Can we stop writing "smart" applications? | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop writing "smart" applications?

5 pointsdevmach9 comments

I have a question to my fellow programmer friends : Can we stop writing "smart" applications ? I'm asking it because obviously we suck at this. Two examples :

Google : Just because i'm in Germany, it doesn't mean you have to redirect me from google.com to google.de and bring me a German page. Yes, there is a link on the right bottom corner ( "Google.com in English" ) but if i type google.com, it means i want to visit google.com, not google.de Believe me, people are not stupid as you think and can type google.de also the google.com => google.de => google.com trip isn't funny.

Gnome's wireless network settings : In Ubuntu / Mint, if you look for wireless networks and click one of them accidentally, you fucked up. You will be asked two times in every 5 minutes about the password of the wireless password. Yes, i made a terrible mistake and i'm an idiot but stop punishing me. And, why did you saved this connection in first place ? There is no reason, I didn't even entered the correct password for this wireless network.

We are trying to make our applications smart by prediction but it doesn't work. So please, stop doing it. Just make a boring configuration process smooth/painless and then go back to your cave, so user get it's things done.

ps : yes i'm a programmer and yes i'm "not" a linux newbee, i know how can i fix this network thing but none of them is what i'm talking about.

The wifi thing is just plain bad design. But the language detection... it amazes me that this complaint has ever come up.

I experience this a lot and have for years during my travels. It's impossible for me to even care about the mild inconvenience because the population is almost exclusively people from the country I'm a guest in. It's not even worth checking the headers to better "guess" what language or destination a person wants on the off chance they're a tourist, visitor or expat, it'd probably be wrong more of the time from pirated copies of Windows in English.

The country extension of the domain is, like the rest of the domain, an irrelevant detail - why make them google for facebook.dk or twitter.com.ar and remember what site uses country extensions vs .com when in almost all cases they don't need to?

Well, language detection "problem" frustrates me a lot, because :

- Everytime i visit google i have to change language

- I might be don't care and use it in german ( or some other language ) but this time the results are different than "English" Google.( Local pages that i don't care and i can't read comes first etc. )

Google should take an action in case of inconsistency. If my ip region and my browser language doesn't match, google can ask me if i want to view google in my browsers language. It costs only a few lines of js code but brings a big satisfaction.

I'm okay with it as the default, but I'm baffled why Google seems to (at least sometimes) do it even when I'm logged in and have English as my preference. Just because I'm in Denmark doesn't mean I want the Google Books interface to override my settings and become Danish!

It'd also be nicer if more sites supported changing languages (in any direction) without logging in. If it's possible to do on Blogger or MySpace, for example, I have no idea how.

I'm baffled why Google seems to (at least sometimes) do it even when I'm logged in and have English as my preference

I was as well, until searching for local things like restaurants. Polish Google gives way better results than the "Google.com in English" site.

I can think of a bunch of examples on iPads and iPhones as well. It amazes me how utterly broken some web sites become once they figure out that I'm using an iPad. Guess what, web developers: I don't want you to force one font size and layout on me just because I have a portable device. It is actually really frustrating when spread-zoom doesn't work at all.

Hacking the user agent string often helps, if your browser supports it.

Sadly, I think it's gotten to the point where we need a way to lie about the screen resolution as well.

I can make my iPad browser pretend to be anything, and it's not enough. I imagine web sites are also checking, e.g. for a 768x1024 browser window and adapting accordingly. It is actually relatively easy to do this with "@media" in CSS, for instance.

All this extra "smart" code takes site developers more time to write, it's more data to download, and more work for the browser to do. Funny that the result would be to damage the user's experience after all that effort was put in.

Yeah...certain CSS tricks are "use with extreme caution" e.g. the ability to hide all overflow with no scroll.

In general, if you don't know how to do it right, you should start by doing it simple. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the impulse to add all the features you possibly can. We've outgrown putting blink tags on everything (mostly), but the underlying impulse is still there.

I don't think the problem is so much contextual logic as it is failing to make errors easy to recover from.

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