This kind of ‘user centric’ justification is rubbish and we all know it.
What this is, pure and simpe, is ‘throw it at a wall and see what sticks’.
Maybe people will like it and they’ll run with it, or maybe people will hate it and it’ll get binned.
Fair enough; but its got zippo to do with user quality of life or what users actually want; its just easier to justify value by adding features than fixing existing ones.
‘Speculative development’
Bitbucket does this all the time as well; its super annoying.
If you want to improve user quality of life, you know what you need to do?
People do want this. If you asked me what I want, in terms of software, a great cloud IDE is near the top of my list.
I didn’t want this before I had kids, though. But now that I do, I greatly value being able to stop work suddenly, even in the middle of a line of code, and then resume what I was doing sometime in the future, somewhere else and on a different device.
So: different people want different things, and the things people want change over time, too.
You might not want a cloud IDE, but based on the many projects and companies in this space, and the many millions of dollars being spent on it, I’m quite sure I am not alone in wanting to be able to code in the cloud.
Years ago, it was equally implausible to do your word-processing and spreadsheets in the cloud. Now it’s routine.
Well, I can't say for sure if if would benefit you, but the one thing I found useful about it is that it makes it easy to do code reviews without checking out the whole project.
At work we use GitHub, so to do a code review I have to check out the working branch or PR that I am reviewing, and review it in my local IDE/editor software. I have to do that because the web UI that shows the PR diff generally isn't sufficient to really review the code. I want to quickly jump to related files to follow the code path, keep the subset of files I'm referring to open in new tabs, get a project-level view of how the pieces fit together, and maybe step through some of the code in the debugger.
Now, the first two are possible just using a web UI but it's very unlike a normal code editing experience. Using the GitLab IDE interface makes it easier to do the first three of those things. It still cannot actually run/debug a program, but I presume that their goal is to someday enable that kind of thing, at least for some kinds of projects.
Today, all major git repo hosting services have rudimentary web-based single-file text editors — seems to me that adding IDE-like multi-file project-level editors is a pretty straightforward and logical extension of that.
So yeah, as a GitLab user, I want this. As a GitHub user, I want them to copy this idea and implement something similar. And if I were a BitBucket user...
Users do want this. The Cloud9 Web IDE was popular enough that amazon acquired it and now it's part of their offerings in the AWS family. There is also CodeAnywhere that has paying users.
This kind of ‘user centric’ justification is rubbish and we all know it.
What this is, pure and simpe, is ‘throw it at a wall and see what sticks’.
Maybe people will like it and they’ll run with it, or maybe people will hate it and it’ll get binned.
Fair enough; but its got zippo to do with user quality of life or what users actually want; its just easier to justify value by adding features than fixing existing ones.
‘Speculative development’
Bitbucket does this all the time as well; its super annoying.
If you want to improve user quality of life, you know what you need to do?
Ask users what they want. ...and listen.