Speed Is the Killer Feature
bdickason.com
bdickason.com
What iphone was a LOT better at than everyone else was UX. Of which speed is one component, of course. It's funny how much people never get it although it happened in front of us, it happened to us. At the time I was working at Nokia Research and I remember my girlfriend telling me how his boss got this wonderful phone that you can take photos with and you can view them, etc. The funny thing is that I had such a phone since 2001. I have been working with smartphones for 6 years then, she knew it, she listened to me when I told her or others what I was doing (and then listen to others responding "yeah, but phones are for making phone calls"). She saw me browsing the net on my phones (a 9210 communicator and then a 9500), send emails from the beach, etc.
Still it somehow didn't register. Because it looked like something that she'd never use. And then the iphone that did a lot less made her and basically everyone understand what a smartphone is. (Even though by then symbian smartphones were pretty common, most people didn't use them as smartphones.)
So no, it's not simply the speed. It's the UX. And even if we talk about speed, it's still not the speed, but it's the perception of the speed, which a lot has been written about: delay (lagging) matters a lot even if speed on average is OK.
With this in place commerce could begin on the phone. Once everyone added mobile pay options it could end there as well. An now everyone has one, if they can.
It helps that the iPhone was a iPod with a phone attached, instead of a phone with a multi-use compute device attached.
OG iPods were single purpose music players, and features that made sense were slowly introduced over time (and were optional). Adding support for photo viewing made sense because album art is universal and well, album art is no different than a photo. Adding video made sense because you have this nice color screen for showing the photos/album art, and music videos are a thing people enjoy. Then adding a camera make sense, because you can already view photos/videos. Once you have all that in one package, adding phone capabilities makes a lot of sense when you realize that people are carrying around iPods along with a cellphone.
The KILLER feature is the total time to do something that the user intends to do.
If you have a very fast OS, but bad UX then the rate-limiting step is the UX, not the OS. And the converse is also true.
Having an expressive vocabulary and complex grammar is great for saying a lot quickly if they’re fluent but painfully slow for anyone who isn’t.
It would help me at least if you could specify/ list what you think were the things in UX that made it so much better than Symbian phones.
But in the case of iOS vs Symbian:
- as others said: capacitive touch screen (this is not an OS issue, but iphone was among the firsts to use it, definitely earlier than Nokia). This is huge. Like the thing that everyone was talking about (around me) when the original iphone came out is how you could swipe to see the pictures. And it wasn't just for paging, it defined how you could interact with the phone (think pinch zooming, and rotation - not sure when these were added).
- the touch screen UI itself. Nokia played around with the touch UI before, but never really liked it. It was expressed several times internally, that touch is just a no go. But no wonder: the resistive touch screen is pretty bad, but also Symbian itself was built on the assumption that all you have is keys while iOS was built with touch UI in mind from the very beginning. (Now, of course touch was added to Symbian, but that's just not the same. Or they didn't put in the effort. Nokia even had an experimental touch phone released to the market in 2003, the 7700[1], but it was mostly ridiculous.)
- the UI just was a lot more polished, looked better, classier, the graphics was better. They had OpenGL and probably a graphics accelerator - nothing like that in Symbian, of course. (It even took the android guys by surprise, I remember reading/hearing in an interview that when they saw a demo or the release, they've realized that they had to redo the UI from scratch. Because before that they had this Blackberry-ish/Symbianish idea, they thought they were competing with that.)
- I'm pretty sure it had a better browser.
And this pretty much defines the experience, the feel a user gets from the phone. It couldn't send or receive MMS-es (some people may have used it then, but most I guess just wanted to have the feature), it couldn't receive 'push' email. I.e. you had to manually refresh your inbox, emails didn't just arrive. It didn't even have apps. Symbian had all these. It has had these for years then. It even had an app store like thing (at least you had to send in your app for verification which would then be signed by Nokia or it couldn't be installed - that was a new thing around 2004-2006, something I think nobody really did before).
I'd argue the latter, but it could be a question of framing?
But you are right that the capacitive display itself makes the interaction faster because it's enough to touch while the resistive has to be pressed. So it's probably slower and feels like you have to put in more effort.
Sure, for many, iPhones are still preferred because of the low latency, so it matters, but I suspect the iPhone would've done just as well if the latency was bad. The competition was about finger vs keys/pencil, not latency.
We can think of things like slide to unlock but much more importantly scrolling. If something shows more the mastery of the iphone UX of that time it is definitely scrolling, who categories it as gesture now? It's completely normalized, on all other Platform of that time, you had to play with arrows and the scroll bar. Now every platform has it.
Using an iPhone felt like directly manipulating the underlying content. It was a qualitatively different experience that only superficially resembled previous touchscreen devices insofar as it used similar input hardware.
Note that Apple didn't invent the concept of a responsive UI thread with physics-based UI metaphors, for example Jeff Han demonstrated a fairly sophisticated example at TED2006[1] the year before. But to my knowledge the iPhone was the first mass-produced device with a direct manipulation interface.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...
However, I think you make a great point that the two are interrelated.
My straw man starting point would be: A poor user experience that is lightning fast can still be a great experience.
But a great user experience that lags or is slow will typically not be successful.
The iphone succeeded because it coupled a great user experience that was so fast that it felt like interacting with objects in the real world.
The iPhone won because it looked amazing and had the App Store. Looks and features. How did you reach the conclusion that it was speed?
Actually, that supports my point. The App Store came by because people wanted it. No one said: “oh no bloat my phone will slow down”.
Remember WAP[1] and WML[2], the HTTP and HTML substitutes for mobile phones too anemic/limited to support the real thing? Back then, many web sites simply didn't support access from a mobile device. (It's the polar opposite of "mobile first" or "mobile only".) A few did, but many just tossed up an error page.
With the iPhone, Apple put together all the key ingredients to be able to say, if you're on the go and suddenly need to access your bank's web site to check your balance or whatever, you will be able to, even if your bank doesn't support mobile devices. The experience may not be great, but it will at least be possible.
Those key ingredients included a big screen, a fast enough processor and large enough RAM to handle pages that were somewhat bloated, a browser that supported enough (JS, etc.) to make most pages work, and special features for making the most of desktop-oriented pages by zooming in on text. To some extent, Apple brought these key ingredients together by designing it that way, but they also did it by not entering the market until powerful enough hardware was available.
The iPhone flipped mobile web access on its head. Instead of implementing whatever was convenient and punting on 50+% of the web, leaving users at the mercy of web sites to decide if mobile access was worth it to them, Apple created a device and browser that took responsibility for doing anything and everything it could to make sites work.
The web is a killer feature for the internet, and getting meaningful access to the web was a killer feature for internet-connected mobile devices. Paradoxically, it worked so well that the platform was enormously successful and it became essential to offer mobile web support.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
Quite frankly, I still tend to think it's as much about Apple knocking it out of the park with the UX (and marketing), as it is about Microsoft doing literally everything wrong in response. WM could have become what Android is today.
But I agree also agree with you in that my own first iPhone was the iPhone 3G, and the 3G part and later the app store became a major thing for the device, whether it was browsing the web, or using internet-centered apps (chat, sms, reddit, etc.).
Any else have a PDA and see the glaring opportunity to add cellular functionality to them?
If we can consider the iPhone to be innovative, we cannot overstate how much timing was important.
The iPhone was a phone with a big screen optimized for the internet. Regarding people who are not into technology,for what I can see, their main interest to go for the smartphone has been whatsapp and free phoning in general. And as time went on, more and more services of all kind including administrative ones where more participial to use on the internet that in real life.
The INSTANT I hit the button to complete the order, the built in printer almost spat the ticket at me. I ordered a second sandwich just so I could get a video of that happening again.
Edit: Just found and uploaded the video :) https://youtu.be/TX_-dXIpPvA
Edit2: looks like it was a soda, not a second sandwich.
The POS app that I worked on (not related to the one shown in the video) also went to pretty serious lengths to get rid of the pause between the user pressing "enter" and the receipt coming out. The store operators rightfully insisted on this, because they wanted to keep the checkout lines moving as fast as possible.
I liked those printers and remember wanting one for myself even though I had no use for it. They start at around $200 and take up space, so I managed to resist.
Costco is the only place where I've seen this. I don't understand how it gets an authorization for any amount that fast, since it can't know the total while the cashier is still scanning items, and it's Costco, so it could be anywhere from $50 to $5,000 so surely it's getting the authorization after the transaction finishes? The flow is almost perfect. I have them scan my Costco membership, I use tap to pay on the card reader, then I or 2nd cashier move to organizing the items into the cart, and then the cashier hands me a receipt with basically zero wasted time.
They actually ask the credit card processor to approve you for $avg + X%, so as long as your purchase comes in lower than that, you've already been approved. If you make a really big purchase it will take a little longer, because they go back for a second auth for the bigger amount.
It's also why you'll see some people making $700+ purchases without having to sign anything -- because Costco already knows they do that every week and pay the bill on time so they assume part of the risk.
I'm sure Costco got a deal that gives them nearly at cost processing and a bunch of other stuff.
It was worth it for Citi too. The moment I got my Costco Amex replaced with a Costco Citi, the Citi became my primary card, because everyone takes Visa.
Thanks for sharing this, it's crazy how much super fast experiences still surprise us.
Netflix is faster in every way. There’s a button on my TV specifically to launch it, the videos start faster, fast forwarding is faster, there’s less buffering in general. Every single touch point is fast. And it’s because they put the effort in where the others didn’t.
Sometimes I have fantasies about sending an email direct to Jeff Bezos just to say: dude, did you know about this?
Suffice to say, I don’t watch much Prime.
Meanwhile Apple TV+ will just go ahead and try to use a super heavy 4k stream on my iPhone over 4G - won't even let me download it (at least this was the case a year ago, the last time I was out of wifi range).
Netflix also never stutters, but it starts with like 480p and gets better over time.
Nevertheless the Netflix UI is far superior.
Also, given the choice, I'll rent a movie on Amazon because they even give refunds if they detect the quality was low.
And I know Apple is a weird one there. On the Apple TV, they offer pretty much a version of iOS. There's multiple options to build your UI, but iirc you can build it native if you want to.
And this has been Apple's differentiator; they were FAST. The code for apps compiled down to native, as opposed to a lot of Java based phones at the time (and later with Android).
I've always maintained that Apple had a 5 year head start on Android when it comes to performance (as well as UX, even in their skeuomorphic designs), and after 5 years it was mainly Android smartphone companies focusing on more performance than the Android OS or apps becoming faster. It was Android phones that went for quadcore (and beyond) processors first, while Apple was just fine with a single core, and later, almost reluctantly, a dualcore. Simply because their earlier technology choices made their stuff so much faster and more efficient.
I'm so glad Apple didn't go ahead and make web technology the main development path, as they initially planned (or so I gathered).
But I'll always check Netflix for something to watch first because it's faster and easier (unless there's something specific I know i want).
Being the default first choice is very valuable, and speed is the reason they're it.
The amount of engineering work going into that must be amazing.
Why do content streaming platforms assume that you want to watch everything other than the content?!
YouTube does this too on my TV, and it's infuriating. Not only does it hide half the screen for a long time after the content starts playing, it then helpfully hides most of the screen before the end of the content also!
This is the computer equivalent of someone shoving their hand in your face to block your vision.
It's rude when a human does it. It's rude when a computer does it.
I'd honestly pay extra for an iPhone where I can disable ALL motion, too. But that's the least of the problems.
I don't want to become the grumpy old grandpa yelling "back in my day!..." but we have waaaaaaaaaaay too much young JS devs who know nothing else.
We need to get back to native UIs. Is it awfully hard? Yes it is. Do the users care? No, they don't. Many people want fast UIs.
But to be fair to all sides -- there are also a lot of people who don't notice certain slowdowns that I scoff at. So there is a middle ground that won't cost billions to achieve and IMO that should be chased after.
So responsive Electron apps are certainly possible.
The whole point for then from the start was to not to repeat the Atom fiasco.
The entirety of the project was running around of making Webkit not suck.
They spent ennormous effort on that.
I think it’s only noticeable if you’ve used a native application for a while. It’s not enough to go from VSC to Sublime and back to VSC again for five minutes. Make an effort to use a native app for a week or a month and then switch back.
Emacs will sometimes become slower (especially remote emacs), but it will always buffer your keypresses and do them in the correct order.
Jupyter (for whatever reason), doesn't do this with the result that I ended up wanting to create a new code block, but that keypress got lost and then i end up ruining my original code block.
I 100% noticed the difference, and it was super frustrating (fortunately I left that job, and have managed to avoid Jupyter in the new gig).
Emacs/Spacemacs can still be weirdly slow sometimes but UI responsiveness is generally miles ahead of all Electron-based software still.
Which makes it even funnier. Emacs is decades old and still uses quite a few ancient techniques that are only hampering it. Even with that, it's still so much better in terms of speed! Funny.
Well electron used to be called "atom shell" :)
Yes, and no. They have a really interesting tale of convergent evolution.
Atom was the original Electron app (as pointed out Electron was even originally named "atom-shell"), so it predates VSCode as an Electron app. But the extremely performant "Monaco code editor" that VSCode was built on top of (that forms the heart of VSCode) was started at Microsoft years before to be a code editor in parts of the Azure Portal, and also it was the code editor in IE/Edge dev tools from as far back as IE 9 or 10 I think it was (up until the Chromium Edge). It wasn't packaged into an Electron app until after Atom, but it has an interesting heritage that predates Atom and was built for some of the same reasons that GitHub wanted to build Atom.
(ETA: Monaco's experience especially in IE Dev Tools and the wild west of minified JS dumps it had to work with from day one in that environment is where a lot of its performance came from that led VSCode to jumping Atom on performance out of the gate.)
I'm guessing it's pretty much dead now that github is under the same company that also makes vscode, right?
VS Code also used to have far more native code earlier on in its development life, but seems to be transitioning a lot of it to WASM (paralleling the Node ecosystem as a whole moving a lot of performance heavy stuff from native NAPI plugins to WASM boxes; as one example: the major source maps support library moved from JS native to Rust to WASM compiled from Rust, IIRC).
1. It takes nine times as long as Vim to open a minified JavaScript file, and then format it with Prettier: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993
2. It takes 14 times as long to open an empty text file than BBEdit: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889
Both of the above examples revolve around opening files for the first time, and I suspect a lot of the slowness I perceive is because I open a lot of different projects and source code files when I'm working, and this is a bad use of VS Code.
In practice, VS Code behaves more like a multi-language IDE than a text editor. Slow startup times are generally acceptable in IDEs because you're exchanging speed for power. A programmer should ideally be proficient in both an IDE and a text editor, because they're tools applicable to different problems. E.g., VS Code is a terrible choice for things like analyzing log output, formatting large files, testing isolated snippets of code, or working on source code files that aren't part of the same project. I find this to be a shame because VS Code is flexible enough that it would otherwise be excellent for all of these tasks if it were just more performant for some operations that it struggles with now.
I would agree that VS Code isn't the fastest thing when the editor is starting up, though I find it fine when started. I pretty much always have VS Code running so I don't find this a problem.
A lot of the overhead seems to come from making a new window (even though the app itself is already running), although notably most of the time spent in the Prettier example seems to be spent syntax highlighting the JavaScript. If you want to try a direct comparison of opening a file vs. a window, you can see the difference between opening a new file in an existing window (on Mac, `⌘N` / `File > New File`) or new window (on Mac, `⌥⌘N` / `File > New Window`). For me the latter is far slower than the former.
I mean the web stack itself was never designed per se. HTML is essentially a text annotation format, which has been abused to support the needs of arbitrary layouts. The weakness of CSS is evident by how difficult it has been to properly center something within a container until relatively recently. And Javascript was literally designed in a week.
And then in terms of deploying web content, you have this situation where you have multiple browsers which are moving targets, so you can't even really just target raw HTML+CSS+JS if you want to deploy something - you need a tool like webpack to take care of all the compatibility issues, and translate a tool which is actually usable like React into an artifact which will behave predictably across all environments. I don't blame web developers for abusing libraries, because it's almost impossible to strip it all down and work with the raw interfaces.
The whole thing is an enormous hack. If you view your job as a programmer as writing code to drive computer hardware - which is what the true reality of programming is - then web development is so far divorced from that. I think it's a huge problem.
Now? You need Windows desktop, mobile on 2 different operating systems, web, MacOS, and possibly TV depending on your market.
What's the lowest common denominator? Web stack.
I only have a problem with the ones among those hammer only people that are proud of not knowing anything else and proclaim everybody not using a hammer for everything stupid, because "look on all those perfected hammers we created! your choice doesn't have such nice ones".
This stuff was fixed at least 5 years ago. If you can drop support for IE11 (released in 2013 and no longer supported by Office 365), you’ll find that framework-free web development has improved massively since React was first released. And if you keep it simple and rely on what browsers support natively, you can achieve great performance.
These days I see people casually adding network hops to web applications like it's nothing. These actually take multiple milliseconds in common scenarios such as cloud hosting on a PaaS. (I measured. Have you?)
At that point it's not even relevant how fast your CPUs are, you're blowing your "time budget" in just a handful of remote function calls.
If you stop and think about it, the "modern" default protocol stack for a simple function consists of:
- Creating an object graph scattered randomly on the heap
- Serialising it with dynamic reflection
...to a *text* format!
...written into a dynamically resizing buffer
- Gzip compressing it to another resizing buffer
- Encrypting it to stop the spies in the data centre
- Buffering
- Kernel transition
- Buffering again in the NIC
- Router(s)
- Firewall(s)
- Load balancer
then the forward -- and -- backwards stack -- again -- for the response
If this isn't insanity, I don't know what is...
Can you tell what is your occupation? Are you dealing with assembler level programming regularly?
It just grinds me gears that we have all these wonderfully fast computers and we're just throwing the performance away.
My analogy to customers where I consult is this: What you're doing is like buying a dozen sticks of RAM, and then throwing ten of them into the trash. It's like pouring superglue into all but a couple of the switch ports. It's like buying a 64-core CPU and disabling 63 of those cores. It's like putting some of the servers on the Moon instead of next to each other in the same rack.
Said like that, modern development practices and infrastructure architectures suddenly sound as insane as they truly are.
To be fair, profiling is way more difficult than it was in the days of single-core local applications. A single-threaded single-machine application means you can get a very clear and simple tree-chart of where your program's time is spent, and the places to optimize are dead obvious.
Even if you're using async/await but are basically mostly releasing the thread and awaiting the response, the end-user experience of that time is the same - they don't give a crap that you're being thoughtful to the processor if it's still 0.5s of file IO before they can do anything, but now the profiler is lying to you and saying "nope, the processor isn't spending any time in that wait, your program is fast!".
Not if you graduated from the printf school of profiling[1].
Measure the time when you start something, measure the time when you finish, and print it. Anything that takes too long gets a closer look.
[1] unaffiliated with the printf school of debugging, but coincidentally located at the same campus.
Nobody wants slow software, its just cheaper, in upfront and maintenance costs. Going with analogies, its like a race car mechanic complaining that a car is using like 3 cylinders where it could have 8. Sure but some people have other priorities I guess.
In theory yes, in practice this almost never happens. 95% of the teams just quickly mash the product together and peace out before anyone notices what mess did they make. And then you have some poor Indian / African / Eastern European team trying to untangle and improve it.
Seen it literally tens of times over a course of 19 years career.
> Nobody wants slow software, its just cheaper, in upfront and maintenance costs
That is true. But nowadays it's more like taking a loan from the bank and running away to an uninhabited island to avoid paying it off.
But time and time again I see that projects with a fast “enough” interfaces and flexible systems win out on more specialized, faster ones. And I hate that but here we are. Sometime we see a really performant piece of software hit the sweet spot of functionality for a while (for example sublime text) but then get overtaken by a fast enough but more flexible alternative (vacode)
Eastern European coders are highly competent, they did magic back in the day with just a ZX Spectrum.
Very few people enjoy producing junk, but management (and customers) often demand junk today rather than quality tomorrow.
Given the chance I'd likely collect a fat paycheck and bail out at the end of the contract as those other people did. But that attitude is responsible for the increasingly awful mess that modern software is becoming.
Almost everyone is at fault, me included. The perverted incentives of today's world are only making things worse.
>> most of those "primadona devs", as you call them, would much prefer to write well-designed programs cleanly coded
Most of them - yes. But there's a non-negligible chunk of them who are too careless or incompetent to care about quality - they've been around long enough to gain knowledge about project and get Vice-President title(inflated ego included).
It is especially visible in big banks (I suppose it's typical for other big non-tech corps as well) where tech culture is generally on poor side.
edit: grammar
Much of my work is in highly parallelized computing (think Spark across thousands of nodes) processing 10s or 100s of TiB at a time with declarative syntax. It's super cool. Until someone decides they're going to use this one line expression to process data because it's just so easy to write. But it turns out doing that absolutely destroys your performance because the query optimizer now has a black box in the middle of your job graph that it can't reason about.
Bad practices like that occur over and over again, and everyone just figures, "Well, we have a lot of hardware. If the job takes an extra half hour, NBD." Soon, you have scores of jobs that take eight hours to run and everyone starts to become a little uneasy because the infrastructure is starting to fail jobs on account of bad data skew and vertexes exceeding the predefined limits.
How did we get here? We severely over-optimized for engineer time to the detriment of CPU time. Certainly, there is a balance to strike, no doubt. But When writing one line of code versus six (and I'm not being hyperbolic here) becomes preferable to really understanding what your system is doing, you reap what you sow.
On the plus side, I get to come in and make things run 5x, 10x, maybe even 20x faster with very little work. It sometimes feels magical, but it would be preferable if we had some appreciation for not letting our code slowly descend into gross inefficiency.
Write a riddle for a CPU with 100% cache miss rate, confusing the prefetcher to clog the memory bus, and enforcing a synchronous memory access. Such thing is very likely to run literally with an MCU speed on an x86 PC CPU.
What you are doing is like a machinist complaining about a carpenter not measuring everything in thousands of an inch or micrometers. The reality is that wood is soft and can shrink or grow. It's maybe not the best material but it's good enough for the job and it's cheap enough that you can actually afford it.
With web content it’s the exact opposite. Every time you are a bit lazy, and add another mushy, poorly optimized dependency, the cost is paid by every one of your users.
The better analogy is that the web is like an assembly line that serves content. Do you want wooden equipment with poor tolerances making up that assembly line which takes twice as long and occasionally dumps parts on the ground, or do you want a well-optimized system working at peak efficiency?
History and inertia also are nearly synonymous with "easier to use" in this context.
Plain HTML renders several order of magnitudes faster than post-load JS rendering, and yes, it is noticeable, especially if you account for variable connection speeds.
Most web devs develop on localhost and test on some of the best connections you can get today, leaving network performance testing as an afterthought at best... and it shows.
Well, "several orders of magnitude" is a bit much, but the point stands.
However, that's only during the initial load. After that, JS can just keep modifying the DOM based on the data retrieved from API, and never download HTML and construct new DOM again. If done properly (and that's a big if!), and where appropriate, this can be much faster.
> Most web devs develop on localhost and test on some of the best connections you can get today, leaving network performance testing as an afterthought at best... and it shows.
Very true! And on beefeir CPUs/GPUs, more RAM, faster storage etc.
For the last couple of years, I've been careful to develop on "midrange" hardware, exactly so I can spot performance problems earlier.
Primary and by far most frequent use case.
> After that, JS can just keep modifying the DOM based on the data retrieved from API, and never download HTML and construct new DOM again.
And then you can never return to the same page again, it's gone into the either, and the Back button doesn't work properly.
Anyone who doesn't support JS to the level you want? Well, fuck those people, let them make their own wheelchair ramps.
> If done properly (and that's a big if!), and where appropriate, this can be much faster.
A big IF, indeed.
For "application paradigm" my points stand. That's where JS is appropriate. I did say "where appropriate", after all.
> Primary and by far most frequent use case.
In document paradigm.
> And then you can never return to the same page again, it's gone into the either, and the Back button doesn't work properly.
Not if the client-side routing is done properly. I did say "if done properly".
> Anyone who doesn't support JS to the level you want?
With modern transpilers, you can produce lowest-common-denominator JS. Essentially you are treating JS as a build target / ISA.
> Well, fuck those people, let them make their own wheelchair ramps.
What's the alternative? They can download a native app, but that doesn't work for everyone either (both from the developer and the user perspective).
You were motivated by submitting a cool demo, they are motivated by not being fired after deadlines. An additional network hop is nothing compared to not shipping.
When I look at the massive backlog of requests from my users, not a single one is "speed."
I've recently come across several such applications that were "split up" for no good reason. Just because it's the current fad to do the microservices thing. Someone liked that fad and decided that over-architecting everything is going to keep them employed.
To clarify: This was strictly worse in every possible way. No shortcuts were taken. No time was saved. Significant time and effort was invested into making the final product much worse.
And not only is the stack you describe full of delays, several of the layers are outside of the control of the software in question and can just… fail! Sure, there are cases where I need my software to communicate with the outside world, but I get furious when some page with text on it dies because somewhere in a datacenter some NIC failed and thus the shitty webapp I was viewing fell over.
Rendering hundreds or thousands of meshes and doing complicated 3D math for physics is no problem, UI is still extremely hard and complex, especially if you are supporting multiple arbitrary resolutions for example.
Godot, for example, has a full UI toolkit built in (the Godot editor was made using Godot components). However to actually get it working the way you want in most cases is a horrendous struggle, a struggle with ratios, screen sizes, minimum and maximum UI control sizes, size/growth flags, and before it gets any more complicated please just throw me a Tailwind flex/grid box model instead, because HTML/CSS has solved these problems repeatedly already.
If you are using Android, you are in luck.
1. Open Settings > About Phone, Tap the build number 7 times (Or google other methods to open Developer menu for your phone model)
2. Go to Developer options -> Drawing
3. Set all animation scale to 0.5x
You'd be amazed to find how fast the phone appears
These settings completely disabled my on-screen home button and other UI elements, and setting the anim scale back to 1.0 and rebooting did not fix that, no more home button for now.
I probably have to reset the phone, did not find any further info so far on how to fix it (pointers, anyone?). But the UI seemed snappy indeed at 0.5 ...
Edit: "other UI elements" including e.g. the Tab switcher in the Lightning browser. The widgets are all displayed, but totally unresponsive.
But even that's overkill for modern phones. I just tried turning off animations entirely, and things still feel pretty much instant, despite the phone being a few years old at this point.
In any case, the animation shouldn't take longer than it takes to start the program.
It help a lot in that "computer user bill of rights" issue that you start to worry at some point that the button press wasn't registered and might then mash the button with unpredictable effects.
(e.g. you might get more customer satisfaction from a crosswalk button that doesn't do anything at all except 'click' instantaneously)
Meanwhile, here I am, making a decentralized social media server and being afraid to add an extra <div> lest it bloats the page.
I'm consider myself lucky to be born in the 'transitional period(1980s) I see the world of my parents and also have abilities to adapt with technology.
TL;DR - users can get used to pretty much anything because they don't know it could be so much better
My company, like many, bloats Windows with security software. We have the type of PC where McAfee uses 80% of resources for an hour every Monday morning. PCs with spinning hard drives take a good 15-20 minutes to fully boot, and some engineers still have those. Those who complain just get told to wait a few years for their planned laptop replacement, to finally get an SSD.
There's no solution, so users just cope.
Most game developers will make it as fast as they have to... in fact most developers do that.
Games are usually developed as abandonware. Do you want your apps to be developed as abandonware?
Game engineers are wizards, but real general-purpose UI is a different problem than they are generally solving. A game UI is typically very limited in terms of what types of information has to be displayed and how. Many applications have to support what is essentially arbitrary 2D content which has to be laid out dynamically at runtime, and this is something different than the problems most games have to solve.
That sounds exactly like the problem most games have to solve. The age of fixed CPU speeds and screen resolutions is long gone. Games have to content with a plethora of dimensions along which to represent an interactive, dynamic, multimedia world.
People here crying about load times and FPS rendering are completely out of touch with reality of SW development - getting stuff to function correctly and reliably with requirements constantly changing > performance, and that's hard enough with tools that simplify SW development. Optimising for performance is a luxury very few can afford.
Hilariously, I wouldn't even say that modern software does that well either.
To have performance, you have to understand the data you are working with and how it can transformed efficiently by your hardware. To have maintainability you have to create good abstraction around how you transform your data. To have correctness you have to implement and composite those data transformation in a meaningful way.
All of those things are orthogonal.
Game developers usually and rightfully skip maintainability and invest barely enough regarding correctness. Games are like circus performances while business apps should be made to run the circus.
It doesn’t feel right with no animation (like Reduced Motion in settings) since spatial hints are lost.
Sadly most people can't afford that and the results are visible everywhere in IT.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17929/how-can-i-di...
https://superuser.com/questions/455313/disable-os-x-enter-fu...
It looks "pretty" to the UI people.
Buys them time to get stuff done under the hood while you are gazing upon the 'sands of time' (good old Windows hourglass).
It conditions you/me/everyone to be impatient. I opt out of all such transition effects on my phone. I prefer that the screen goes black of freezes until the next screen comes up. This way I don't get distracted by irrelevant junk (spinning wheels, hourglasses, etc.). It is crunching bits. Don't add more junk to it. Let it crunch bits without tricking me.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
tl;dr : programmer inserts a large empty loop in a UI, so that in weeks when he achieves nothing, he removes a single zero from the end of the loop counter to speed up things a bit.
We later created a light version for a specific use case, and the product owner came prepared with a nice splash screen for this one too. The app was so lightweight that it loaded near instantaneously - so the engineer added a six second delay just to meet the splash screen requirement.
The crazy thing is that all these web apps also do a fraction of the things that the native apps used to do. They’ve somehow managed to strip down all the features while making the apps slow and bloated. Watching Microsoft’s To-Do blog is comitragic. Elon Musk will be living on Mars before the Microsoft tools allow you to schedule todos by dragging them to the calendar like Outlook has done since what, 98? (You can drag a todo from the web sidebar to the calendar now—but it somehow doesn’t actually schedule the due or start date in the todo itself or even have any link back to the todo.) And I feel like that’s one thing that’s different now. I also complained that Word 97 was a slow bloated big compared to Word Perfect, etc. But back in the day there was feature bloat. Now, everything is both slow and and non-functional.
I have to assume that it’s a structural thing with the industry. Machine learning, big data, security, etc., has become the hot areas, so all the “A” teams have migrated over there. I hear Apple is having trouble even getting people to do kernel work on MacOS.
I've seen devs arguing this, though IMO that is more the devs speaking out of resignation and learning to say the right things rather than the truth.
I only wish this were true; then value propositions for software could climb a value ladder. The challenge is business' are not standardized beyond some very basic functions, and new standardization comes at a brutally high cost (time and expense). So I see where office productivity has settled on Microsoft Office (though even there, I see huge fragmentation between versions, how people don't use styles, how most people have no idea of pivot tables in Excel, etc.), and we've pretty much just crawled along at a snails pace since then.
If anything, judging by how little I can transplant of business processes that emerge around software from one company to another, and how much those processes mutate over time, I would assert software standardization is getting worse, because getting businesses to standardize even when moving to the cloud has been a bigger challenge than I anticipated.
But anyway in the enterprise sector, it doesn’t matter whether an app is web or native, it will be slow regardless lol.
This could really be applied to any good or service where the purchaser is not the end user. For example, in the U.S. dealing with your health insurance company is a nightmare, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's your employer who's the customer. If the health insurance company treats you badly, you can't go with another provider, so they're free to offer terrible service so long as they don't piss of your company's HR department who decides which health plans to go with.
If there is UI, UI responsiveness matters for employee output.
Research that has been done on this topic suggests that increase in UI latency non-linearly decreases user productivity, whith the ultimate effect on the cost of doing business.
And that has been known for decades - take a look at the "The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time" from 1982:
https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rap...
It's puzzling to me why businisses still don't prioritize UI latency, but it's not a rational decision.
Perhaps it's just human nature, as hinted in the linked article:
"...few executives are aware that such a balance is economically and technically feasible."
They won't bring in a ton of cash, but I can continue to make beautiful apps that are fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources.
For tech, I'd consider both Cocoa + Swift and SwiftUI as candidates for UI components, on a case-by-case basis. Swift is not my favorite language (feels like I have to use Xcode; have yet to try out the JetBrains IDE), but it gets the results I want. Perhaps in the future, we can use Rust in a more ergonomic fashion to talk with native UIs.
Honestly, I'd love an ObjC-like language that interops with ObjC and has strong static typing with a dynamic typing escape hatch for metaprogramming.
The FOX codebase isn't terribly modern, as it's older than the standard C++ concurrency machinery, but it works.
It depends on the target market for your application I suppose - if your target won't be happy unless they have html/CSS or similar animations, then using something with low latency isn't going to make them happy.
Personally I don't mind the Windows 98 look, it strikes me as clean and no-nonsense. Everything is clear and high-contrast. Unlike with many 'flat' themes, it's generally clear what's clickable. I realise not everyone likes the Windows 98 look though.
If someone is serious about developing fast GUI apps, trading off on themeability is the kind of thing they should consider. As you say, FOX really is fast. I presume this is because of its uncompromising hard-coded native-code-only approach - it's just a C++ codebase. All the drawing operations are implemented directly in C++. Unlike Qt, there's no JavaScript. Unlike JavaFX, there's no CSS. It's all just C++.
Perhaps a GUI toolkit could add themeability without any performance impact by implementing it as a compile-time abstraction.
> depends on the target market for your application I suppose - if your target won't be happy unless they have html/CSS or similar animations, then using something with low latency isn't going to make them happy
Right, but mattgreenrocks said fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources, presumably in contrast to current norms.
It's been fun to work a bit closer to the metal than I've been with JS for the last few years. Made about 50 sales so far. Can't imagine it'll make me rich but maaan it makes my video editing way faster :D
Also, if I click the "Switch to New Outlook" button, it says that it can't copy over my custom IMAP accounts for work. I would think that supporting things besides exchange or gmail accounts would be something they would do before releasing a new version.
There have been a bunch of interesting rumors that Microsoft is planning to hollow out the insides of Outlook Desktop (anything that isn't nailed down to big corporate contracts and their extensions), and directly replace those guts with Web Outlook via React Native or something like it.
Really, a web app wrapped in a desktop app would be fine if it could perform better. I don't even need good, just better.
- User visits website - downloads binary (preferably small size, use an appropriate language and cross-platform graphics library) - launches it (preferably without installation) - Perhaps creation of a local storage directory on the file system is needed the first time. - and voilà!
What would be the main obstacles to such a workflow? Are there projects who try work like this?
I get annoyed with Windows having the cursor randomly stutter for a split second rather than smooth motion. Or Teams taking half a second to load the conversation I clicked on. Or Powershell taking 3 seconds between initial render & giving me a damn prompt. Or the delay between me pressing the Windows button & the start menu appearing. None of these delays exist on my Linux machine where I've had the freedom to select the programs I use
I've made fast UIs with Javascript & React. Like all optimization it comes down to sitting down & profiling. Not taking "this is as fast it it can be" as an answer. In short, saying "Javascript is just slow" is part of the problem
Blaming languages is chasing a fad. I deal with it when people think the service I'm working on in Ruby is going to be slow because Ruby is slow. Nope, architectures are slow. If you know what you're doing Ruby will do just fine at doing nothing, which is really the trick behind speed
Languages like JS and Ruby make it easier to write slower code (and harder to detect that you're doing it) by the virtue of how their ecosystem and culture turned out with time.
I stood behind the romantic statement of "you are holding it wrong" when I was younger but nowadays it seems to me that the languages live and die by the culture of their communities. It rarely if ever matters if the language itself can be better / faster.
So while I agree JS/Ruby might have undeserved reputation for being slow, I think you should also agree that they are easy targets because observably a lot of software written with them is in fact slow.
I am looking at it empirically / historically while you are postulating a theoretical construct. I don't disagree with you per se but prefer to work with the reality that's in front of me.
---
That being said, kudos for being the exception in the group of the JS devs! The web frontend industry needs much more people like yourself. Keep up the good work. <3
On some days, I manage to type faster than XCode can display the letters on screen. There is no excuse for that with a 3 GHz CPU.
And yes, 200ms seems plausible to me:
Bluetooth adds delay over PS2 (about 28ms). DisplayPort adds delay over VGA. LCD screens need to buffer internally. Most even buffer 2-3 frames for motion smoothing (= 50ms). And suddenly you have 78 ms in hardware delay.
If the app you're using is Electron or the like, then the click will be buffered for 1 frame, then there's the click handler, then 1 frame of delay until the DOM is updated and another frame of delay for redraw. Maybe add 1 more frame for the Windows compositor. So that's 83ms in software-caused delay.
So I'd estimate a minimum of 161ms of latency if you use an Electron-based app with a wireless mouse on a DisplayPort-connected LCD screen, i.e. VSCode on my Mac.
I'm sure Id notice if typing had that much lag on vs code. I am using manjaro Linux but I can't imagine that it would be much faster than osx.
I get electron or MS have optimised the typing path. I don't click that much in VS Code so I don't think its ever bothered me.
* - actually it could be Wayland but doesn't work with my old window manager config.
Surely VGA would have more latency than DP for an LCD? It's gotta convert from digital to analogue and then back to digital again at the other end.
Is the overhead of the protocol really greater than that? (genuine question)
But to answer your question, digital to analogue and analogue to digital conversions tend to be so fast that you don't notice. It is more of a convention thing that most VGA devices will display the image as the signal arrives, which means they have almost no latency. DP devices, on the other hand, tend to cache the image, do processing on the entire frame, and only then start the presentation.
As a result, for VGA the latency can be less than the time that it takes to send the entire picture through the wire. For DP, it always is at least one full transmission time of latency.
If the required video data rate is lower than the link symbol rate the micro packets are stuffed with dummy data to make up the difference, and up to four micro packets may be sent in parallel over separate lanes, so some buffering is required, but this need only add a few microseconds of latency, which is not perceptible. Of course it's possible for bad implementations to add more, but the protocol was designed to support low latency.
In that case, I'm guessing the latency is coming from the fact that most LCD screens are caching one full image so that they can re-scale it in case the incoming video resolution isn't identical with the display's native resolution.
I vaguely remember there being an experimental NVIDIA feature to force scaling onto the GPU in hopes of reducing lag, but not sure that ever got released.
Where CRTs do have an advantage over LCDs is response time, which is generally a few ms even on the best monitors but basically nonexistent on CRTs.
But overall, a good monitor is only about half a frame worse than a CRT in terms of latency if you account for response time. At higher refresh rates it's even less of an issue; I'm not aware aware of any CRTs that can do high refresh rates at useful resolutions.
Got my numbers by glancing at a few RTINGS.com reviews: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/gaming
You type in a letter and that starts off a cascade of computations, incremental compilation, table lookups, and such to support syntax highlighting, completion, etc. and then it updates whatever parts of a dynamic UI (the user decides which widgets are on the screen and where) need to be updated.
It almost has to be done in a "managed language" whether that is Emacs Lisp, Java, etc. and is likely to have an extension facility that might let the user add updating operations that could use unbounded time and space. (I am wary to add any plug-ins to Eclipse)
I usually use a powerful Windows laptop and notice that IDE responsiveness is very much affected by the power state: if I turn down the power use because it is getting too warm for my lap, the keypress lag increases greatly.
From a UX perspective, I can see doing simple syntax highlighting on the UI thread...so long as it is something with small, bounded execution time. I don't quite get why completions and other stuff lags the UI thread, as it seems obvious that looking that information up is expensive. I can't tell if that is what's happening, or there's something more going on, such as coordinating the communication between UI/worker threads becomes costly.
I've seen it in a bunch of IDEs though, especially those in managed languages. You're typing, it goes to show a completion, and then....you wait.
Table lookups for syntax-highlighting can't be backgrounded, but they should be trivial im comparison to stuff like compilation, intellisense, etc.
Months ago I noticed picom causing issues with keynav I was too lazy to find a (proper, pretty-window-shadow retaining) fix for, so I just killed it and — while I can’t confidently say I remember noticing a significant lag decrease — I can say I don’t really miss it (and my CPU, RAM, and electricity use almost certainly decreased by some small fractions).
The researchers telling me I don't notice 100ms delays are smoking something. Yes, human reaction time is 200ms on average but we process information much faster than that. Moreover, the delays make it impossible to do "learned" chains of actions cause of the constant interruptions.
Hackers typing insanely fast and windows popping up everywhere in movies? The reason why that looks very unrealistic is just that our tools do not behave like that at all.
You can absolutely detect when your ping gets above 25ms even. It can't be missed.
> Hackers typing insanely fast and windows popping up everywhere in movies? The reason why that looks very unrealistic is just that our tools do not behave like that at all.
Right on. That's why, even though I have an insanely pretty Apple display (on the iMac Pro) I move more and more of my day work to the terminal. Those movie UIs are achievable.
Related: I invest a lot of time and energy into learning my every tool's keyboard shortcuts. This increases productivity.
What task is actually being measured here matters, too. For example, while it is true that humans cannot generally react faster than 100ms or so; most actual skills being tested by competitive gameplay are not pure reaction tests. They are usually some amount of telegraphed stimulus (notice an approaching player, an oncoming platform, etc) followed by an anticipated response. Humans are extremely sensitive to latency specifically because they need to time responses to those stimuli - not because they score really well in snap reaction tests.
Concrete example: the window to L-cancel in Melee is really small - far smaller than humanly possible to hit if this was purely a matter of reaction times. Of course, no player actually hits that window, because it's humanly impossible. They don't see their character hit the ground and then press L. They instead press L several frames in advance so that by the time their finger presses the trigger, their character has just hit the ground and made the window. Now, if I go ahead and add two frames of total lag to the display chain, all of their anticipated reactions will be too late and they'll have to retrain for that particular display.
Yeah this resonates for sure. Multiple times per day i tell citrix ctrl+alt+break, down arrow, return (minimise full screen citrix, go to my personal desktop) and about 50% of the time an app inside the citrix session will be delivered the down arrow, return keystrokes :-/
Surprisingly, I find MS Windows native stuff to be head-and-shoulders the best at this queuing.
Blame OS vendors for refusing to get together to specify a cross-platform standard API for UIs. We have mostly standard APIs for networking, file I/O, even 3D graphics, but not for putting a window on the screen and putting buttons on it.
OS vendors are still trying to play the lock-in game by forcing everyone to write GUI apps for only their platform. This is a non-starter, so everyone goes to Electron.
There are a few third party cross-platform UI libraries around. They suck. Qt is as bloated as HTML-based UIs, and then there's wxWidgets which is ugly and has an awful API based on 1990s MSC.
We could have something better, but it's an extremely large and difficult project and nobody will fund it. OS vendors won't because they don't want cross platform (even though all developers and users do). Nobody else will because nobody pays for dev tools or building blocks. The market has been educated to believe that stuff should all be free-as-in-beer.
As for the free aspect, I feel like this ship has sailed like 20 years ago. Nobody will pay for an UI toolkit these days. This is not Unreal Engine 4, you know. That stuff only works on AAA games market, apparently (although I am curious as to why it doesn't work everywhere else -- likely thin profit margins and/or middle management greed outside of the gaming genre).
Crazy you say? Start making a list of the features a modern UI toolkit has to have to even be considered for serious projects.
Bullshit. Qt is much faster than Electron, the Mumble client is really fast on my Turion laptop, that with OpenBSD.
And I say this even if I prefer Barnard IRL.
1) Would need to be lowest-common-denominator by nature
2) Would quickly stagnate due to friction against changes/additions
3) Would have few allowances for platform HIGs
If it were permissible to have vendor specific additions on top of a common core, that could probably work fine otherwise this hypothetical standard UI library would share many of the problems suffered by Qt, wxWidgets, etc.
The other option I could see working is something like SwiftUI, in which some control over the behavior, layout, and presentation is ceded to the platform — basically having developers provide a set of basic specifications rather than instructions for every pixel on-screen.
Not really. I'm sure plenty of people remember the quick feel of early PC UIs. Ironically, q3 kind of came at the end of that era.
Some of the same people might even remember when, with a little training, voice recognition software could do its thing without an internet connection and a warehouse full of computers at the other end, on a PC with less RAM than the framebuffer of a modern PC or phone...
This can be hard to achieve if you work off templates and plugins.
Yet, I find it supremely important. I frequently lose my train of thought while waiting for pages to load.
Can the same be said about Electron-based apps?
I'm too losing my train of thought sometimes waiting for pages/apps to load. It's embarrassing and I'm face-palming.
Chromium is a huge boon to developers for this reason. Now there could have been a different history here. Apple after acquiring NeXT had also gotten OpenStep, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep . OpenStep was a cross platform UI development kit, even the web could be a target. Apple decided (possibly for good reasons, hard to argue with success) to kill this off. But, they had toyed with it, https://www.macrumors.com/2007/06/14/yellow-box-seems-to-exi... . So, Apple had effectively what Chromium has become. A cross-platform development and runtime environment.
Would things be different today if that wasn’t killed off? Would Apple have never come back from the brink of death to become the behemoth it is today, because it would have starved its own platforms? One thing you might have had is a cross-platform “native” UI platform, and that might have meant faster more efficient UIs like you want now.
Shoutout to GNUStep trying to keep the dream alive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep
Follow up question: maybe with Apple being so successful, now they could revive this and make it profitable for themselves, rather than starving their own platforms?
The bad news is that doesn't seem likely to happen.
As an example, my grandmother-in-law has been putting up with Microsoft Jigsaw's desktop app for years. Last time I watched her load it, we sat there for awhile and had to restart multiple times because it was getting stuck loading some advertisements. The startup time was absolutely brutal and the run-time performance while playing wasn't great either, even with a decent laptop.
So when I saw how slow, bloated and laggy this app was, I wanted to try to make her a better jigsaw app for the web and I think I succeeded [1]. It loads almost instantly, has no advertisements, and feels super smooth while playing... and it's mostly just js, svelte and a little bit of Rust WASM.
Anyway, I do prefer a good native app over a web app when available. But with native apps, it's also harder to block ads and other trackers compared to the web.
I've been working with the horrors called Windows MFC and Java Swing a long time ago. It was tough but if you did it right (moderately hard) you had a very snappy app on a computer that was 5x slower and had 10x less RAM than a midrange today's Android device.
It takes someone who really cares about performance and monitors it to make a fast web app and to keep it that way. Unfortunately it's still too easy to accidentally make it slow.
Yupp, it's on my todo list to give users the option on how difficult they want the rotation to be. So far I have users that want click-to-rotate and even no rotation at all.
Especially after the walkbacks that Xbox Game Studios had to do after flak about scummy microtransactions in Halo, Gears, and Forza, it still seems incredible that Microsoft continues to allow Arkadium to do it to a far bigger audience (and a lot of people's parents and grandparents especially) with their brand name attached to it.
WAT.
I wouldn't say native UIs necessarily, IMO, but I definitely agree that something has to change.
Current systems are not only getting slower and less useful, but they're also getting harder to develop, test and maintain as well -- and, consequently, buggier.
The fact that there still are many old, TUI-based systems out there AND that users favor them over the newer ones exposes a lesson we've been insisting on overlooking.
I've had enough of today's slow buggy messes that require gigabytes of memory and two CPU cores to show me a splash screen for 10 seconds.
A lot of the TUI apps I stumbled upon seem really well-done.
I'm currently using nvlc and cmus for music playback, and then of course your standard complement of text editors etc. I like Lynx et al. for some web browsing, but compatibility is a pain.
- `lazygit` is extremely valuable.
- `lnav` for inspecting log files has turned out to be surprisingly good.
- Do you use `fzf` in tandem with your shell so you can also search your command history (and not just look for files)? I use that for like a year now and can't live without it.
- `mc` for TUI file management has been moderately alright.
- How about `ripgrep`? Can't believe I lived without that one too.
- Rust's tool `skim` (the command is `sk`) in tandem with `ripgrep` or `the_silver_searcher` to very quickly search in file contents in big directories has saved me a ton of time already (although I moved to search file contents in projects in Emacs since). To be fair, you can just use `fzf` instead of `sk` here though; I am just positively biased towards Rust.
- `ripgrep_all` allows you to search in ZIP archives, PDF docs, Office docs/spreadsheets etc. Really useful.
- `ht` is a Rust rewrite of `httpie`, the Python friendlier `curl`. I like `ht` much more because it doesn't incur any startup overhead and started replacing my scraping / syncing scripts with `ht` where applicable which is NOT everywhere because `curl` is extremely powerful and it doesn't often make sense to replace it.
- Command-line or in-terminal charting/plotting: `jp`. I have made a CSV file out of all file sizes on my NAS (bucketed by powers of 2) and then invoked it on the input. Here's a sample CSV from a random directory:
0k,79
1k,6
2k,1
4k,166
8k,34
16k,7
32k,6
64k,3
128k,27
256k,2
512k,2
1M,3
2M,4
4M,8
8M,10
16M,135
Then do this:
`cat THIS_FILE.csv | jp -input csv -xy '[*][0,1]' -type bar -height 57`
And enjoy an in-terminal vertical bar charts. :)
- ...And I have a ton more.
But your question makes me sigh. I really have to start a blog. I am a very practical guy and people usually love my posts (scattered on different forums) where I make such lists. I should roll my own blog static web site generator in Rust I suppose, because the existing ones are either slow or don't support what I need... So, not going to happen in the next year, most likely. :(
The rest I haven't looked at, but will have to add to my list, they fill a couple voids I've been feeling.
> I should roll my own blog static web site generator in Rust I suppose, because the existing ones are either slow or don't support what I need... So, not going to happen in the next year, most likely. :(
It isn't powerful enough to support what you need I'm sure, but I actually did something similar a little while ago.
http://a-shared-404.com/programs/
It's written in Rust, with dependencies on sh and markdown. I'm thinking about adding the ability to automatically execute an (optional) shell script in each directory, so that it would be easier to do things that markdown doesn't.
The code quality is atrocious (first Rust program of any size, and I'm not great at programming in the first place), but it may be useful. If you're interested in me adding that functionality, let me know, it may be the push I need to move it to the top of my pile.
I'd also like multilingual article ability (but I think some of the engines out there can do that). The more I think of it, the more I wonder if it should be something like Ghost.org: namely backed by sqlite and not naked files. But who knows.
That being said, I'd be quite interested in reading your blog, whenever you are able to get it going.
Maybe not necessarily something as radical as terminals, but anything providing the same programming ergonomics (in order to be easy to build and maintain) and constrained by the same restrictions (so that functional requirements get tamed).
At first, it would definitely sound as an involution, but I feel somehow confident that the market in general will accept such constraints as soon as the results become evident.
If Electron is rewritten in C / Zig / Rust / whatever and becomes much more lightweight then I'll be on board about using it myself.
But the abusive relationship between today's software and what is essentially supercomputers has to be ended and started anew on a more respectful foot.
The problem is the abstraction level, instead of a locally running program manipulating objects that are turned into render instructions basically in a one-to-one fashion, there is a whole added indirection with generating and parsing HTML and then converting the dynamically created DOM into renderable elements.
I agree overall though, most developers/managers of developers/companies who write software fucking suck at their job.
I'm sensitive to latency.. first thing I do when I setup a new android phone is go into the developer settings and speed up all animations.
For our own company [0], we also treat speed as a top feature, though it's not something that's easily to market. It's something that power users appreciate. I even wrote a similar blog post [1] to this. The magic number, from what I've found, is 100ms. If you can respond to a user action in 100ms, it feels instant to the user.
I would immediately apply but I'm not interested in Ruby or HTML/CSS anymore (although I still know the last two rather well and plan on making a return there to author my own blog theme).
Main focus are Elixir and Rust -- the latter exactly because I want to make efficient and ultra-fast software. Also very invested and averagely skilled in DevOps / sysadmin activities.
I hope there are more companies like yours out there -- and that yours is thriving!
Current situation is people creating abstraction at the wrong level and not understanding the performance cost of things like reflection and ORMs.
Kudos to you. We need more people like you.
The only change we might see are more "native" UIs written in C#, Swift, etc. Also, Swift will not be a suitable replacement in its current form. Any replacement needs to at minimum work on MacOS plus Windows and by work I mean you can create a UI without crazy amounts of platform specific code.
But I'd argue that's because nobody wants to invest money and effort.
As a fan of Rust (I'm regularly using it but I don't work for money with it currently) you are right: even if everyone agreed to move to it tonight, that wouldn't change things much because we have no cross-platform native UI toolkit.
Additionally, you might be surprised what prices people could pay for really good software. I personally will pay $500 for a lifetime license of a lightweight, fast, cross-platform and rock-solid office suite. But there's no such thing.
Not sure I agree with this. I wrote a bunch of data vis GUIs with PyQt and Pyqtgraph, all Python, with everything keyboard shortcuts and accelerators, and it was Vim-like speed except where CPU bound by data processing (NumPy).
So I think it can be fairly easy yet Qt dies (frequently, on HN) on the altar of native look/feel/platform (ie doesn’t look/feel like a MacOS app on macOS).
Still, I bet if more people used it then its community would have an incentive -- or a kick in the butt -- to quickly fix its deficiencies and it could become the de facto native GUI toolkit? Who knows.
My only gripe with qt is that one has to use C++ or python, other bindings are not
funny, java applet in the 90s gained a fame for being slow, being caused mostly by junior devs putting stuff on the UI thread
:-(
I do that on my Android phone. Feels snappier than the iPhone now. Not perfect though. Scrolling sucks.
JavaScript is bad but nowadays that's not the main evil. That falls on the hideous awful libraries on top of JS that everyone seem to love these days. They need to die ASAP.
When I built my blog, I tried to find every opportunity to reduce cruft (even stripping out extra CSS classes) so reading it would feel as close to a native app as possible.
You could argue that HN succeeded because it's focused on speed above all else.
(Also - fellow former Q1/Q3 player here, I competed in CPL, Quakecon, and a few other events).
Profiling: https://i.snipboard.io/UPhtmH.jpg
The problem is not the language or framework, is that very few people/devs/businesses actually care about performance anymore, so they just implement the quickest solution without even thinking about the performance impact.
I can never go back to Android now. I'm sure if you studied the phones under a high speed camera we'd be talking about differences of only tens of ms but when you tap something 1000x a day it really adds up. It's just like how most programmers are hyper sensitive to text editor latency.
Personally I switched from an S10 to Iphone 11, and was absolutely repulsed by the horrible screen on the iphone. They both felt similar in terms of UI responsiveness. But due to the screen I went back to the S10.
Maybe the total time to complete a given task is about the same, but I can seriously say I have never seen the iPhone drop a single frame. The Pixel got choppy all the time. Every Android phone owner knows the feeling of "why is my phone suddenly hot? Oh some runaway background service" or "why is this thing running at 5fps? Oh an app is auto-updating in the background".
iPhone just doesn't have these issues.
"As snappy if not better" as an "old iPhone SE" though...
A Samsung Galaxy for example costs almost as much as an equivalent iphone and is significantly less responsive then some motorola phones with stock android
(But yeah, this phone is super fast, and the 90Hz screen is a joy. I literally cannot switch to iPhone until/unless they get faster screens, because of post-concussion syndrome and the migraines I get from 60Hz screens.)
Every second support email in the early days of https://www.darwinmail.app was from users who were wondering why the website wasn't faster to load and operate.
I knew that this was going to slowly kill the product if I didn't focus on optimising the speed immediately. I also heard somewhere that even a 0.01 increase in load times for Amazon's website would cost them somewhere in the region of 100's of millions.
1. I gathered feedback from all users that said the website was slow (in any way and in any page/component/workflow).
2. I created a Trello board https://trello.com/c/PPuhLtW0/95-upgrade-performance for all the feedback.
3. Since that week of initial performance enhancement research and groundwork, I have essentially been completing todo's on that Trello card and adding more tasks as time goes on. I think the more speed improvements I make, the more I learn about what other parts of the application can be sped up. It's like economics, the more you learn, the more you realise you have so much more to learn :D
A few years later and I have not received an email suggesting to increase the speed of the app in several months, although I continue to make speed improvements on a regular basis.
Netflix have been my source of inspiration here. They are leagues ahead of every other streaming service and their custom architecture placed at the ISP level is absolutely incredible and paramount to how the deliver content with such amazing speeds.
When fixing performance problems you shouldn't guess, just profile it to find the bottlenecks.
I've seen plenty of performance 'fixes' that weren't, pure guesses by developers that did nothing, when a quick profile immediately revealed the culprit.
In your case you also need to figure out if it's happening server-side or client-side. I generally start with the server-side logs, get a few days/weeks worth of data, find average page request times, plus how much deviation on those requests, then go from there. That gets you the server-side. For client-side, unfortunately it's a lot harder. Google analytics page load speed, for example, is a pile of crap. But, again, there's a profiler in dev tools, remember js compile time is a significant thing and can slow load time too so check that out as well as the actual run times (js compile time shows in the page load graph).
I've done heaps of profiling.. pun intended :D
But I'm not sure you can say that he's not profiling - he's using the end users' direct experience as the profiling tool, prioritizing the fixes by greatest annoyance.
Since he let himself get in the mode of being reactive, that's not a bad way out of the hole he dug himself.
Of course the best way is to design your architecture for speed, minimize all code usage & data transfer, use the profiling tools before release candidate status, and prioritizing speed & performance in the QA process.
Talking to your users is paramount, at the very least they will indicate where you have to add profiling
That's something no other smartphone could do. I don't know how things are today but I looks like Android more or less "solved" the problem by throwing powerful hardware at it.
The killer feature is not really speed, but low input latency. And this is achieved by taking performance in consideration during development. And contrary to the old "premature optimization is the root of all evil" saying, you have to do it early, because while can be relatively easy to increase throughput, latency is much harder to deal with.
This is also part of the success of Google Chrome. While it didn't load pages that much faster than its competition it was great at showing you something quickly. It took ages for Firefox to catch up, and it looks like it did mostly because Chrome became slower over time. How is Servo going BTW?
Pretty much dead, unfortunately.
I find Android is now terrible on both my Samsung Tab 2 and my Galaxy S8. Sometimes I click something and it takes over a second to do any UI changes and looks like it hasn't responded. Just as you go to click it again, it comes up. I find the same in multiple apps where basic actions take too long even simple menu/view apps like email.
I don't know what has happened but it does seem crazy that in 20 years with hardware that is 1000s of times more powerful, we still can't consistently solve click latency.
Maybe it's just me.
> That's something no other smartphone could do.
Either I'm misreading you, or you have a strangely narrow version of the world we live in. What is so magical about the iPhone that no other smartphone can "react quickly to your input by showing you a nice, smooth but slow animation while work is being done in the background"?
(Part of my doubt probably comes from using a OnePlus 7 Pro as my daily driver. 90Hz refresh rate and everything is ridiculously fast and smooth. But that's not actually possible, is it?)
I don't know how but if you look at input response time charts, especially in the early days, the iPhone is among the best, if not the best by a large margin. Less abstraction layers? Better tuned OS? More attention given to latency? More trickery? Apple's level of integration and closed ecosystem certainly helps here, and I can easily imagine Steve Jobs pissing off every single employee that wasn't fired for the smallest hiccup. I am far from an Apple fan and I don't own any of their stuff but I have to admit that on some points, they are really good. And as a developer, I have a lot of respect for those who care about performance.
Your OnePlus 7 Pro is a beast. It is fast and smooth because it has quasi-desktop class hardware inside. That's the "solution" I was referring to.
To be fair, Android did work on smoothness. It was called "project butter". But IMHO, they still didn't manage to match Apple on equivalent hardware. I don't know about the situation right now but I hope everything is smooth considering the ridiculously powerful hardware they put in modern flagships.
Animations are very seldom used on iOS to hide any work happening in the background. Most things happen instantly, and animations are added for usability, to give spatial hints and make the UI easier to follow.
Hum... I don't think that makes much sense. Yes, there are some latency optimizations that are certain and architecture wide, so they are much easier to do at first write time, but there are a lot of latency optimizations that are iffy and local, and thus much easier to do with an actual profiler running.
The thing is, throughput optimizations also come on both forms. I'm having a very hard time remembering any large and general enough experience on the ratios, or arriving at a property that would change them for latency or throughput. I think that dimension is really not relevant for them.
There's a reason why it's hard to ever go back, once you've experienced the fluidity of even just your mouse cursor reacting instantly to your movements.
If you've ever used the iPad Pro, there's clearly something special about the experience. It just _feels_ better, and for all the same reasons described in the article.
60hz is far from smooth, and that number is a leftover from days past, not what is actually optimal or good.
Display technologies unfortunately still have ways to go when it comes to high resolution, color accurate panels, with high refresh rates, but the general direction on the market is that high refresh rates are not available in the "productivity" category of monitors, even if sometimes the manufacturer has panels that would fit the bill. You unfortunately always need to look in the gaming category, which usually lack many of the features you'd like in a more productivity centered display. Such as a fully adjustable stand, high color accuracy and viewing angles, virtual display splitting, or just overall design of the enclosure.
I could go on another rant about display enclosure designs... Why isn't there a single company out there (with perhaps the exception of Dell) that's creating nice and minimal display enclosures that aren't covered in cheap plastic and "aesthetic" ornaments? Apple's Cinema Display from 2004 is to this day one of the better looking enclosures out there.
I don't think you can blame this on the consumers really. For the higher end market that I'm talking about in general here, I'd be willing to take a bet on if you build it they will come. I'd certainly be praising any company willing to take this on to high heavens.
I want a great, fast, accurate panel with a nice, minimal, aluminum enclosure. Is that just too much to ask?
But you probably haven't, except in, well, games?
> 60hz is far from smooth, and that number is a leftover from days past, not what is actually optimal or good.
Well it would already be wonderful if we actually had 60 Hz in modern application / devices, including 16 ms response time. I fired up an old game the other day on my arcade cab (CRT screen), some shoot'em up game, and it was silky smooth. I'm pretty sure it was "only" 60 Hz but it was constantly 60 Hz: any input with the joystick or buttons had results the very next frame.
This felt so much smoother than any of the army of modern devices I'm using on a daily basis: even if they can animate stuff at high refresh rate, the latency before the animation starts is what makes using them painful.
Refresh rate is a thing but so is the latency between when your input and when, visually, it produces a result.
I've seen people working on ports from old arcade game where they'd record using high-speed cameras LEDs physically hooked to the joysticks/buttons to make sure that "input at frame x means response at frame x + 1". Short of that your app very probably is not responding in 16 ms or less, unless you really know what you're doing.
There was this famous rant by John Carmack where he lamented that on PCs it was faster to do a transatlantic ping than to push one pixel to the screen: I don't know how far we've gone, but when I compared modern devices to my old arcade cab and it's measly 60 Hz (but 16 ms latency), I'm still not impressed.
A 120 Hz or 144 Hz or 240 Hz is no good if it takes 35 ms between when you move the mouse and when you see the results on screen: that's not "120 Hz" but 30 Hz. And 30 Hz feels laggier than an 35 years old arcade cab: it is that shameful. 35 years and still feeling more responsive than any productivity app.
I remember a recent tool posted here (I think for OS X: maybe an editor) here by someone who was fed up with this extreme "input lag" and was guaranteeing his program would be answering in less than 16ms (maybe was it 24ms, don't remember exactly). But that is an exception.
I think you're highly underestimating how smooth 60 Hz already is when there's no input lag. Now, of course, I'm taking 120 Hz or more any day over 60 Hz but we should very badly focus on input lag too.
And, sadly, we live in a world where I'd scientifically guesstimate that 99.99% of the programmers are totally unable, due to limitations of their tools (do they have high speed cameras and can they prove how fast things are pushed to the screen?) / knowledge (I'm not John Carmack and modern software stacks sure seems complicated) / languages (let's not start a flame war) / mindset (never optimize anything / 100 MB JavaScript downloads are fine, etc.), to push anything to the screen in 8ms or 4ms.
Except for top-notch game programmers working on AAA titles.
So 240 Hz monitors, sure: bring them up. But bring me too the programmers and tools needed so that in 4 ms I'll see the result of my inputs.
Mac OS 9 Lives praise Mac OS 9 against OSX because of that.
In our case, our users had a specific flow through the application they would use, and it worked, but it required clicking many (10+) buttons and waiting for a web request on each. People on the team were satisfied that the flow worked and going through it didn't take TOO long... But what people on our side didn't get is that our customers had to go through this flow dozens if not hundreds of times - some users would need to do it this many times regularly. It effectively made our users hate using the product, or they would refuse to, or they'd use it but only a little bit and they'd try to minimize the cost.
I tried to get people on our side to experience the pain points, e.g. asking PMs to follow this flow one hundred times, and things like that, but I never could get through to anyone that we should redesign and refocus on making it usable. Maybe a mockup of a faster flow was what was needed to be persuasive there.
I bring this up with others, and they are lukewarm about it. I feel like our company is in deeeeep shit if I don't convince people this is a problem.
I always felt like resistive screens were more responsive than capacitive screens.
Case in point: My 3DS resistive screen and Palm Centro responded instantly. I think their downside was the necessary use of the stylus (because of the additional precision, their UIs required you to pull out the stylus before you could do anything effective).
What the Apple iPod Touch / iPhone did, was allow you to touch without using a stylus.
Anyway, I read this post as if its a mirror-image of my reality. The one thing I remember about Apple's capacitive push was that it felt slower than what I was used to. Honest.
--------
With that being said: I've played fighting games vs opponents who can 1-frame link and counter-throws within 7-frames (115 milliseconds). I'm well aware of the human-brain's capability to process data far faster than most people realize.
Musicians, Video Game players, Athletes... I expect most of them to have reaction speeds well above average: below the 200ms typical human. Even then, "average" humans have far better reaction speeds and ability to perceive things that happen in factions-of-a-second (at least, once you make them aware of those things).
UI-speed is absolutely a great feature. I just disagree that Apple's iPod Touch or iPhone was a good representation of that.
I upgraded my monitor to 144hz, got a low delay mouse and headset (some headsets have over 400ms delay and audio response is faster than visual!). My ranking in games I've played for years has gone up about 1 standard deviation. I'm at my record high ranking in every game and it continues to rise.
Likely biased study, but Nvidia found an eyebrow raising difference in player performance when using higher refresh rates. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gives-you-...
Jokes aside, I'm happy I haven't had the same experience as you for gaming. Because then I would have to buy into high performance gaming. I can now happily play a game on something like Stadia or my old Macbook without having to feeling something is wrong or missing. Kinda like how watching movies on VHS was fine until HD came along. Now every artifact or resolution drop in a video is an annoyance.
PC upgrades have given me 50ms reaction time advantage. Nearly what I lost since my early 20s. Feels nice to be "good" at games again
Everybody online said the non-plus-ultra was the iPad Pro, even compared to other name-brand devices from Samsung/Microsoft.
So I tried them both, and wow. 120fps and a screen optimized for low delay really makes an enormous difference.
With all other tablets, it was more a question of "well how more or less awkward does this feel to use", where that question didn't even come up with the iPad.
I know this sounds like shilling, but I recommend just trying it out on a real device sometime, even or especially if you have no intent of buying one.
Newer studies have shown recognition of events as fast as 13ms. https://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116
More than 30ms of delay is noticable. My old screen + mouse had a delay of ~50 crudely tested. My old bluetooth headset was over 400ms!
I totally believe you that delay is noticable. I haven't used iPhone, but Android has terrible UI lag virtually everywhere (pointless animations don't help, pro tip you can turn these off in developer options)
I measured my delay using a USB keyboard which are generally assumed to have zero delay but that's not great.
I base most of my delay numbers off of reviewers that have special hardware
Which headset did you switch to?
I bought the HyperX CloudX Flight (what a name) wireless gaming headset about three months ago, and I was shocked at how much latency I could feel in something that was supposed to be a dedicated gaming headset.
There's no inherent reason that a wireless headset has to have more latency than a wired headset, analog wireless being the extreme example of no added latency, but a purpose-built wireless headset seems like it would use some digital wireless protocol that is optimized for low latency, instead of buffering something like 100ms of audio in the channel. That ~100ms to ~150ms of latency really impacts reaction times.
So, I could switch to a wired headset... I just wish I could find a wireless headset that didn't suck. Microsoft just recently introduced their new "Xbox Wireless Headset", which looks awesome, but... the absence of any latency specification is not encouraging.
Proprietary USB dongles for low delay headelsets is standard for foreseeable future.
Don't switch to wired, there's no point. Chances are, your HyperX headset has same latency as a wired connection.
We can look at Input Lag [1], and Microsoft Research's work [2] on Touch Input. Apple's ProMotion being part of that as well. For the past 20 years we have make 10 - 100x improvement in bandwidth at the expense of Latency. Now we need to do more work on it . Especially if we want VR or AR which are extremely latency sensitive. John Carmack [3] used to talk a lot about it when he was still working on Oculus. How it was faster sending something hundreds of miles away than showing it on your computer screen.
[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/
Speed matters. I CAN perceive the latency of using an SPA vs using a native application. I notice. the diff. between executing a GNU binary vs running a js based script.
I agree with your post. We as a community have completely subverted the meaning of this quote. It is originally about the need to profile your code, and about how programmers instincts often fail them, making them optimize the wrong things.
But when it mixed with Startup Culture it morphed into "don't worry about speed, just write whatever shitty code comes into your head and only optimize if a customer complains... scratch that, let's not listen to customer complaints because we know better".
Like you said, some companies with good products and some good developers are following what Knuth had to say and are constantly optimizing for speed (but after profiling). Others are engaged in a race to the bottom and are trying to convince everyone else that careless engineering is somewhat better.
What they dont say is that there is never an end to set of feature requests you will get. No matter how many crappy, unusable features you throw in, there will always be a request to tweak this , tweak that.....
This applies to every metric, not just performance. For example: don't optimise your top of the funnel when your bottleneck is actually conversion.
So measure, and then optimise. Don't optimise prematurely.
This. Yet, I’d say it’s not the teams. In my experience it’s usually management that demands new features and doesn’t care about speed.
This line of reasoning makes me sad. It highlights so many problems in a company that a developer is having to deal with;
- Seeing 'management' and 'devs' as opposing teams shows a lack of communication and a lack of understanding from everyone involved.
- A company where managers aren't willing to listen to developers is never going to put out a great product. Developers have expertise and know what they're doing.
- A company where developers think they know best is never going to put out a great product either. Managers also have expertise and know what they're doing.
- If the "managers" dictating that features are added are "higher ups" rather than product managers then the company is never going to put out a great product because the people who talk to the customers and look at usage metrics should be driving the product roadmap. Customer needs should be driving what gets added.
- Developers who aren't putting up a fight to write good, fast code because they're not being listened to stop caring about what they're building, and that means there's very likely to be other problems like significant bugs, tech debt, etc. That just grinds you down and stresses you out.
All in all, if your opinion is "the product I build sucks because managers make it suck" you probably need to find a new job. Not every company is like that. Find a good one.
One possibility for speed as in latency would be to pre-agree on a latency budget (as in realtime-systems: if you exceed that deadline, your system has failed). Then have everyone be aware of how they spend that latency budget. Say the latency deadline is at 500ms for your website to full interactivity. Currently you are at 320ms. Marketing wants to include some analytics scripts. Include them in the test page, measure the added latency, then check against your deadline: added 200ms, we are now at 520ms. Do we reject marketing's wishes or do we make the design dept. cut back on their image load times, maybe they can get from 130ms to 90ms? How about investing in better caching to get 100ms?
That way you can discuss numbers and can quantify how something impacts the overall experience. Budgets is something everyone can understand, and taking a big gulp out of a limited budget is something no-one wants to be seen doing.
For example right now I have to deal with a data interface provided by a partner company. The theoretical limit of the interface should be 1.625 MB/s. If we were to stupidly copy our numeric streaming data over, we would be within our timing budget, and optimizing this would be optional.
However, the implementation of the partner company only reaches 0.1MB/s max. So their "smart" implementation/interface is only 6% efficient, or in other words could be 16 times better. That really helps putting things into perspective, and turns management's bullshit filter on, when the partner company says "you can buy this from us if you want more performance" or "that's just the limit of the hardware".
Unfortunately this is not always the case. Currently there are other "developers" getting access to our sql servers that drag down performance a lot. It looks to me that they may be coming from an OOP world and now trying to force these patterns onto sql which doesn't scale at all.
So developer != developer and not all developers are good imho.
In enterprise, the "customer" is going to be someone who will almost never touch the product once they've signed off on it. Building something that's a pleasure to use (good UI, responsive etc) for the end-user is usually wayyyy low on their list of priorities.
I upgraded to latest i5 with SSD for data, and the performance drops are basically 0. It bothers me that there is something which needs improvement and I cant check on a commit to commit basis. But yes, it is very easy to oversee performance drops due to new / faster hardware.
Speaking of Teams, there is something I don't really understand, which is that we have just experienced nearly a full year of intense competition between Teams, Webex, Zoom, Bluejeans, Skype and all the rest. All of those products should be AMAZING by now. But actually most of them are still clunky as hell, and Teams itself is probably the worst of them, it's still as slow as it was a year ago, still unreliable and still missing (trivial) features that people actually want, like the ability to block/ignore certain contacts. And it can't be - if anyone at Microsoft actually uses it themselves - that they don't know how bad it is. But they seem to be doing absolutely nothing about it.
No opinion on Bluejeans nor Webex but I assume it could be the same as above.
Zoom isn't actually that bad. UX-wise it has some issues but speed-wise it performs better than everything else I've tried (probably helps that it has a native app instead of being browser-based or Electron garbage).
Skype is a consumer product and is left to stagnate more or less. Most likely, they don't see enough profit potential in it to make it actually better (which would involve throwing away the Electron crap and rebuilding a - or dusting off the old - native app).
Quoting for emphasis. It's incredibly telling most people who started WFH since spring 2020, they are nowhere near as adapted or sensitive to this stuff as people who used similar commercial apps with a different target audience (gamers) on the regular.
Teams feels like two steps forward, one step back compared to Skype. It looks more streamlined, business-y and has cool integrations, but so many design choices irk me and the performance is meh.
For most people in the environments where Teams is rolled out, the standard used to be either e-mail (using bloated clients like Outlook) or Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Office Lync).
The question as to why those previous options can't be as good as the consumer-grade alternatives (such as the social networks they're often using) has already been settled long ago and they've accepted whatever BS answer they've been given.
Compared to what they used previously, Teams is indeed an upgrade (albeit small) and they are unlikely to question its quality as they've already accepted that the tools they use in their enterprise are terrible compared to consumer-grade alternatives they use outside of the enterprise.
The real eye-opener for them would be to try Slack, where they would suddenly realize that office chat doesn't have to suck, though I have to say Slack is doing a great job over the last couple years at catching up to Teams when it comes to terribleness.
Easy conspiracy theory to postulate, but with WFH "bean counters" use video conferencing software just as much as devs - indeed probably far more intensely.
Jitsi and Google Meet don't employ any dark patterns, they are fast, they are reliable, they are easy to use. (I do use them only in Chromium.)
Zoom desperately wants me to download their client, even going so far as to require multiple failed attempts before showing the button to join using the browser. Then it wants me to complete a CAPTCHA before letting me join. If I do use the client it opens several separate windows and asks if I want to join using desktop audio. (Of course I do, and if you still want to ask please keep it in the main window.)
However, speed is not “the killer feature”. Speed does not add any value in isolation; your app needs to solve a need for the user first. If you don’t have PMF don’t think about speed yet.
The article gestures at objectivity by linking some cases where people measured revenue gains from speed improvements, but fails to follow through and actually propose an experiment or ROI calc. If you think your app is slow, run an experiment and measure the impact on conversion. (You can even take a page from Google’s book and _add_ delay with a simple sleep() if you don’t want to spend any time on perf work before you get data. Or just do the first bit of low-hanging fruit and measure the impact.)
Talk to your users and ask them what frustrates them in the app. It might be “takes so long to check out”, or it might be “it just lacks feature X that competitor Y has”. I’d suggest it’s unwise to spend time on perf work if you are pre-pmf and the main feedback was the latter. Again, do experiments too because customers don’t always tell you what they need. In particular enterprise users often don’t care as much about speed, as long as you tick all of the boxes. Many users are used to line-of-business software that is slow and buggy, so your bar in B2B is not always high here.
Finally do an ROI calculation. If a perf iteration is going to cost you $20k in dev resource, and get you 7% improvement on $10k of monthly revenue, that might not be the right thing to focus on. Ideally you’re looking at features that will improve your top of funnel volume more than that.
It’s all a trade-off. It depends on your company’s level of maturity, Product/Market fit, and the value of the marginal feature that you’d be deferring to make your app go faster.
If we interpret this to be a political manifesto carrying the message “you should care more about speed/performance”, I’d prefer the meta-level “you should care more about trade-offs and marginal value”.
How could the majority of people collect a salary working on software that has no users? That makes no sense.
Basically, if you think that software is feast-or-famine as an investment, then this would make sense.
I’m not intending to generalize, quite the opposite. I’m arguing against a generalization that “speed is the killer feature [for all products]”. In my post I presented a few cases where this over-generalization is not true (pre-PMF startup and potentially large B2B product) and suggested a more nuanced and objective analysis of the trade-offs.
> You are speaking in generalities, so you are essentially implying that most people are working on software that has not achieved product market fit?
Perhaps try parsing my post as “here are a few examples of common cases where speed is not the killer feature, and a sketch of a more flexible thought process that will get you to a better answer”.
Product managers at both large and small companies use ROI and experimentation to figure out what to build (though in some ways it’s actually harder at a startup as your sample size can be too small to get statistical significance, or at least to run as many experiments as you’d like).
1) As programmers we're biased to feel like speed is the most important thing because it's very fun and satisfying to optimize. In reality, for actual users, it's one of many different axes of value that have to be weighed against each other. In some domains it's critical, in some it matters very little, in most cases it's one important factor among many.
2) There are different types of "speed". Generally anything that's supposed to mimic something physical - basic UI feedback, real-time games/simulations, etc - has a much higher speed requirement than some abstract process. Will the process take long enough that it makes sense to show a loading spinner at all? Then the user probably won't mind waiting a couple extra seconds. Will it take <500ms? then the user will approximate it to "instant", and will notice if there's a bit of "lag".
> Phones in 2007 had the same features as the iPhone. The Palm Treo even had a touch screen. The difference was speed.
If the original iPhone had taken twice as long as the Treo to load a web page, but the touch screen was still more responsive, people still would have perceived it as being "faster". The extra seconds matter less than shaving off the extra milliseconds.
All that said, I do agree with the general thesis. Evernote has just come up with a huge update of all their apps, having ported them all to Electron to standardize development. The only problem is, they're all brutally slow compared to the native apps that preceded them, and it truly ruins the experience.
Even before the HTC Touch, their WinMo version allowed for touch only operation for 3-4 years.
If you wanted to you could perhaps argue that the PalmPilot was the first touch only portable device that worked "really well", but that wasn't a phone (and you'll have lots of angry Newton fans telling you that are wrong). Or you could try to make an argument for the Treo, but it wasn't really "touch only".
As someone who has used every device mentioned above (and owned at least half of them), I personally feel comfortable calling the iPhone the first phone with a touch only interface that worked "really well"
I will also argue that Apple verbatim copied some of their UI ideas.
At the time I had limited experience, but personally I thought touch screens would never work, because they were slow, imprecise and unresponsive (often worked with special pen only) and then iPhone came with buttery smooth experience and multi-touch. Mind blown.
Stopped listening to these people for product expertise. Even took a chance on Facebook at $19 when HN was gleefully expounding on how this was obvious and the company was doomed. Glad I did that.
Did it again when everyone on HN was convinced SMCI was spying for China. Worked out again.
I'm going to call it "Tech Enthusiast Inverse Sentiment Index" TEISI. List it on the NYSE and people can make big money doing the opposite of people here. Maybe you get a couple of losses like WeWork and whatever but overall, I think you win.
I'll never get another Samsung, even though I don't know if they did it deliberately, or if it was even them that did it.
Somehow my current phone has lasted 3 years with no appreciable slowing.
Everything is just too slow -- and it doesn't need to be.
It seems to me that basically 100% of the UI/UX developers at the big tech companies are woefully ignorant of the fact that there is a massive amount of data and papers written about human computer interaction. I'm guessing that is because few comp-sci programs even touch the topic, rather spending all their time on more esoteric/mathematical topics.
In summary, a very large number of studies were done in the 1960s-1980's on the _human_ aspects of user responsiveness (important when timesharing became common), how people learned computer interfaces, and how effective they were at operating them. Despite some of these papers being > 40 years old, none of it has really changed because the studies were about humans, less than computers. The underlying computing may have changed from a time shared terminal to a phone in someones hand connected to a server, but in that time the human cognitive loop hasn't changed.
IMHO, and somewhat backed by the science, any system which isn't responding in under 100ms is broken unless its performing something extraordinary. If its actually interactive (like typing on a command prompt) even that is far to slow. User frustration, and loss of attention are real things, and you can bet when given the choice users will pick less frustrating systems. The saving grace for many of these platforms is that the entire industry is trying to be like the fashion industry and follow the latest trends. So it doesn't matter if BigCoX makes a huge UI blunder all the others will follow it down the lemming hole.
So tell me why some of the conclusions in a paper like http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu/~corbato/sjcc62/ (1962) are wrong. How about: http://yusufarslan.net/sites/yusufarslan.net/files/upload/co... (1968)
Amusingly other classics like https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... are discovered regularly too (1983).
Thanks everyone for sharing really awesome examples in the comments here - from Games to Receipt Printers to Apps, it's clear that speed is valued.
Or... that there's a big opportunity to bring back lightning fast products :)
1/3 of a second is already insane lag, 3 seconds is just ridiculous.
My first impression was "unbelievable" - how on earth would anyone think a Palm device is slow?! Then I followed the link and saw a Palm Tree 750/V... oh, of course, that thing run Windows Mobile.
A Palm device running Palm OS is blazing fast! I switched to iPhone from Treo 650 in 2009. Almost everything became much slower. The iPhone software was slow, so was the user interaction (in the sense of UX).
Palm only started using Windows in its later years. And there were actually very few Windows Palm phones. Most Palm PDAs and phones run Palm OS and were very, very fast.
Speed always has been not only the most important thing, but virtually the only important thing. Back before most of you were born, there was a review (in PC Magazine, IIRC) of the category of spreadsheet programs. MBA Analyst dominated the others (visicalc and lotus 123, IIRC) in every category except speed, in which it was OK, but not great. That's why you never heard of it.
The speed requirement is closely related to the self-importance fallacy. If a computer needs time to think, maybe we could make good use of a few moments pause, too.
For example, Line of Business (LOB) apps are built with ROI in mind. LOB apps help businesses run more efficiently, and employ the vast majority of developers. These are the most used apps in the world, and company owners are much more interested in functionality, automation, and distribution of apps than performance and usability.
Examples I can think of: The emoji selector (ctrl+cmd+space) is quite slow. On my brand new macbook, it's a small noticeable pause, and on my old macbook it's several seconds (during which time keyboard input is lost).
> If you can’t speed up a specific action, you can often fake it. Perceived speed is just as important as actual speed.
Second example is facetime on my iPhone. They fake being fast by showing the last opened screen. For me, it's very often the "most recent calls". The problem is that in the meantime there's been another call. Result: I see the person I want to call back, tap on the screen where they are, observe that the content changes and I call the wrong person. This happens often enough that I should learn, but somehow I don't.
A very strange phone to reference. First iPhone was slow as molasses with all of the excessive visual effects.
It was only around OMAP iphones when they first got proper hardware acceleration.
Palms were noticably faster than WinMo 6, and WinMo 6 was faster than 5 which was indeed painful to use because of input lag.
Ironically, Android is still somwhat slower than WinMo 6 on input lag despite every trick Google is throwing on it.
I read somewhere they even tried to wire the input layer directly to hardware acceleration to make scrolling less laggy.
It was the first all-in-one (camera, music player, phone, game system, organizer, etc) that didn’t make you a bully target.
Not saying Speed is unimportant...I’m saying this is straight up lying.
Like back in the AOL days, when dialup was a thing, the internet was dogshit slow, but you still had to get in line to use it. Took hours more often than not.
If people valued speed more than anything, aol would have gone bankrupt. People are willing to pay extra for speed but can live without it as long as features are there.
This is starting to bug me because for startups, this is bad advice. It’s actually harmful since it’s all about product-market fit at the beginning. You’re better off throwing away code instead of optimizing.
But Google Pay released a new update using the flutter framework. And now even scrolling takes ages to complete. I complained on Play Store but the reply said to check my internet speed.
Meanwhile PayTM has also redesigned their app, but unlike Google Pay their updates actually made the app much faster and intuitive. I still check Google Pay from time to time to see if they have fixed their app, but the scrolling is still laggy (it feels like you are in a web page) and the loading page still flickers.
Few apps are native anymore, they're all just wrappers around web pages. It sucks.
I think it's fine to say faster page loading makes users happier and will increase conversions but you should avoid generalising with such specific figures (I see this often with page speed article titles where they mention conversion rates changes to 4 significant figures). It's going to vary wildly based on the product, audience, price, exclusivity, custom loyalty etc. and you'll get diminishing returns as well.
The impact page speed has on amazon.com conversions isn't going to be the same as on your side-project website for lots of reasons.
If you deliberately add a second to the checkout and measure the conversion rate it will go down. But to then talk of reducing latency creates this much extra conversion rate is a lie. There is an oft touted figure from when they deliberately slowed the BBC website to assess engagement.
However, truth is that speed is good.
It’s incredible that nobody has 1-click flight bookings a-la-Amazon yet.
It's painful (for me, that is :D), but I know it's the right thing to do.
Now turn off the screen with the power button.
Notice the annoying delay when turning off the screen is gone? enjoy :-)
Of course you also don't have a way to invoke the wallet manually, but luckily if you put it near a payment terminal it will auto activate
Probably won't work if you're a heavy apple wallet user but if you use it only sporadically I personally think it's worth it, I found the delay very annoying when I switched to a homekeyless iphone
Speed (or more likely, perceived speed) is only one part of UX, and how much it matters depends a lot on what else is going on and the users expectation. Even focusing merely on responsiveness feels a bit superficial.
Something a bit closer to the core of it is that whenever a user is focused on waiting for your software, it reduces their experience. That can be articulated better I'm sure - and still is only one part of the (complex) equation.
The thing with iPhone was the capasitive screen, which made touch UI work. At the point I had already worked with phone touch UI:s for seven years, and that's the thing that felt like magic.
I was reminded by this today as I installed Debian on a new computer. Why do Gnome makers imagine it's OK to have the *default* on slow ("Animations") rather than instant ? Do they really think we'll be happy enjoying a 200ms or 500ms delay every time we reduce or open a window ?
Those aren't even the right questions.
Change 10 seconds to 1 for the checkout page. And then ask if they ever have to watch a loading indicator. We have no hope if we dont set good goals.
For my personal notes, I'm still organizing it in local files (via vimwiki), but for team notes, Notion needs to step up its game.
Oddly the links were right next to each other.
You can cheat in some weird and fun ways though. For instance, if you say "no user of this system will ever be more than 50ms away", you get to play some really interesting games with vertical scaling and consolidation of compute capability in an all-in way. I.e. server-side technologies ran out of a single datacenter near the userbase.
If your latency domain fits it, something like Blazor server side can be an incredible experience for your users. First load is almost immediate because there's virtually no client code. Everything is incremental from there. If you are within 50ms of the server, UI feels instant in my experience. The nature of how applications are developed with this tech means that if your business services are completing requests within the performance budget, you can be almost certain the end user will see the same.
Going to the bottom of the rabbit hole, understanding how NUMA impacts performance can make 5+ orders of magnitude difference in latency and throughput. Letting a thread warm up on a hot path and keeping it fed with well-structured data is foundational to ultra-low-latency processing.
You can handle well over a million events per second on a single thread on any recent PC using techniques such as LMAX disruptor combined with a web hosting technology like Kestrel. The difference between a class and a struct can be 10x if you get to that level of optimization. I measure user interactions in microseconds in my stack these days.
A millisecond is a fucking eternity. You shouldn't be doing a bunch of back and forth bullshit in that kind of latency domain. Stream client events to server as fast as possible, microbatch and process, prepare final DOM changeset and send to client all at once. How could any other client-server architecture be faster than this, especially if we are forced to care about a bucket of shared state?
How do you explain then that iphones took over the market, even though Nokias had many more features? Speed, or the feeling of speed, was part of it, I am sure
That said, I feel like it is sort of belaboring the obvious.
I think that our overdependence on dependencies has a lot to do with UI latency.
Not saying I necessarily disagree with the premise but they chose a poor example.