Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

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I am an engineer at a big tech company. I’m not a “normie”.

Even for me the new features aren’t compelling. They don’t really help me do anything I actually want to do. They don’t solve a problem or scratch an itch. And features change so often and so drastically I don’t really care to learn. I used to have an optical zoom but now I have super wide angle. My Fidelity widget used to show my balance but now it doesn’t so I just never bother swiping to that page. I assume the current iteration of widgets will go away or be replaced soon so I don’t bother trying to fix it. Whatever, doesn’t matter.

Smartphones are essentially solved at this point. It’s an appliance. And just like my washing machine and dishwasher the buttons are arbitrary and clunky but work well enough. I tolerate it. Like I tolerate that burner on the cooktop that doesn’t always work.

The only thing that would get me excited is text editing and spellcheck that work correctly.

I don’t get the assumption (not just in your comment, all over this post) that engineers and programmers are more likely to appreciate the changes.

I’m a programmer, apple devices have had the cpu grunt to run ssh or vi for ages. Therefore, I don’t really notice much generation to generation. I wonder if it will ever catch up to the Raspberry Pi in usability.

I expect a photographer, or maybe someone who opened big spreadsheets, or a social media person, or one of those coffee-shop authors, might be more likely to notice the difference.

My comment is a counter response to the assertion that engineers are any different than “normies”.

How can you call it "solved" when such basics as text editing are broken?

The dishwasher comparison is also way off, the level of dishwasher interaction is primitive and the frequency thereof is very very low, so it's much easier to tolerate bad design

> How can you call it "solved" when such basics as text editing are broken?

I just want to be able to hold backspace in my URL bar until my link is 'polite' enough to share with someone else. I want it to stop clearing the entire field when I'm only halfway through removing the trailing crap.

What would you want next, a modal editor that understands "clean url" as a type of a text object which you could then select&copy in a couple of motions?

So true. With so much advancement in phone tech I’m still not typing as fast as 15 years ago when phones had physical keyboards. Copy paste undo redo is unnecessarily clumsy. The list goes on.

> Smartphones are essentially solved at this point.

How about running a normal desktop OS on smartphone, so that you could completely replace your laptop/desktop?

This makes a lot of sense for tablets - but Apple decided they won't allow it in order not to cannibalize sales. For phones, the value is arguably smaller, at least for people like me who hate doing anything remotely complex on a tiny screen.

There is no reason to do anything complex on a tiny screen. The phone can stay a phone, except when you connect a keyboard and screen to it.

Nobody actually does that, turns out. Several manufacturers have the feature and it goes unused.

They do it wrong: Nobody needs to expand mobile apps to a large screen. There is only one company which does it right: Shrink desktop apps to mobile: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co...

Total pipe dream. I like GNOME’s design but gtk and its desktop apps at large will never be appealing to mobile users, so I wholeheartedly disagree with you.

I already use a desktop Firefox and LibreOffice on my Librem 5. It's relatively slow but works sufficiently well with NoScript and text.

See also: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/

well not fully solved. That's why I was watching foldable phones carefully and seeing how they iterate. That was indeed the first thing in a long time that both excited me and easily had me imagining various improvements (horizontal folds for productivity, vertical to minimize space. Both to built-in protect the screen).

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