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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Android's Mastodon choices are indeed rather... surprisingly underwhelming. For many reasons, not just lack of flair. It feels odd to me too.

>But more broadly they all just look and especially feel inert and rigid. Nothing shrinks or stretches. There’s no life to them.

I've been disabling animations on my phone for a few months now, and oh boy. Give me more of that dead, lifeless feel please.

It's so much faster, and it makes my phone into more of a tool rather than a fancy toy that sometimes gets in my way for no discernible reason or benefit.

I get why life-full things are popular, but it's increasingly smelling like a form of addiction-feeding to me.

Also UI design still hasn't recovered from the absurdities that excessively flat, whitespace-heavy nonsense forced on the world. It's slowly regaining sanity, but I'm kinda glad there are a mountain of Android apps that have not followed along.

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What does it even mean for an app to "feel" like something? How do you quantify that so you can do a proper comparison with other apps, or (from the app author's side, take corrective action)?

Author calls these apps "brutalist" and leaves it at that. To his credit, he does list three features that he's like to see: fluid scrolling, swipe gestures, and tap-and-hold contextual menus. Fine. But then goes on to describe his feelings "inert and rigid". Then "comfort, fun, and panache". What on earth is he asking for out of these apps? How do you objectively compare one app's "panache" with another? If I was a developer, what are the steps I can follow to program some "comfort" into my app? These complaints seem so wishy-washy and underspecified.

Then he leaves with the Kubrick quote: “Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” We're fully in the realm of mysticism now, this is not an attempt to fairly compare or measure anything.

You want to quantify feel? Gruber's saying the vibes are off, that the attention to detail in the interaction design isn't there.

I think if he's going to praise some apps and dunk on the other ones, he should compare using measurable criteria. Otherwise, it's only one person's opinion. Just saying "App X feels right" is like saying "App X has a better chakra energy." What is any developer supposed to do with that feedback? The whole article could have boiled down to "I personally like these apps and I don't like those."

Curious what you think of Mozart vs. Salieri, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_(film)

Or a four star Michelin restaurant vs. a Mall food court, or all art/entertainment reviews?

Seems like it's really common to compare things in ways that aren't objectively measurable?

That’s like asking for “measurable criteria” for evaluating a movie or novel or song or painting. It’s art. I will offer another quote from Kubrick: “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.”

If you don’t think apps can be artistic works, it’s no wonder you don’t understand what I’m trying to express.

I suppose our fundamental difference is over whether these apps are best compared as tools or as works of art. When I evaluate and compare tools, in addition to cost, I'm looking at things like speed to perform key tasks, ease/speed to navigate the UI, reliability, error rate, user mistake-rate, latency, accuracy, feature discoverability. Does it effectively do what it says on the tin? And are these attributes greater than or less than those of competing tools? These are all things the developer can take as feedback, file as bugs, go back and improve, and re-measure.

If it were a video game or movie, then sure, subjective comparisons of the media content would make more sense. Does the plot make sense? Are the characters likable? But then, it's just one reviewer's opinion vs. another's rather than actionable measures of quality.

I'm looking at the article from the point of view of the developer accepting criticism and wanting to take corrective action. If I released a utility application and a reviewer told me [not your words, but for example] it felt cold and without pizazz, and it didn't zing and pop and it wasn't sleek enough, I wouldn't know what to do to fix this.

> If I released a utility application and a reviewer told me [not your words, but for example] it felt cold and without pizazz, and it didn't zing and pop and it wasn't sleek enough, I wouldn't know what to do to fix this.

The point of the piece is that there are developers that would know what to do with that feedback, and for whatever reason more of those developers develop for iOS than Android.

If you owned a restaurant and got a Yelp review like “the food was great but the ambiance was a turn-off” what would you do?

Yes. Or: “The hammer technically works when it comes to getting nails into walls, but it’s uncomfortable to hold.”

Why should developing the feel of an app be any different than the feel of a game. That’s what good apps are like. It’s like you can play a good app as much as you use it. All good tools and instruments in history have been crafted like this.

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