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Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

It's not very hard to engineer software with these two constraints at the same time:

* Must feel very responsive * Network requests can take up to 500ms end to end

It isn’t, but at the same time, smart hackers were working with highly constrained PC hardware in the 1980s and early 1990s and were cranking surprisingly good performance out of it. Folklore.org has plenty of stories about it, and John Carmack’s early career history is very impressive. We mustn’t forget the demo scene hackers either.

Recently I tried an approach of "just write the f*** code" instead of using infinite abstractions on a new UI side project. So for instance when you scroll, it shifts the pixels and just redraws the new exposed area. This is how stuff worked in the 90s. And it's blazing fast and uses very little memory. It's easy to mess up redraw code like that - in my case, when the window goes past the screen border and the pixels to copy aren't there. That's a bug we also had a lot of in the 90s.

That's why phones and windows use animations. You can also use intersitials related to the product you sell. Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background. For example in the interstitial, use an animation that takes up a small portion of the screen and not just a simple spinner or loading icon. Something more complicated with 2 or more things moving or changing at once.

If your app absolutely must rely on the cloud for every one of its interactions, then fine. If not, you're just applying band-aids to a problem of your own making. Many apps could easily be local only, or local first. If you're not constantly accessing the network for information which could be stored locally, then you don't need to hide your app's slowness behind animations.

Canva replaced PowerPoint. Canva is cloud based and PowerPoint is not. There's so many apps that are cloud only so that corporate it no longer has to manage installations and users don't need to ask IT for permission anymore. I think SaaS doesn't really work without the cloud, you could technically do what adobe does but why bother with app distribution and windows' quirks. Cloud based web apps are write once, run anywhere come true with no installation required. Cloud based is more convenient for the user and the developer, at the cost of app runtime speed

I like this example. A lot of people would prefer to use PowerPoint because they can still use their files and templates they made last year even if Microsoft doubles the price of Powerpoint, removes features, discontinues the product, or goes bankrupt.

Difficulty - Microsoft retroactively cancelling lifetime licenses.

Let them sue you if they want to.

They literally unlicense the product out from under you as part of windows update. You’re the one having to sue, unless you never connect your machine to the internet anyway.

Okay then pirate the software while the lawsuit carries out.

Or just pirate the software and let them sue you for pirating, which you will win since you have a license, even though the computer thinks you don't.

uh huh

I have seen many companies migrate to gsuite away from Microsoft. It's perfectly compatible with excel, word and PowerPoint files unless you use macros

Just nerds I think. I'm not seeing any evidence that people who want freedom from the cloud make up any sizeable market segment. Most corporations actually prefer the opposite - they prefer a monthly fee and continuous silent updates.

I'm not familiar with Canva but I don't see any technical reason why every interaction would need to rely on the server. Since Canva uses client-side JavaScript, it could be designed so that the local version of a document updates immediately and the cloud version syncs with the local version as soon as possible.

I would guess Canva already does something like this.

> Users are usually fine seeing many changes on the screen quickly because it gives the impression that stuff is happening on the background

This gave me a chuckle because I personally hate things like watching the browser jump through 50+ redirects when logging into a website.

My bad, I mean the interstitial. Like it should stay for at least a second to not make it jarring. People believe computers need to think so you can't make things too fast either. Not the interstitial and not the app either, to the point you sometimes have to deliberately slow down the app, add latency to make people trust it because it "gives the computer time to think"

Literally the first thing I do is disable all animations when setting up an os

Power users absolutely hate this mindset. It’s resulted in Apple animations taking seconds for something that was done before the animation even started.

The delay in filing email in iOS is incredible. Selecting and moving a single message can take over a second, even with animations disabled. Maddening for what should be an instantaneous action.

Sometimes. Not by default.

I don't doubt that was an original justification, but most of what I see are not for this purpose. Most of the time they're just adding unnecessary delay and CPU cycles.

I absolutely hate this shit, because my goal is actually doing something in a reasonable amount of time.

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