 11y ago

The fact that this post is currently #3 on HN homepage and has ~100 comments in support is a strong indication to limit investment of time and effort in HN as a source of knowledge and HN community as a source of rational discussion. EDIT: 50 -> 100 comments. That rule about avoiding gratuitous negativity is obviously not working.

faceplanter 11y ago
Lighten up, everyone likes a good rant once in a while (especially as good as this one). Not every link on HN can be to a white paper or similar.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  Banalities, myopia, lack of perspective, bad boring writing, pandering to misconceptions does not make a good rant.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Or maybe, just maybe, it suggests that the author is right and said out loud what many of us secretly think.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  Feeling hate and spreading hate towards technology domain that is known as "web" and its ecosystem because of trite and banal grievances with some of the products of some corporations is "right"? If that is so I don't want to be a member of a toxic community that lacks meaningful perspective on the evolutionary, path-dependent origins of problems with "web technologies".
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    You call it "spreading hate", and I'll say that anyone for whom the brokenness of the web and mobile is not self-evident is suffering from a heavy case of Stockholm syndrome. It takes having a "meaningful perspective on the evolutionary, path-dependent origins of problems" to notice how insanely fucked up web/mobile is on so many levels - from absurd amount of crap we have to deal with as users to the fashion show IT industry is. The first step to fixing a problem is noticing and admitting it.

lazyant 11y ago

Try sharing photos you have in your iPhone while travelling to someone with a PC (I wasn't able to do it).

Brakenshire 11y ago
I'd really like a kind of local dropbox, to make the sending and syncing of files directly from one computer/smartphone to another incredibly easy. I suppose that's what bluetooth is supposed to do, but 90% of the time I try to use it for that purpose it fails, either because of glitches or lack of speed.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
prawn 11y ago
I can't even get Airdrop working between my iPhone (latest model) and MBP (recent model, latest software). It's infuriating.
geggam 11y ago
funny... my blackberry still shares files easily... perhaps its the icrap ?

rwallace 11y ago

User-facing software in general tends to hit a quality ceiling pretty early on based on the unwillingness of the developers to make further improvements. Contrary to the commenter who talked about NASA and the space shuttle software, this is actually a matter of willingness, not ability. I've filed half a dozen reports on bugs that would have been trivial to fix, and been refused every time. I've seen developers go out of their way to reduce the quality of their software and break things that used to work. On the bright side, this means most domains of user-facing software still have open opportunities even when they should be thoroughly mature. If only there were more hours in a human lifespan, I'd love to fork Chromium or Firefox and just start fixing things at the browser end.

discordianfish 11y ago

As much as I hate almost everything, I always ask myself what's the baseline for those assumptions? How easy should it be to do the mentioned tasks? Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom. Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty. I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some tasks to be much more laborious than others.

gtirloni 11y ago
It took longer, but it was not nerve wrecking. There is little thought given to quality and usability. We're churning out features and half-cooked solutions and moving on to the next fun thing. It might be OK in the past but today we depend much more on these systems and there is no way back.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
There's this, and then there's purposeful degradation. A lot of the problem TFA describes were already solved properly years ago. There was a much better experience getting photos from your phone in pre-smartphone era, where you could just hook it up to your computer via the USB-to-some-propertiary-port cable and it would register as mass storage device. Web used to be much cleaner and better to use than it is now.

snarfy 11y ago

The space at the end of the password entry was found in QA testing. Since we are an agile shop and run two week sprints that bug was left in and put on the backlog to be prioritized later. Gotta release every two weeks, even if it's utter crap. As long as the PBIs are completed, who cares about the users? It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.

andrewstuart2 11y ago
A minor soapbox of mine: agile doesn't say anything about release cycle. What it says is that the goal is working software, not released software. Software can be working but not released until it's working well.
- collyw 11y ago
  Any criticism of Agile, and the definition changes.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    The definition of Agile is the Agile Manifesto. It doesn't change.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's sort of like religion. The definition of Christianity is the Bible. The amount of Christian religions that actually care about what's written in the Book is minuscule.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > The definition of Christianity is the Bible. The closest thing actually within Christianity to this is a relatively new idea ("new" in the context of how long Christianity has existed) particular to a subset of Protestant Christianity, and generally rejected by the rest of Christianity, to wit, the doctrine of sola scriptura. [0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura

profinger 11y ago

Oh my god I hear this, so much! I am so SICK of the horrid usability in favor of stupid fancy shit on the web! I'm so glad I'm not the only one!

prottmann 11y ago

Be glad that google is not the perfect company, all other would have no chance ;)

dash2 11y ago

Guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E "You are sitting in a chair, IN THE SKY."

mkawia 11y ago
It's still frustrating ,because google did the hard part(storing 8 gb plus data) and mess up the easy part it's angering.
- Nemcue 11y ago
  It's because Google was and is still an engineering organisation. For the most part they still don't understand UX or design, and when they do it's in some incredibly maligned product that no one wants.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I'm willing to bet on the opposite. I think it's engineers who understand how the product should work to be useful, but it's the sales and design people which screw this up because "hey, it's cooler / more shiny / will attract new people".
    - Nemcue 11y ago
      Ah, yes — because engineers left to their own devices make products that are highly functional and polished. Much like game studios left to their own devices by publishers make super popular game classics.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
There's a difference. The hard parts are done. The easy parts are broken. We know they can do better, but they do crap, and this literally looks like them saying "fuck you users, we'll shit on you because we can get more money this way". Want some examples? Random things we had better 60 years ago than today: kettles, shoes, clothes, watches, utensils, furniture. There's a purposeful downgrading going on.

profinger 11y ago

To make things worse, people half ass the "mobile web" even harder! This is to the point where, when you click through a search engine result to a website and DON'T get forwarded to their garbage mobile site you are impressed! Also, don't forget the zip code or phone number boxes that have the format as a "placeholder" type text in the textboxes on mobile that repeatedly force your keyboard to reset so that they can format you phone number for you.

superbaconman 11y ago

I was really happy with my nexus 4, but after the last update the phone started acting up. I was really happy with my Toshiba CB2, but after the last update the laptop started acting up. The only reason I haven't lost my mind is that my Macbook Pro, after the last three updates, has been acting up. :(

theandrewbailey 11y ago

About 2 months ago, I went to my grandma's funeral, and snapped some pics of family and friends with my new DSLR. After two weeks, I realized that I wanted to share all these photos. I discovered OneDrive has a ridiculously easy interface for photos: upload folders of jpegs. I thought the web interface for looking at them was sexy too, with the photos featured prominently (not much text, no comments). It even has a "Download All" button! I sent a public view link to everyone. Damn, Microsoft is getting things right these days.

agounaris 11y ago

Amen!!

GnarfGnarf 11y ago

And these people want to be driving our cars?

Istof 11y ago
They would take detours to drive by stores that you might like... even if your pregnant wife is having a baby on the back seat.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

skizm 11y ago

Note to self. Make app that easily downloads, zips, and sends photos.

allendoerfer 11y ago

The requested magic with payment inputs is tricky. Commas and periods are both used for thousands and decimals sometimes interchangeably within the same country.

z3t4 11y ago

I think it's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail from regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get a better understanding about the product(s). About sharing images, I find setting up a FTP-server is the simplest solution. Most file-browsers have FTP built in and allows features like drag 'n drop. The problem with usability in free services like Google, is that they earn more money the more time you spend on the site. So if it takes ten minutes to do something that should take five seconds. Their metrics will show one hundred times more earning from the slow and tedious version. Guess what version they want you to use!?

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> I think it's important for every company that the CEO answer support mail from regular customers at least a few hours every day. Then he/she will get a better understanding about the product(s). I have my pet theory - the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction. Your CEO has a marketing team that probably outsources some of its work to marketing companies, which come up with asinine ideas of promoting your product. The CEO gets reports with (probably a little fudged) numbers saying the sales are going up, and he has little idea that your company is now shitting on its users in order to get more money from them.

matt_morgan 11y ago

I have to save this for my wife, and my coworkers, so they know I'm not the only one.

cycleash 11y ago

You should improve your vocabulary sagargv. Seriously.

DominikR 11y ago

The one thing I hate most is setting up my Google or Apple account on a new iOS/Android device. I use a very long generated password with all kinds of special characters so what does Google do after you successfully entered the username/password on the device during the native setup flow? It opens a WebView where you have to enter it AGAIN! And why do I have to enter my Apple ID password after every single OS update again? I can't imagine what security concern prompted them to do this to us.

cycleash 11y ago

You should hate your vocab too @sagargv. Seriously.

lcfcjs1 11y ago

User experience has always taken a back seat at Google.

aepearson 11y ago

Dude, can we be friends? Because I feel like we'd get along - asshole.

andor 11y ago

Is the new time picker widget in Android 5 more efficient for anybody? It makes me angry every time I have to use it, please just give me a numeric keypad instead!

Istof 11y ago

I Still love the Web but we need at the very least something like a distributed open search engine / cache engine...

d23 11y ago

From the comments: > It's so much worse than that though. It's not for no reason, they actually call this is a best practice. Everyone's browser already has jQuery cached if you load it from jQuery's site, right? So yeah, just load all seventeen of your random javascript things from their original sites. Now your site is fast because all those pages are already in everyone's cache! Uh, what "best practice" site did that come from? W3Schools? I'm not a web dev anymore, but the best practice recommendation as far as I know has always been to combine and minify assets into as few requests as possible. Unfortunately most of the web still sucks and doesn't do this.

dmak 11y ago

I have similar frustrations with most of Google's products. I hate the maps the most. Between the iOS and the web version, it can be so difficult to find the same data.

SilvaR 11y ago

Brilliant. Oh the irony... I had to receive a code via SMS just to be able to sign in and leave a comment on that blog.

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