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.
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.
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.)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
People like PC World in the UK, as its the closest they have top a normal shopping experience.
I always told friends to go to the small independent shop over the road where they will get a better deal. But then they have to speak to someone who will baffle them with jargon. Its far easier to see the 40% discount offer (from the initially high prices) as some sort of bargain. I have wasted hours uninstalling crap from PC World machines. One came with 3 firewalls and it wouldn't connect to the internet.
I don't think is ignorance, but I think is mostly a lack in a better solution to compare with. I mean, if you have something that works great (in any field, not just tech), you take it as yardstick. If you don't have a real super-nice-outstanding solution to compare with, you will be always ok with what's coming, even if it's the worst implementation ever made.
I agree with 90% of the points in the article, but I also know that others have implemented similar solutions and only fews have, instead, tackled the same problems with a different, better implemented, solutions.
Anyway, the most annoying example is Skype, I really hate the "oh it looks like is a Live Account, redirecting..." flow, it's annoying.
Your response is reasonable, but what's frustrating is not that software has bugs. What frustrating is when something that worked well enough before gets a whole slew of bugs that could have been avoided by simply not adding unwanted features.
Here's an update to the piece of software that you had enjoyed using and had incorporated into your daily workflow. It has a whole bunch of features you didn't want and the new interface is so complicated and intrusive and buggy that it renders the whole thing nearly worthless. Something that worked well for you before has been taken away for no discernible reason. Becoming enraged at this may not be rational, but it is human nature.
You say "people" as though you don't put up with it too...
It's the same everywhere. Shit flows from the walls, up through the streets, through and within everything we interact with, because we've managed to build a civilisation on "that'll do" and "well, forever!" so far, and through some unlikely sequence of sheer fluke we're here to talk about it.
The internet is a bodge job. The web is a bodge job. This finely made bit of machinery I type this on is a bodge job - and so are my shoes, this chair, the postman outside, the tarmac on the street and the governance of our societies.
We put up with it because we go through a phase of learning "the way things are", and then go one of several ways:
- Accept and/or support the status quo
- Realise things could be better but realise that your task is so huge you cannot begin to do anything about it, and revert to the above.
- Try to work with others to change things for the better.
The third camp are the ones who make the bodge jobs, because they ultimately realise that time is the one true constraint, and you don't know what perfection is until you've seen it. We're solving a big old NP problem called "humanity" one excruciating step at a time.
Anyway, it's up to us to go make some better bodge jobs, which'll do for now, and not forever.
If you are philosophically inclined, you realize that art is one of the few exceptions to that. Artists are people that try to achieve perfection in a way that ordinary society doesn't allow.
Because art is done for it's own sake, not to sell it. As a painter you don't get offers from third parties that are willing to pay you for including their logo on your work.
I think you only captured half of the picture in this comment. Yes, there's ton of crap created because we screw up implementation. But then there's another ten tons of crap created on purpose.
Implementation rarely is hard. Some problems brought up in TFA were already solved years, if not decades ago. There's no reason we should have problem downloading photos from our phones and sending them to family. And it was easier in the pre-smartphone/early smartphone era than it is today.
I blame the same force that gave us our progress - capitalism, the market economy, and the mindset it promotes among management. In established markets, all the easy things have already been solved - you can't win any more customers by creating quality products. You have to squeeze money out of perfectly working things. This is where the engine of capitalism stops being aligned with humanity's needs.
There's a business term for all that crap - "value-added". When you see some "value-added" thing it means that the company is about to shit on you to get more money, either from you or someone else. We didn't have that much crapware on computers until vendors realized they could get paid by third parties by bundling their worthless (for end-user) crap. It's a gamble that worked well for the companies - people will deal with crap because they don't have any other choice, and vendors get more profit.
Then there's completely purposeful degradation. Some of the things we had much better 60 years ago than today: shoes, clothes, kettles, lightbulbs, utensils, kitchenware, various home appliances. Sure, they weren't that shiny and plastic, they didn't have an army of "designers" behind them, but they fucking worked and they still fucking work today. I still have a microwave bought ~20 years ago in Sweden, and it fucking works and never had a single glitch. My grandfathers have equipment bought when they were young, whereas my shoes and clothes degrade within half a year or less.
This is the problem. We know very well how to make good things. But making good things is not profitable compared to shitting on your customers.
If we were buying a product/service, I firmly believe we would see incremental improvements, which things generally getting better each iteration (with the occasional mis-step).
However, since so much is "free as in beer" people have to layer on a bunch of stuff to monetize everything.
People aren't trying to build better mousetraps. They are trying to monetize the mousetrapping experience for social. No, wait, we have to throw all that out because we are trying to capture mindshare for mousetrapping on mobile.
> If we were buying a product/service, I firmly believe we would see incremental improvements, which things generally getting better each iteration (with the occasional mis-step).
I disagree, and that's why I brought crapware bundled with PCs and all the non-tech products which get progressively worse. We buy this stuff. Companies aren't giving laptops or coffee makers for free. But we've reached the point of overall-pretty-good computer or coffee maker some time ago. The dynamics works like this: a company can get a little bit more money by bundling some crap or adding some non-feature. This lets them undercut their competitors. Soon, everyone follows, and you see a continuous increase of crap. A race to the bottom.
The end-game is not incremental improvements. It's as bad products as possible, that are still good enough that people will buy them.
It's a result of having no other options. It seems like 80% of websites suck in one way or another to the point where it's refreshing and impressive when a company's website actually meets your needs. "Oh my god! Look at that! I can actually click "remember this next time" and that actually works!" "What??! I can tab through this form in correct order and actually use my keyboard to select my DOB?" "Oh my god, that actually filled in information for me based on the account that I'm logged into? What is this? 2080?!"
Putting up with annoyances on the web is nothing compared to real life. Ever tried immigration? Unless one has lots of money (most people don't) and hire very experienced, super fancy lawyers (most people can't afford), it is one of the most painful, demoralizing and expensive (even without the lawyers) process one can go through. How about the judicial system? healthcare? And so on.
At least we have options on the web, plus the option to improve/fix things (relatively speaking). He can always send his photos as attachments in an email, or put them up on dropbox and send the link etc. Offline? Different story altogether.
That is why people put up with things online. When you get used to real life crap, these problems online seem small.
"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.
"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"
> I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins"
This is my feeling as well. The norms on mobile and the web are so far out from anything I'd call common sense or proper usability that it must be cargo cultism at work here. Its just so. friggin. bad.
I also think this is why Apple is doing so well now. They're guilty of these sins, but their ultra-minimalist approach means they're able to sin less than others. Google's "anything goes" mentality allows these bad habits and this broken culture to thrive.
I'm not too pessimistic about it. We're still in some growing pains here. Mobile is a kind of a mess. Memory unsafe languages rule. Privacy is non-existant, Security is in the toilet, etc. I think there will be a shakedown of these things and we'll look back at this time as being needlessly reckless.
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.
> 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.
Because it enables a very simple transaction: I am exchanging money for your good and/or service, so you try to provide me the best experience you can.
If Starbucks gave away free coffee but monetized their restrooms, their coffee would eventually end up full of diuretics.
It doesn't work with SaaS startups. The goal of a typical startup is to get bought. The so-called "exit". Which basically means they don't give a crap about their users. They'll lie to you on their front page that the want to create an awesome service, but it's all a trick to get you to sign up - because the more people sign up, the bigger growth they have, and the better chance of getting bought. And when the buy offer comes, the product gets shut down, paying customers or not.
It might not hold always, but it is a very good rule-of-thumb.
Normally, a company (either startup or not) cares most for its clients, because they are the ones that pay its topline and ultimately its workers' salaries. Other parties (users, providers, government, whatever) also have power and can also influence the company's behaviour, but clients normally have it easiest.
That does not always hold, as I said. Another example is you being a commodity client; if the company is, for example, more interested on big clients, your interests might not be the first concern for that company. But they will have you in mind, nonetheless, as the bad service you receive can signal something bad for bigger clients. Sometimes, even big clients are commodities, as they can't wield a lot of power, so the company can act not in its client's best interests (monopolies or tax burden when price is inelastic are scenarios that come quickly to mind).
That's why I mentioned SaaS startups - because they're both an exception to your rule and something HN demographic has to deal with a lot.
I still don't buy that rule though. Let me illustrate it by a graph:
.....
| ooooooo ...... .
| ooo ....oo ...
| ooo .... ooo ....
| oo .. oo ..
| o .. o ..
| o .. oo . profits
| o . oo
| o .. o user satisafaction
-+-o-.---------------------------------------------------->
Companies have figured out that the point of maximum profit is not aligned with the point of maximum user satisfaction, and they only care about the former - the latter is a proxy. In every mature market we're past maximum user satisfaction point, and this is what we perceive as "products getting crappier".
I agree, but to some extent I think we all do pay for Google services. They sit at the junction of just about everything we do online, and they've turned everything we do, look at, hear, say. etc. into a commodity data product that they sell over and over again. The services are either compensation or bait, depending on how you want to look at it :).
"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?"
The bug is in the design of 2FA. Sooner or later Google will get rid of GV and I'll just move to another provider to front-end my SMS spam instead of sending it to my phone. The other failure mode is best displayed by my bank not realizing their site is accessible via mobile, so my two factors when customers log in on their phones are the phone people log in with and the code they're sending to the customer's phone, oh wait that's only one factor. Although in the second example the bank wins by security theater.
The bank does offer a phone app that demands access to pretty much everything on my phone presumably for marketing / spam purposes or just being weirdo creeps, so needless to say I won't leave it installed, although I did try it for a short period of time. However the bank phone app sucks so I didn't lose much by uninstalling that creep-app. Also the creep-app doesn't do 2FA and seems to be permanently logged in, so I've downgraded my account access to merely the phone lock screen level of security, which isn't very good.
Damn. I never thought I'd be happy about my usually behind-the-curve bank, but my bank's app has me type in my user code, password and then identify with my fingerprint. Now, someone could still steal my phone and login to the banks website -- but that'd also require my fingerprint or cracking the very long passphrase, which while it can be done, if that's what I'm up against I've probably got bigger issues than my bank account being raided...
2FA means something [only] you know and something [only] you have (the phone number), the 3rd factor is usually something you are (biometric).
So using a password and the SMS on the phone is still 2FA as far as I know.
However, I also consider my home PC to be safe enough that I don't want 2FA on it. Nope, banks apparently don't want to waste money on considering this user story. Or that what about registering multiple tokens/phone numbers. Got a new phone? Just burn the old one, you can't have backup login methods!
Also the creep-app (...) seems to be permanently logged in
That's terrible. My bank's app is actually really insistent on logging me out; just locking the screen or switching apps will immediately lock it - though it doesn't lose internal state, which is nice.
While 2FA is often phrased as “Something you know and something you have”, I find that misleading. Knowledge is acquired from information, and the way they check what you have is through information alone.
What it really proves is that the telephony system authenticates you as part of their network. That authentication is done by the SIM card, which it is assumed you have unlocked with a password of entropy 13.3 if it's a PIN code with four random digits.
That, and your actual password.
By far the easiest way to get incorrectly identified through the telephony system is to break the PIN code, which requires to have physical access to your SIM card. But if all your secure HTTP cookies and/or your keyrings are only protected by that as well, then yes, your 2FA has a single point of failure. It goes from an arbitrarily strong password and something you have to a 13-bit entropy password and something you have. Or, if like so many you leak PIN code information from your life or the traces you leave on the surface of your phone, just something you have.
"Pick a security picture, now write a security phrase. Please choose three security questions. Now enter a password. Would you like to enable 2FA on your phone?"
My bank's mobile app does not work on rooted phones, because they are concerned for my safety, afraid that some rogue app will get my banking info and steal my money. Well, that's my problem, isn't it?
Do you know how most people with custom ROMs bypass this? They go on XDA and download a patched version from some stranger on the internet, stored on some malware-ridden file hosting service.
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.
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.
I'll check it out, thanks! AirDroid is a first good-enough solution I discovered, but it has way more features than I need - you can tweak and manage your mobile device from the web browser in all kind of ways, but the only thing I use is downloading/uploading files.
You can't blame the (quite old) phone for being difficult when one of the main interfaces is broken. And there are many apps that let you explore your phone via wifi instead of using Kies. Just searching "wifi file transfer" or "wifi file manager" gives you plenty of hits.
My phone and computer are on the same wireless network, so the cable is a little silly. I use an ftp server on my phone, and my file browser just deals with it like a normal folder. Adverts in the ftp server, though, a little ridiculous.
Many phones make this harder than it needs to be as well... my experience with a Motorola phone I had a few years ago:
Install driver X, restart your computer, unplug and replug the phone, shut down auto-starting "image manager" BS which came with the driver, look for (and fail to find) the raw mounted USB device, reload the propitiatory image manager, import the files, look for an export which actually exports the files and not a degraded version, and...
> 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.
Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.
For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.
I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.
Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.
Does this actually work for you with a recent Android phone?
On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic error.
Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.
On a Nexus 5, sure, it works. Both Mac and PC. Sister's Moto G, same thing.
Once on my Nexus 5 i got an error about copying a folder with lots of contents (some kind of backup i did i think). It forced me to archive it via a file manager on the phone and then transfer that instead. Only happened once though, and on Mac, which needs a standalone app to communicate with the device.
I looked at that but have you seen the permissions required. Wow. Change my contact list? I'm sure they have good reasons but I'm struggling with that for something I'm going to use for copying files.
While I've gotten MTP to work ok its not a first class experience. Folders with many files (like photos) can take a long time to even start copying. I assumed that MTP was done due avoid patents over FAT32 with Microsoft or something.
But isn't Android software and the APIs designed to be extremely modular? This could be solved through a separate app that enables the functionality. Maybe if Google's app store supported this idea more extensively, we could choose the options that an app has access to instead of just trusting they're not going to abuse the privilege.
I can relate to this. I transfer my files via SSH/SFTP when I have to because MTP is just completely unreliable, sometimes it works but most of the time it's just unpredictable.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the web is completely "open" and unlike "walled" proprietary platforms you have no choice of a programming language whatsoever (PS: fuck your transpilation).
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>"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.
Oh, this mail exchange is golden. Note in particular one of the responses to Bill's concerns:
"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 thal the user has to purposeful~/go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-s~de 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"
(WU is Windows Update)
This is how we end up with so much crap in software. It's like there are people in important positions who live in alternate reality where those ideas don't immediately sound fucking insane.
Thank you for posting this rare opportunity to look into the minds of people that are responsible for all this mess we have to deal with.
I really appreciate how even-keeled he is despite being utterly frustrated with the experience. I think the worst he said was "crap," which I find refreshing.
That's something I hope I bring to every team I'm on.
Yeah, although it feels good in the moment to let loose whatever salty vocabulary you have, it definitely distracts from the substance of your point in most instances.
Thank you, this made me regain all my respect for Bill Gates and imagine that the messy shit that is Windows today was not his intended or approved creation.
Scroll to the bottom, and read Bill Gates giving a Steve Jobs-ian second-by-second critique of user experience. I remember software sucking in 2003 just as Gates describes. I have new respect for him. I especially love his line
> These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.
Ha! I always thought Documents and Settings\me\My Documents was weird.
He also says:
> What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft
Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage2,
Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.
Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The
registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
Wow. I mean I found Linux's pieces made ten times more sense than their Windows equivalents. And Bill Gates in 2003 shared my sentiment (not relative to Linux of course)!
Another person in the email chain lists problems with Windows Update:
> Critical updates that aren’t really critical--if you're machine is behind a firewall many just aren’t critical.
I'm glad somebody identified that issue. The computer "lying" to people causes a lot of computer-ennui. The computer says to someone, "Install this critical security update" but husband/partner/IT guy says, "Eh, don't worry about." In the aggregate I think this hurts people's desire to learn more about computing.
Say what you will about the email exchange, I think that is the most excellent problem report you'll ever see out of a C-level exec. It's the steps-to-repro/expected/observed report pattern that even seasoned testers too often can't be bothered with. Gates even goes so far as to give timings instead of estimates: "...six minutes" vs. "after a long time". We can all learn something, especially you, Little Ms. "I've been a tester for ten years and know how to write a bug report".
The replies are horribly disappointing, however. A bunch of managers chiming in without providing actionable, useful solutions so as to raise their "visibility". Nothing in that exchange (and granted, that's just the one we're privy to) encourages me to think the problem will get fixed.
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 ...
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.
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.
293 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadAlso, 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.)
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
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-t...
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.
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
Little by little, we abstract ourselves away.
I'm good now ;)
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.
I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.
I think it's a mix of both ignorance of better options, and familiarity with the status-quo.
People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.
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).
I always told friends to go to the small independent shop over the road where they will get a better deal. But then they have to speak to someone who will baffle them with jargon. Its far easier to see the 40% discount offer (from the initially high prices) as some sort of bargain. I have wasted hours uninstalling crap from PC World machines. One came with 3 firewalls and it wouldn't connect to the internet.
I agree with 90% of the points in the article, but I also know that others have implemented similar solutions and only fews have, instead, tackled the same problems with a different, better implemented, solutions.
Anyway, the most annoying example is Skype, I really hate the "oh it looks like is a Live Account, redirecting..." flow, it's annoying.
Here's an update to the piece of software that you had enjoyed using and had incorporated into your daily workflow. It has a whole bunch of features you didn't want and the new interface is so complicated and intrusive and buggy that it renders the whole thing nearly worthless. Something that worked well for you before has been taken away for no discernible reason. Becoming enraged at this may not be rational, but it is human nature.
It's the same everywhere. Shit flows from the walls, up through the streets, through and within everything we interact with, because we've managed to build a civilisation on "that'll do" and "well, forever!" so far, and through some unlikely sequence of sheer fluke we're here to talk about it.
The internet is a bodge job. The web is a bodge job. This finely made bit of machinery I type this on is a bodge job - and so are my shoes, this chair, the postman outside, the tarmac on the street and the governance of our societies.
We put up with it because we go through a phase of learning "the way things are", and then go one of several ways:
- Accept and/or support the status quo
- Realise things could be better but realise that your task is so huge you cannot begin to do anything about it, and revert to the above.
- Try to work with others to change things for the better.
The third camp are the ones who make the bodge jobs, because they ultimately realise that time is the one true constraint, and you don't know what perfection is until you've seen it. We're solving a big old NP problem called "humanity" one excruciating step at a time.
Anyway, it's up to us to go make some better bodge jobs, which'll do for now, and not forever.
Still, its technical history is that of bodge jobs, even if its matter is free of the constraints other "works" require.
Implementation rarely is hard. Some problems brought up in TFA were already solved years, if not decades ago. There's no reason we should have problem downloading photos from our phones and sending them to family. And it was easier in the pre-smartphone/early smartphone era than it is today.
I blame the same force that gave us our progress - capitalism, the market economy, and the mindset it promotes among management. In established markets, all the easy things have already been solved - you can't win any more customers by creating quality products. You have to squeeze money out of perfectly working things. This is where the engine of capitalism stops being aligned with humanity's needs.
There's a business term for all that crap - "value-added". When you see some "value-added" thing it means that the company is about to shit on you to get more money, either from you or someone else. We didn't have that much crapware on computers until vendors realized they could get paid by third parties by bundling their worthless (for end-user) crap. It's a gamble that worked well for the companies - people will deal with crap because they don't have any other choice, and vendors get more profit.
Then there's completely purposeful degradation. Some of the things we had much better 60 years ago than today: shoes, clothes, kettles, lightbulbs, utensils, kitchenware, various home appliances. Sure, they weren't that shiny and plastic, they didn't have an army of "designers" behind them, but they fucking worked and they still fucking work today. I still have a microwave bought ~20 years ago in Sweden, and it fucking works and never had a single glitch. My grandfathers have equipment bought when they were young, whereas my shoes and clothes degrade within half a year or less.
This is the problem. We know very well how to make good things. But making good things is not profitable compared to shitting on your customers.
However, since so much is "free as in beer" people have to layer on a bunch of stuff to monetize everything.
People aren't trying to build better mousetraps. They are trying to monetize the mousetrapping experience for social. No, wait, we have to throw all that out because we are trying to capture mindshare for mousetrapping on mobile.
I disagree, and that's why I brought crapware bundled with PCs and all the non-tech products which get progressively worse. We buy this stuff. Companies aren't giving laptops or coffee makers for free. But we've reached the point of overall-pretty-good computer or coffee maker some time ago. The dynamics works like this: a company can get a little bit more money by bundling some crap or adding some non-feature. This lets them undercut their competitors. Soon, everyone follows, and you see a continuous increase of crap. A race to the bottom.
The end-game is not incremental improvements. It's as bad products as possible, that are still good enough that people will buy them.
At least we have options on the web, plus the option to improve/fix things (relatively speaking). He can always send his photos as attachments in an email, or put them up on dropbox and send the link etc. Offline? Different story altogether. That is why people put up with things online. When you get used to real life crap, these problems online seem small.
Then again, I guess it's my fault because I always put in the spaces because I'm a masochist who likes finding out how much the web sucks.
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.
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"
This is my feeling as well. The norms on mobile and the web are so far out from anything I'd call common sense or proper usability that it must be cargo cultism at work here. Its just so. friggin. bad.
I also think this is why Apple is doing so well now. They're guilty of these sins, but their ultra-minimalist approach means they're able to sin less than others. Google's "anything goes" mentality allows these bad habits and this broken culture to thrive.
I'm not too pessimistic about it. We're still in some growing pains here. Mobile is a kind of a mess. Memory unsafe languages rule. Privacy is non-existant, Security is in the toilet, etc. I think there will be a shakedown of these things and we'll look back at this time as being needlessly reckless.
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.
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.
If Starbucks gave away free coffee but monetized their restrooms, their coffee would eventually end up full of diuretics.
Normally, a company (either startup or not) cares most for its clients, because they are the ones that pay its topline and ultimately its workers' salaries. Other parties (users, providers, government, whatever) also have power and can also influence the company's behaviour, but clients normally have it easiest.
That does not always hold, as I said. Another example is you being a commodity client; if the company is, for example, more interested on big clients, your interests might not be the first concern for that company. But they will have you in mind, nonetheless, as the bad service you receive can signal something bad for bigger clients. Sometimes, even big clients are commodities, as they can't wield a lot of power, so the company can act not in its client's best interests (monopolies or tax burden when price is inelastic are scenarios that come quickly to mind).
I still don't buy that rule though. Let me illustrate it by a graph:
Companies have figured out that the point of maximum profit is not aligned with the point of maximum user satisfaction, and they only care about the former - the latter is a proxy. In every mature market we're past maximum user satisfaction point, and this is what we perceive as "products getting crappier".The bug is in the design of 2FA. Sooner or later Google will get rid of GV and I'll just move to another provider to front-end my SMS spam instead of sending it to my phone. The other failure mode is best displayed by my bank not realizing their site is accessible via mobile, so my two factors when customers log in on their phones are the phone people log in with and the code they're sending to the customer's phone, oh wait that's only one factor. Although in the second example the bank wins by security theater.
The bank does offer a phone app that demands access to pretty much everything on my phone presumably for marketing / spam purposes or just being weirdo creeps, so needless to say I won't leave it installed, although I did try it for a short period of time. However the bank phone app sucks so I didn't lose much by uninstalling that creep-app. Also the creep-app doesn't do 2FA and seems to be permanently logged in, so I've downgraded my account access to merely the phone lock screen level of security, which isn't very good.
Even if you log on on your phone, it's still something you know and something you have, this does not diminish the 2FA.
So using a password and the SMS on the phone is still 2FA as far as I know.
However, I also consider my home PC to be safe enough that I don't want 2FA on it. Nope, banks apparently don't want to waste money on considering this user story. Or that what about registering multiple tokens/phone numbers. Got a new phone? Just burn the old one, you can't have backup login methods!
That's terrible. My bank's app is actually really insistent on logging me out; just locking the screen or switching apps will immediately lock it - though it doesn't lose internal state, which is nice.
While 2FA is often phrased as “Something you know and something you have”, I find that misleading. Knowledge is acquired from information, and the way they check what you have is through information alone.
What it really proves is that the telephony system authenticates you as part of their network. That authentication is done by the SIM card, which it is assumed you have unlocked with a password of entropy 13.3 if it's a PIN code with four random digits.
That, and your actual password.
By far the easiest way to get incorrectly identified through the telephony system is to break the PIN code, which requires to have physical access to your SIM card. But if all your secure HTTP cookies and/or your keyrings are only protected by that as well, then yes, your 2FA has a single point of failure. It goes from an arbitrarily strong password and something you have to a 13-bit entropy password and something you have. Or, if like so many you leak PIN code information from your life or the traces you leave on the surface of your phone, just something you have.
"Pick a security picture, now write a security phrase. Please choose three security questions. Now enter a password. Would you like to enable 2FA on your phone?"
My bank's mobile app does not work on rooted phones, because they are concerned for my safety, afraid that some rogue app will get my banking info and steal my money. Well, that's my problem, isn't it?
Do you know how most people with custom ROMs bypass this? They go on XDA and download a patched version from some stranger on the internet, stored on some malware-ridden file hosting service.
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.
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.
Install driver X, restart your computer, unplug and replug the phone, shut down auto-starting "image manager" BS which came with the driver, look for (and fail to find) the raw mounted USB device, reload the propitiatory image manager, import the files, look for an export which actually exports the files and not a degraded version, and...
Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.
For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.
I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.
Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.
On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic error.
Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.
Once on my Nexus 5 i got an error about copying a folder with lots of contents (some kind of backup i did i think). It forced me to archive it via a file manager on the phone and then transfer that instead. Only happened once though, and on Mac, which needs a standalone app to communicate with the device.
I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to be.
Not having to unmount the phone when disconnecting, IIRC.
While I've gotten MTP to work ok its not a first class experience. Folders with many files (like photos) can take a long time to even start copying. I assumed that MTP was done due avoid patents over FAT32 with Microsoft or something.
I use it exclusively to transfer files, much faster then connecting a cable.
Pardon my ignorance, but what's a DTA?
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.
Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.
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.
It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.
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).)
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.
>>"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.
"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 thal the user has to purposeful~/go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-s~de 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"
(WU is Windows Update)
This is how we end up with so much crap in software. It's like there are people in important positions who live in alternate reality where those ideas don't immediately sound fucking insane.
Thank you for posting this rare opportunity to look into the minds of people that are responsible for all this mess we have to deal with.
That's something I hope I bring to every team I'm on.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Scroll to the bottom, and read Bill Gates giving a Steve Jobs-ian second-by-second critique of user experience. I remember software sucking in 2003 just as Gates describes. I have new respect for him. I especially love his line
> These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.
Ha! I always thought Documents and Settings\me\My Documents was weird.
He also says:
> What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3. Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
Wow. I mean I found Linux's pieces made ten times more sense than their Windows equivalents. And Bill Gates in 2003 shared my sentiment (not relative to Linux of course)!
Another person in the email chain lists problems with Windows Update: > Critical updates that aren’t really critical--if you're machine is behind a firewall many just aren’t critical.
I'm glad somebody identified that issue. The computer "lying" to people causes a lot of computer-ennui. The computer says to someone, "Install this critical security update" but husband/partner/IT guy says, "Eh, don't worry about." In the aggregate I think this hurts people's desire to learn more about computing.
The replies are horribly disappointing, however. A bunch of managers chiming in without providing actionable, useful solutions so as to raise their "visibility". Nothing in that exchange (and granted, that's just the one we're privy to) encourages me to think the problem will get fixed.