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
Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November.
Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...
There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.
Bad is an understatement. Problems with Lollipop I've experienced so far:
* Calls don't work. Had to reinstall OS a couple of times. Known Google bug that they refuse to fix on their own Nexus 4 phone. Bug also exists in Android 4.x. Yay!
* Contacts didn't show names. Had to reinstall OS.
* Bluetooth skips, sometimes fails to connect, and after disconnecting, always reconnects with no sound (though the song metadata is transmitted) - no solution that i've found so far
* Calls and texts sometimes do not alert, even when not in the quiet period - no solution / unable to replicate
* For a long time google apps just crashed, but I was able to finally solve that after reinstalling the OS and google apps a few dozen times
* Hangouts will not let you delete more than one conversation at a time
* No silent mode (speaks a lot to the idiocy of Google's product team)
* The new maps interface is incredibly slow and unusable at times (the article gets this one spot on), especially without a very fast connection (not limited to Android of course--the new slow, downgraded experience is available on all platforms from Google)
I'm pretty certain I won't buy any more Google hardware due to their lack of support (which seems to span all of their product divisions) and likely will avoid Android in general if at all possible. It's ironic because the Nexus 4 hardware seems to be quite excellent and well built--I haven't been able to break the phone yet even when intentionally smashing it into the ground as hard as I could multiple times because of the above (the bumper helps a lot, I think). The only reason I haven't made the switch yet is that a $649 starting price (really closer to $800 for a decent model after tax) for an iPhone is simply atrocious for a phone and worse than the horrific problems described above. For now ...
> Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory.
The only thing that makes Android usable in a sane way for me is custom ROMs and Titanium Backup's app freezing.
To continue the parent link's sentiments, it's like someone built an operating system at a company that employed such talented people that no one wanted to work on usability minutia. (Note: design is NOT usability)
Am I just desensetized to quality or, do I put up with a lot more issues than I should, or do I not have the same high standards as everyone else? As far as I can tell, Lollipop (aka Android 5.0) works brilliantly, and everyone thatI recall speaking to who has it is also similarly pleased. To call it a failure seems to be vastly overstating the viewpoints of a minority of customers. My Sony Z3 Compact and LG G Watch R work great, and that seems to be the general experience of other with modern devices. I get that it's fun to hate and rage, but this seems nitpicky - nothing is perfect, and Googla has great track record for pushing bugfixes and updates for Android and Chrome. #satisfied
> Am I just desensetized to quality or, do I put up with a lot more issues than I should, or do I not have the same high standards as everyone else?
Hard to say. My best guess is that you put up with a lot more issues than you should. The mobile is so utterly broken that we all have to get used to it to stay sane.
But from my personal experience, and I'm not saying that it applies to you personally, I've noticed that many people just don't give a fuck about the looks. Go and look at how majority of people write letters, or even how they write on the Internet. The amount of typos and overall lack of style is so big that 60 years ago a typical reader would get a heart attack.
Looking at the world as it is today, I start to feel that it's me who has insanely high standards because I want things to look and feel nice, not just barely work.
----
Oh, and about Lollipop - I've seen so many cases where something utterly broken on my device worked fine on everyone elses and reverse, that I learned to appreciate that things just really don't work the same even on the same brand of hardware. It's entirely possible that you and your friends have a good experience while for some reason, GPs device-software combination is broken. Hell, I personally never had any issues with Windows Vista, and almost no one believes me it's possible.
The Sony Z3 Compact is a VERY powerful device, and also pretty expensive (U$ 400 or so). On slightly older or less powerful devices, Lollipop is INCREDIBLY bad.
It's so bad I'm recommending a switch to Windows for users that haven't bought into the ecosystem too much - basically U$ 100 Windows/Nokia phones outperform U$ 100 Android phones by a huge margin, so are a better buy for casual users, plus Microsoft is subsidizing phones over here.
My Google Nexus 7 tablet was unusable with the Lollipop update. My LG G3 Mini also performs extremely badly. OTOH my iPad 1st generation is still going strong (though I've seen iPhones go bricky with iOS updates).
Edit: note that I had badmouthed Windows phones previously after an incredibly frustrating experience with older Nokia phones.
me neither, but a bug I've only seen on my Nexus 5 is that my timestamps on recent hangouts messages say "now" for hours. This is a problem if I mix hangouts and SMS because SMS runs on a normal timestamp, so essentially all of my texts appear above my hangouts. For a while it just seemed like my texts weren't actually coming in at all.
On my Note 4, I get the same (possibly related) date/time issues manifesting in Google Maps; "Driving distance 37 miles. Drive time estimated 72 hours" :)
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.
Interestingly, as the breadth and complexity of Google product grows, the need for true customer service grows, disproportionately. Very few of us needed "customer support" for Google Search, but for many of their newer, more complex products, it's a must. Google either missed this need altogether, or they decided that even with crappy/no CS, they could still make a killing with half-assed products/support. Thoughts?
I think you are right - and for me having bad customer support is a miss. If the customer support "costs" why don't include that cost in the products price? Bad customer support @ Google has turned me away from their Google Docs. Customer support is also needed when the UI is not self-explanatory like Google's very often.
They have Google Apps for the Enterprise, but very often you can't reach the Enterprise without the proper support, product documentation and service. From the other hand, I got very positive experience with Microsoft support which proves that "Customer support at scale" is possible.
The place which is hilariously broken is that on the Google play store, I cant give star ratings to movies / music that I like to get a more customized experience because doing so requires you to publicly disclose on Google+ that you liked / disliked that movie/song.
Google Photos is a very recent addition to Google Drive[1]. I'm not sure the change even rolled out to everyone yet and still not all my photos have been migrated. They used to be only availble through the bizarre web interface within Google+ that OP described.
Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile.
Can't understand why everything in lollipop is so white and bright, complely degraded the UX. Android was dark-ish from the start.. now all apps are following the same trend, which will only worsen the situation
Don't even get me started... Just wanted to add a user to my Google Apps domain. Couldn't for the love of god find the button. One minute passed. Tried CMD+F, nothing. Asked my colleague, Google Fanboy. Turned out that button was the only one completely hidden out of sight in the very lower right corner of my 27" cinema display and camouflaged in candy green, in stark contrast to the rest of the serious looking and actually usable interface because "material design" and "mobile first". Fuck that, it's just blatantly stupid and annoying UX. WTF?
I think Google is taking a lot of wrong decisions in terms of strategy. I really liked Material Design and how they tackled the UI discrepancies in their products, but on the Android world this is just a mess. If you want it, you need Lollipop that is just the 5% of the Android world. Can a developer ignore the 95% of the Google Play store? NO.
Then they ported Google Apps, it was nice, but Google Apps wasn't requiring a real re-style, but a better integration with apps and with their services too. Nope, we got a new UI.
It looks like they are prioritizing things that people are not caring now, at least, not so much compared to other things...
They could never get design right. First it was complete shit because they didn't care, then they copied Microsoft's metro and called it Holo, then they came up with Cards UI and now they have Material. Not one of these was properly implemented in their own apps, which should tell you a lot about their inner workings.
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap.
Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.
I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.
Google puts out free or cheap services and devices because they're trying to draw users to their platform, which gathers metrics about usage. These feed into the services, but they also feed in to Google's need to be a better advertising platform. Although we think of Google as the company behind the eponymous search engine and Android phone, it's actually an advertiser. I'm not sure if it's still in the 95% range, but it's still high. I have a 7" Nexus tablet which (for the time) was a great tablet at an insanely good price. But I knew I was essentially giving up information about what I read, what I listen to, and what apps I used in exchange for the free services and discounted device.
In contrast my Apple devices aren't cheap, and there is less collection of data with the intent of selling my attention to third party advertising clients, but they are more expensive and I pay an iCloud subscription fee. For the most part the Mac software doesn't suck and works reasonably well. I don't love everything about it but it's more appealing than Picasa for photos. I do pay for extra storage on Google to back up my pictures (over 100 gigs of family photos). But I am definitely paying more Apple in a direct sense (buying computers and phones + iCloud) than to Google (Google Play and 1 device). Apple's margin on hardware is high, but they make a quality product (for the most part).
What I give Google is information about myself, my work, my family, the music I listen to, the books I read, and anything and everything I ever searched for. They're pretty open and transparent about this, and I pretty much understand what I'm turning over in exchange for their free stuff. See the Google dashboard on you. If there's an application or service hosted by Google, I pretty much understand their intent is to extract data from that service or application.
That works for most people, even though they really don't understand this exchange or think about it. Free is a powerful lure and most consumers have come to expect not to pay anything at all for software and services. That's why they download a free game and keep playing it even when they find out it sends the contents of their address book off to some weird holding company. It's also why they get suckered into free games (because 4.99 is just too expensive on an App store) and then spend multiples of that amount in in-game purchases. It's why they're willing to turn over even extremely intimate details of their life for free e-mail or messaging services.
But the incentive for Google is not to make great software or hardware because that's how they make their money. Their incentive is to roll out services which help them collect information to feed their need for information about your tastes and behaviors. If that photo app you're using doesn't really give them more information, there's no incentive to make it better. Apple has an incentive to make software good enough to support their device/computer sales. Microsoft (arguably) has an incentive to make software good enough for manufacturers to license it. Apple and Microsoft, no matter how much people love to shit on them, actually have more straight forward, simple motives. They have an actual financial incentive to care about the quality of the product they deliver because you are paying them (directly or indirectly).
tl;dr Google only makes software good enough to draw you in to collect data. Other vendors are selling yous something and therefore have an interest in making that thing better.
> Although we think of Google as the company behind the eponymous search engine and Android phone, it's actually an advertiser.
Don't forget about Play Store revenue. They're making money hand over fist by taking a cut of app sales, which is enough to financially justify Android. Oh, and the media sales too, which don't even require Android.
When I realized all this, I switched to hosted paid email service and moved off using Google services. Last thing now was selling the Android phone and getting the alternative, where at least you get value and support for your money.
As with most software/hardware, the alternative is to not "upgrade" and put up with the negative comments you'll get (both from other people and websites) but if it's such a regression in functionality, should we really continue calling them "upgrades"? I feel like we've reached somewhat of a saturation point in the past few years. Meanwhile, with systems becoming more locked-down and proprietary, every new revision feels like it's incrementally taking control away from the user and replacing it with superficial beauty.
I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.
Gmail became so painful about two years ago. So I moved to Fastmail (wow, web UI can be THAT fast!). New Google Maps were broken for a couple of months. Google's own developer plugins like Game Services and AdMob are buggy and unintuitive.
Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.
I just went and checked. Surprisingly, they added the month view to portrait and brought back the week view (who had the idea that "week" has 5 days is beyond me). If you turn your device to landscape position however, you get only the week view, with no ability to change it.
I always never use landscape because it is not handy enough for me (I use a smartphone not a tablet). I actually turned the reorientation accessibility feature off.
The original "new" calendar only had month view in landscape but the current one has full month view in portrait as well. Basically with the original design I assume they figured it would be too info-dense and hard to read. People complained (understandably) so they added it in an update.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>"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.
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.
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 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.
Fixing the space issue will help more people than it hurts. People that have spaces at the beginning or end of their password can simply reset their password or call customer support. Users forget or mistype passwords all the time.
There's a huge swath of the industry where it doesn't make sense to release any faster than a few times a year. Think Office applications, RDBMS products, email servers, accounting apps, etc, etc. Even the fastest cadence apps (like browsers) are on more of a 6-week cycle. The web is unique in that every visit is an opportunity to deliver new code, but there's way to much friction with most application types to do that.
All methodologies have the goal of working software. Where they differ is in how they try to get there.
Agile came about because people started saying "hey, this process we have for creating working software isn't actually creating working software. Maybe we should try another process."
Software is a hell of a lot easier to write and test if you have a decent well thought out set or requirements. Getting that is far harder than any coding.
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.
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]
That reminds me of a bug I found during my first internship. The company had it's own niche social network centered around it's main product. On it, you were able to change your display name at any time, and if you added any spaces to the beginning or end of your username, you could hijack another users profile. That is, I could change my username to " snarfy", and if you clicked my display name to go to my profile, it would actually go to yours. A malicious user could use this to make inflammatory posts posing as a high profile user.
The bug was that the display name was first checked to see if it already existed before white space was stripped. Luckily this was fixed very quickly after it was found, as it existed in production.
My favourite was a recent banking webform which refused to recognise "0". Apparently it's not a real number. When I got through to support, they explained I had to leave the box blank to represent zero...
I live in the USA and have a credit card issued by an American bank. When I pay my bill online, I want the $ and comma to work like I've known they work ever since I was in first grade over 50 years ago.
I don't give a fuck about how the rest of the world does numbers and banking. That's their problem. If the UK were still using guineas and shillings, should I care about that?
No. Deal with foreign currency problems on their websites. If the rest of the world wants to use commas and periods backwards from the way we do, then solve that problem for them elsewhere. Don't make my life difficult just so you can use the same code for a website in Elbonia.
The rest of the world's problems are not my problems. Solve them, or don't. But don't make my life hard because you're* too fucking lazy to do the right thing.
Computers should exist to make peoples' lives easier. People shouldn't be required to make programmers' lives easier.
/rant off
*not you personally, I don't know what you do, it's just an indefinite pronoun
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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 :).
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!?
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
The requested magic with payment inputs is tricky. Commas and periods are both used for thousands and decimals sometimes interchangeably within the same country.
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. :(
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the web is completely "open" and unlike "walled" proprietary platforms you have no choice of a programming language whatsoever (PS: fuck your transpilation).
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.
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".
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.
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