This strikes at a slightly different problem, the latency of actually showing things on screen, but points out that not all is going well.
It was slow, awkward, and needed a few days' training to get up to speed with. Redrawing a map on the screen took a couple of seconds. Scrolling around to find stuff wasn't really possible. But give it a postcode and it knew where everything was. And give it a list of 10 postcodes and it would spit out the best route a few minutes later.
Google's UX for everything except search is utter shite. I don't know what they think they're doing. Anyone here from Google who can explain why their UX is so crap?
They are doing search. Specifialy, the monetizable variety of it.
The real question is why do people insist on using it? If people didn't, they would have to broaden their goals.
You can think of everything else they do as a hobby for a rich person. They don't really need the money and they don't really care about it. Sometimes it turns out well, and sometimes not. It doesn't matter either way.
I need to buy groceries, get a few t-shirts, ship a package, and put gas in my car. Minimize travel time.
Alternatively (and even easier):
I need to go to Safeway, Target, the UPS store, and Chevron. Pick a route and and order.
This would be trivial to enter into the computer using the interface in the article, and trivial for a modern computer to compute and display in under a second.
Why would you need to do that, though? It only makes sense if you’re going to print out directions, which no one does any more. You put your destination in the maps app in your phone and go. Then enter the next destination once you’re there. And so on. There’s very little utility in planning such a trip upfront in a world of ubiquitous GPS and internet.
Only if you know where on the map the place is which you wouldn't since you found it in a book. In Google Maps, I click "Add Destination" and put in the address. Drag it to the right places and it's now part of my route. On a paper map, I need to spend 10 minutes finding the address, referring to the index on the back to find the right square.
Think of it this way: everything our phones/computers do for us reduces our ability to do the same task in the long and short term.
Exposing us less to the challenges of the past is not a bug, it's a feature.
It has gotten worse since. On one machine, I have an NFS mount over WiFi. Network manager wants mount to complete before it runs because they didn’t think before they implemented it. I eventually got that machine to boot, but it takes an extra 5 seconds.
Also, when I start typing with the keyboard, I have no idea which web page text box has default focus. At least with Word (which I really, really hated), the document body always had keyboard focus.
Also, if I go back to edit a word in the middle of a previous sentence, the operating system sometimes decides I want the first character to be uppercase (and sometimes it doesn’t).
Just now, it took 5 tries to get the damn thing to type a freaking lowercase letter. I have autocorrect disabled, or it would be even worse.
Heck, you can’t even reliably guess which direction a mouse wheel will scroll any more.
This thing is blisteringly fast.
I do not miss Windows XP.
He's right that speed matters. It matters when you are driving in traffic and you need to know where to take that left turn. I don't use Google Maps or any map app when I'm driving because it's too damn dangerous. Much better to take a screenshot of the map beforehand because jpgs don't take 45 seconds to load. Sure, you can pull over and wait a minute for the map to load (and sometimes I do this), but with a paper map you can just fold it so that the area you are driving in appears and with a glance you can see where that turn is. Load speed ~0.5 seconds.
The issue, as far as I am concerned, is not with the UI of the apps, but with the OS. It strikes me as completely primitive that modern OS's (and I include browsers, because they are basically a one-abstraction-layer-higher OS) don't have a proper way of prioritizing the user's needs, instead leaving it to the applications. It's an abdication of responsibility IMHO.
I'm sure there are challenges and reasons why it is that way. Maybe there are experimental OS's which do this properly or ways to tweak existing ones. I don't know enough about this. I'd be happy to learn more from those of you who do...
To me that means it is no longer my/your computer.
> Maybe there are experimental OS's which do this properly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTLinux
Funny: In JS I tried to find the maximum number of http requests a system could make. Async operations have unpredictable response time. Parsing the payload when it is returned was not an option since you end up with more parse jobs than the system can deal with at that moment which freezes the UI. (Earlier requests may arrive late, later requests might arrive soon.) So I ended up de-async-ing the tasks an doing them with setInterval (which requires checking the time or it will cluster up the parse tasks again) and tuning down the number of requests if there are many unfinished parse jobs. Now, if the user clicks something everything waits except dumping the responses into an array. Previously I couldn't lower the number of requests far enough to completely avoid UI freezes. They only got less frequent. With everything synced properly I can push the rate of the requests 20 times higher without freezes than async with 1 freeze per minute.
Excessively dismissive. It's not so patently false when you recall that applications on personal computers were designed to do much less in 1983 than they are now.
The model gestured at in the assertion is (arguably) one in which perceptual speed is a function of an application's (1) proximity to the outer bounds of a machine's capabilities, and (2) the efficiency of its implementation.
This is elucidating, and a useful contribution.
Also, if you some real fucking power, try this:
https://ls2pac.lapl.org/?section=search&term=grapes%20of%20w...
Yeah, NOT only can you check out an ebook of Grapes or Wrath FROM HOME, you can find out the exact number on the shelf in multiple libraries if you want the actual book.
I bet they didn't have THAT in 1998.