Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web
cbloomrants.blogspot.com
cbloomrants.blogspot.com
Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this.
Anyway back to your issue with picture downloads: I had the same problem and after 20 minues of searching I managed to find where can I download my FUCKING pictures:
- go to Google Drive
- Click "Apps"
- Click "More"
- Click "Photos"
- Click "All photos"
And here comes the tricky part:
- At the top left corner hold your left mouse button and drag a box around all your photos
- Unselect the ones you dont't want to download
- Click "More"
- Click "Download"
That's it just 9 easy steps.......no comment
I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.
I have actually written to them about my issues and I'm waiting for a response ever since.
They have Google Apps for the Enterprise, but very often you can't reach the Enterprise without the proper support, product documentation and service. From the other hand, I got very positive experience with Microsoft support which proves that "Customer support at scale" is possible.
Thank you for the comment!
It seems a common feeling that is spreading during the last year... Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074704
If I could, I would downgrade to 4.x ..
I think Google is taking a lot of wrong decisions in terms of strategy. I really liked Material Design and how they tackled the UI discrepancies in their products, but on the Android world this is just a mess. If you want it, you need Lollipop that is just the 5% of the Android world. Can a developer ignore the 95% of the Google Play store? NO.
Then they ported Google Apps, it was nice, but Google Apps wasn't requiring a real re-style, but a better integration with apps and with their services too. Nope, we got a new UI.
It looks like they are prioritizing things that people are not caring now, at least, not so much compared to other things...
Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile.
[1] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html
Provided you run them using the proprietary {AOL,Prodigy,CompuServe,MSN} client app.
a.k.a. Chrome.
Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.
I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.
In contrast my Apple devices aren't cheap, and there is less collection of data with the intent of selling my attention to third party advertising clients, but they are more expensive and I pay an iCloud subscription fee. For the most part the Mac software doesn't suck and works reasonably well. I don't love everything about it but it's more appealing than Picasa for photos. I do pay for extra storage on Google to back up my pictures (over 100 gigs of family photos). But I am definitely paying more Apple in a direct sense (buying computers and phones + iCloud) than to Google (Google Play and 1 device). Apple's margin on hardware is high, but they make a quality product (for the most part).
What I give Google is information about myself, my work, my family, the music I listen to, the books I read, and anything and everything I ever searched for. They're pretty open and transparent about this, and I pretty much understand what I'm turning over in exchange for their free stuff. See the Google dashboard on you. If there's an application or service hosted by Google, I pretty much understand their intent is to extract data from that service or application.
That works for most people, even though they really don't understand this exchange or think about it. Free is a powerful lure and most consumers have come to expect not to pay anything at all for software and services. That's why they download a free game and keep playing it even when they find out it sends the contents of their address book off to some weird holding company. It's also why they get suckered into free games (because 4.99 is just too expensive on an App store) and then spend multiples of that amount in in-game purchases. It's why they're willing to turn over even extremely intimate details of their life for free e-mail or messaging services.
But the incentive for Google is not to make great software or hardware because that's how they make their money. Their incentive is to roll out services which help them collect information to feed their need for information about your tastes and behaviors. If that photo app you're using doesn't really give them more information, there's no incentive to make it better. Apple has an incentive to make software good enough to support their device/computer sales. Microsoft (arguably) has an incentive to make software good enough for manufacturers to license it. Apple and Microsoft, no matter how much people love to shit on them, actually have more straight forward, simple motives. They have an actual financial incentive to care about the quality of the product they deliver because you are paying them (directly or indirectly).
tl;dr Google only makes software good enough to draw you in to collect data. Other vendors are selling yous something and therefore have an interest in making that thing better.
Don't forget about Play Store revenue. They're making money hand over fist by taking a cut of app sales, which is enough to financially justify Android. Oh, and the media sales too, which don't even require Android.
When I realized all this, I switched to hosted paid email service and moved off using Google services. Last thing now was selling the Android phone and getting the alternative, where at least you get value and support for your money.
Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...
There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.
The only thing that makes Android usable in a sane way for me is custom ROMs and Titanium Backup's app freezing.
To continue the parent link's sentiments, it's like someone built an operating system at a company that employed such talented people that no one wanted to work on usability minutia. (Note: design is NOT usability)
* Calls don't work. Had to reinstall OS a couple of times. Known Google bug that they refuse to fix on their own Nexus 4 phone. Bug also exists in Android 4.x. Yay!
* Contacts didn't show names. Had to reinstall OS.
* Bluetooth skips, sometimes fails to connect, and after disconnecting, always reconnects with no sound (though the song metadata is transmitted) - no solution that i've found so far
* Calls and texts sometimes do not alert, even when not in the quiet period - no solution / unable to replicate
* For a long time google apps just crashed, but I was able to finally solve that after reinstalling the OS and google apps a few dozen times
* Hangouts will not let you delete more than one conversation at a time
* No silent mode (speaks a lot to the idiocy of Google's product team)
* The new maps interface is incredibly slow and unusable at times (the article gets this one spot on), especially without a very fast connection (not limited to Android of course--the new slow, downgraded experience is available on all platforms from Google)
I'm pretty certain I won't buy any more Google hardware due to their lack of support (which seems to span all of their product divisions) and likely will avoid Android in general if at all possible. It's ironic because the Nexus 4 hardware seems to be quite excellent and well built--I haven't been able to break the phone yet even when intentionally smashing it into the ground as hard as I could multiple times because of the above (the bumper helps a lot, I think). The only reason I haven't made the switch yet is that a $649 starting price (really closer to $800 for a decent model after tax) for an iPhone is simply atrocious for a phone and worse than the horrific problems described above. For now ...
EDIT: Added newlines.
Hard to say. My best guess is that you put up with a lot more issues than you should. The mobile is so utterly broken that we all have to get used to it to stay sane.
But from my personal experience, and I'm not saying that it applies to you personally, I've noticed that many people just don't give a fuck about the looks. Go and look at how majority of people write letters, or even how they write on the Internet. The amount of typos and overall lack of style is so big that 60 years ago a typical reader would get a heart attack.
Looking at the world as it is today, I start to feel that it's me who has insanely high standards because I want things to look and feel nice, not just barely work.
----
Oh, and about Lollipop - I've seen so many cases where something utterly broken on my device worked fine on everyone elses and reverse, that I learned to appreciate that things just really don't work the same even on the same brand of hardware. It's entirely possible that you and your friends have a good experience while for some reason, GPs device-software combination is broken. Hell, I personally never had any issues with Windows Vista, and almost no one believes me it's possible.
It's so bad I'm recommending a switch to Windows for users that haven't bought into the ecosystem too much - basically U$ 100 Windows/Nokia phones outperform U$ 100 Android phones by a huge margin, so are a better buy for casual users, plus Microsoft is subsidizing phones over here.
My Google Nexus 7 tablet was unusable with the Lollipop update. My LG G3 Mini also performs extremely badly. OTOH my iPad 1st generation is still going strong (though I've seen iPhones go bricky with iOS updates).
Edit: note that I had badmouthed Windows phones previously after an incredibly frustrating experience with older Nokia phones.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=165558
Mind you this was the case since the L preview that came in July 2014.
Type-Defect Priority-Small
I'm glad Google is all about fixing it.
Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.
I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.
>>"One of the biggest issues today is that WU provides no way to promote a download to an end-user. We want to promote MM2 and WMP98 to end-users as something new and cool that they can get for Windows. Three lines of text describing it buried under "Windows XP" in a page that the user has to purposefully go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-side piece proactively display a bubble "Look! Cool, new features for Windows XP" and the option to display a much richer "advertisement" for the feature if the user wants to read more?"
If Windows Update did these types of pop-up promotions I would throw my computer out the window.
"One of the biggest issues today is that WU provides no way to promote a download to an end-user. We want to promote MM2 and WMP98 to end-users as something new and cool that they can get for Windows. Three lines of text describing it buried under "Windows XP" in a page thal the user has to purposeful~/go find just isn’t good enough. Why can’t the WU client-s~de piece proactively display a bubble "Look! Cool, new features for Windows XP" and the option to display a much richer "advertisement" for the feature if the user wants to read more"
(WU is Windows Update)
This is how we end up with so much crap in software. It's like there are people in important positions who live in alternate reality where those ideas don't immediately sound fucking insane.
Thank you for posting this rare opportunity to look into the minds of people that are responsible for all this mess we have to deal with.
That's something I hope I bring to every team I'm on.
Scroll to the bottom, and read Bill Gates giving a Steve Jobs-ian second-by-second critique of user experience. I remember software sucking in 2003 just as Gates describes. I have new respect for him. I especially love his line
> These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.
Ha! I always thought Documents and Settings\me\My Documents was weird.
He also says:
> What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3. Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.
Wow. I mean I found Linux's pieces made ten times more sense than their Windows equivalents. And Bill Gates in 2003 shared my sentiment (not relative to Linux of course)!
Another person in the email chain lists problems with Windows Update: > Critical updates that aren’t really critical--if you're machine is behind a firewall many just aren’t critical.
I'm glad somebody identified that issue. The computer "lying" to people causes a lot of computer-ennui. The computer says to someone, "Install this critical security update" but husband/partner/IT guy says, "Eh, don't worry about." In the aggregate I think this hurts people's desire to learn more about computing.
The replies are horribly disappointing, however. A bunch of managers chiming in without providing actionable, useful solutions so as to raise their "visibility". Nothing in that exchange (and granted, that's just the one we're privy to) encourages me to think the problem will get fixed.
It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.
1. let's suppose a user have a password: (note the space)
" 123"
3. two weeks later the bugfix goes live, the user cannot longer access the service.
Also, you cannot easily estimate how much benefit/annoyed users your _fix_ will endup having .. which makes it a higly risk change.
Fixing the space issue will help more people than it hurts. People that have spaces at the beginning or end of their password can simply reset their password or call customer support. Users forget or mistype passwords all the time.
With 2fa, you control the allowed character set, and as such can make sure that what you mention cannot happen.
Mind you, 2fa is stupid for a whole lot of other reasons, but that's another matter.
Software can be working but not released until it's working well.
The closest thing actually within Christianity to this is a relatively new idea ("new" in the context of how long Christianity has existed) particular to a subset of Protestant Christianity, and generally rejected by the rest of Christianity, to wit, the doctrine of sola scriptura. [0]
- why believe in god? because the bible said so..
- why believe in the bible? because god wrote it..
Agile came about because people started saying "hey, this process we have for creating working software isn't actually creating working software. Maybe we should try another process."
The bug was that the display name was first checked to see if it already existed before white space was stripped. Luckily this was fixed very quickly after it was found, as it existed in production.
That sounds sensible, but now you've just broken it for every country that uses comma as a decimal mark.
For example, here's a story about how the majority of power users in Poland use an english keyboard with specialized key bindings, because using a polish keyboard marks you as a n00b: https://medium.com/medium-eng/the-curious-case-of-disappeari...
However, blaming the user for doing what makes sense is not helpful.
Mind: Blown.
I don't give a fuck about how the rest of the world does numbers and banking. That's their problem. If the UK were still using guineas and shillings, should I care about that?
No. Deal with foreign currency problems on their websites. If the rest of the world wants to use commas and periods backwards from the way we do, then solve that problem for them elsewhere. Don't make my life difficult just so you can use the same code for a website in Elbonia.
The rest of the world's problems are not my problems. Solve them, or don't. But don't make my life hard because you're* too fucking lazy to do the right thing.
Computers should exist to make peoples' lives easier. People shouldn't be required to make programmers' lives easier.
/rant off
*not you personally, I don't know what you do, it's just an indefinite pronoun
Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.
The USB interface on my old Samsung Galaxy S2 broke (seems to be a common problem), now the connection just charges, data transfer is borked under Windows and Linux.
So I thought it would be "easy" to use WLAN for that - Samsung itself wants you to use "Kies", proprietary software which works only under Windows. Once I had located the right old version for my apparently-too-old phone, I started to back up my photos. But Kies decides to be super-duper-slow and downloads with 1 kb/s, so it predicts about 48 hours of copying.
Luckily there's sftp on the play store, with that and scp under Fedora it took 5 minutes.
It's like they want you to hate them.
Install driver X, restart your computer, unplug and replug the phone, shut down auto-starting "image manager" BS which came with the driver, look for (and fail to find) the raw mounted USB device, reload the propitiatory image manager, import the files, look for an export which actually exports the files and not a degraded version, and...
Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.
For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.
I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.
Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.
On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic error.
Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.
Once on my Nexus 5 i got an error about copying a folder with lots of contents (some kind of backup i did i think). It forced me to archive it via a file manager on the phone and then transfer that instead. Only happened once though, and on Mac, which needs a standalone app to communicate with the device.
I have no idea what the benefit of MTP over USB mass storage was imagined to be.
Not having to unmount the phone when disconnecting, IIRC.
While I've gotten MTP to work ok its not a first class experience. Folders with many files (like photos) can take a long time to even start copying. I assumed that MTP was done due avoid patents over FAT32 with Microsoft or something.
I use it exclusively to transfer files, much faster then connecting a cable.
Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.
Breaking the web for fun and profit, 101:
The simplest example I can think of is the fact that in a standard google web search, "copy link address" does not give you the actual destination address, rather a google tracking link.
Another: Image attachments in gmail. Now there's this overlay that asks you whether to download, open in google drive, or view in the gmail image viewer (which conveniently has interfaces with a bunch of other google apps I don't care about). Now you might think the google image viewer is nice, but personally I liked my once-upon-a-time ability to just look at images directly in my browser with a single click.
So I gain nothing, google gains everything. They are wresting control of how I access my files, every step of the way.
It was worth it to me to install Greasemonkey for this script alone.
What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good physical labor in the lab.
I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was correct on its parallel path.
Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use, straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the public hates them.
The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs" "Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core, practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our products"
This is my feeling as well. The norms on mobile and the web are so far out from anything I'd call common sense or proper usability that it must be cargo cultism at work here. Its just so. friggin. bad.
I also think this is why Apple is doing so well now. They're guilty of these sins, but their ultra-minimalist approach means they're able to sin less than others. Google's "anything goes" mentality allows these bad habits and this broken culture to thrive.
I'm not too pessimistic about it. We're still in some growing pains here. Mobile is a kind of a mess. Memory unsafe languages rule. Privacy is non-existant, Security is in the toilet, etc. I think there will be a shakedown of these things and we'll look back at this time as being needlessly reckless.
Why not?
"I get the numeric code sent to me. I go to Google Voice on my computer"
This seems like it defeats the purpose of 2FA. Am I wrong? Isn't 2FA supposed to work by proving that you own a device for which it was set up on?
"always download all the images made by Google Charts because that service will die at some point"
Probably. If it matters to you, learn some JavaScript and build stuff in highcharts. And next time, never rely on a service that you don't pay for.
Also, it's clear by this post you hate Google, especially its suite of exceptionally shitty products, and not the Web.
Conclusion: free lunch is over. Some of us developers are learning that we can't rely on a free (or even paid) service for any long term.
I totally agree. SaaS is ephemeral. Personally I don't expect to see a SaaS site being active for more than two-three years, because the goal of most startups is to get bought, at which point they'll happily let the product die or turn into a piece of crap. If I use a third party service, I do that with an expectation that my project is temporary and will die/get superseded faster than the service it relies on.
If Starbucks gave away free coffee but monetized their restrooms, their coffee would eventually end up full of diuretics.
Normally, a company (either startup or not) cares most for its clients, because they are the ones that pay its topline and ultimately its workers' salaries. Other parties (users, providers, government, whatever) also have power and can also influence the company's behaviour, but clients normally have it easiest.
That does not always hold, as I said. Another example is you being a commodity client; if the company is, for example, more interested on big clients, your interests might not be the first concern for that company. But they will have you in mind, nonetheless, as the bad service you receive can signal something bad for bigger clients. Sometimes, even big clients are commodities, as they can't wield a lot of power, so the company can act not in its client's best interests (monopolies or tax burden when price is inelastic are scenarios that come quickly to mind).
I still don't buy that rule though. Let me illustrate it by a graph:
.....
| ooooooo ...... .
| ooo ....oo ...
| ooo .... ooo ....
| oo .. oo ..
| o .. o ..
| o .. oo . profits
| o . oo
| o .. o user satisafaction
-+-o-.---------------------------------------------------->
The bug is in the design of 2FA. Sooner or later Google will get rid of GV and I'll just move to another provider to front-end my SMS spam instead of sending it to my phone. The other failure mode is best displayed by my bank not realizing their site is accessible via mobile, so my two factors when customers log in on their phones are the phone people log in with and the code they're sending to the customer's phone, oh wait that's only one factor. Although in the second example the bank wins by security theater.
The bank does offer a phone app that demands access to pretty much everything on my phone presumably for marketing / spam purposes or just being weirdo creeps, so needless to say I won't leave it installed, although I did try it for a short period of time. However the bank phone app sucks so I didn't lose much by uninstalling that creep-app. Also the creep-app doesn't do 2FA and seems to be permanently logged in, so I've downgraded my account access to merely the phone lock screen level of security, which isn't very good.
Even if you log on on your phone, it's still something you know and something you have, this does not diminish the 2FA.
So using a password and the SMS on the phone is still 2FA as far as I know.
However, I also consider my home PC to be safe enough that I don't want 2FA on it. Nope, banks apparently don't want to waste money on considering this user story. Or that what about registering multiple tokens/phone numbers. Got a new phone? Just burn the old one, you can't have backup login methods!
That's terrible. My bank's app is actually really insistent on logging me out; just locking the screen or switching apps will immediately lock it - though it doesn't lose internal state, which is nice.
While 2FA is often phrased as “Something you know and something you have”, I find that misleading. Knowledge is acquired from information, and the way they check what you have is through information alone.
What it really proves is that the telephony system authenticates you as part of their network. That authentication is done by the SIM card, which it is assumed you have unlocked with a password of entropy 13.3 if it's a PIN code with four random digits.
That, and your actual password.
By far the easiest way to get incorrectly identified through the telephony system is to break the PIN code, which requires to have physical access to your SIM card. But if all your secure HTTP cookies and/or your keyrings are only protected by that as well, then yes, your 2FA has a single point of failure. It goes from an arbitrarily strong password and something you have to a 13-bit entropy password and something you have. Or, if like so many you leak PIN code information from your life or the traces you leave on the surface of your phone, just something you have.
"Pick a security picture, now write a security phrase. Please choose three security questions. Now enter a password. Would you like to enable 2FA on your phone?"
My bank's mobile app does not work on rooted phones, because they are concerned for my safety, afraid that some rogue app will get my banking info and steal my money. Well, that's my problem, isn't it?
Do you know how most people with custom ROMs bypass this? They go on XDA and download a patched version from some stranger on the internet, stored on some malware-ridden file hosting service.
After two weeks, I realized that I wanted to share all these photos. I discovered OneDrive has a ridiculously easy interface for photos: upload folders of jpegs. I thought the web interface for looking at them was sexy too, with the photos featured prominently (not much text, no comments). It even has a "Download All" button! I sent a public view link to everyone. Damn, Microsoft is getting things right these days.
Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.
Fixed it.
(But I agree with regards to Maps Classic, it is superior to the new maps in almost all ways (for me, at least).)
Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom. Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty.
I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some tasks to be much more laborious than others.
There is little thought given to quality and usability. We're churning out features and half-cooked solutions and moving on to the next fun thing. It might be OK in the past but today we depend much more on these systems and there is no way back.
Also, don't forget the zip code or phone number boxes that have the format as a "placeholder" type text in the textboxes on mobile that repeatedly force your keyboard to reset so that they can format you phone number for you.
On the bright side, this means most domains of user-facing software still have open opportunities even when they should be thoroughly mature. If only there were more hours in a human lifespan, I'd love to fork Chromium or Firefox and just start fixing things at the browser end.
> It's so much worse than that though. It's not for no reason, they actually call this is a best practice. Everyone's browser already has jQuery cached if you load it from jQuery's site, right? So yeah, just load all seventeen of your random javascript things from their original sites. Now your site is fast because all those pages are already in everyone's cache!
Uh, what "best practice" site did that come from? W3Schools? I'm not a web dev anymore, but the best practice recommendation as far as I know has always been to combine and minify assets into as few requests as possible. Unfortunately most of the web still sucks and doesn't do this.
About sharing images, I find setting up a FTP-server is the simplest solution. Most file-browsers have FTP built in and allows features like drag 'n drop.
The problem with usability in free services like Google, is that they earn more money the more time you spend on the site. So if it takes ten minutes to do something that should take five seconds. Their metrics will show one hundred times more earning from the slow and tedious version. Guess what version they want you to use!?
I have my pet theory - the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction. Your CEO has a marketing team that probably outsources some of its work to marketing companies, which come up with asinine ideas of promoting your product. The CEO gets reports with (probably a little fudged) numbers saying the sales are going up, and he has little idea that your company is now shitting on its users in order to get more money from them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
"You are sitting in a chair, IN THE SKY."
Much like game studios left to their own devices by publishers make super popular game classics.
Want some examples? Random things we had better 60 years ago than today: kettles, shoes, clothes, watches, utensils, furniture. There's a purposeful downgrading going on.
Also, the thread starter was setting up a straw man, no one said that developing photos yourself was better. Just that the experience of many web applications is not so good.
(Personally, I use BTSync's and/or Dropbox's photo sync, so that it shows up as a file on my machines. Sharing works fine as well, especially since Dropbox has the family-friendly Carousel that pulls photos of regular Dropbox.)
Regardless of the time period, he's annoyed how the "ease of use and simple flow" is not so easy, and doesn't seem to flow. Some of it may be not being familiar with the "way they want you to use their products" (poor UX in my opinion). But that's what kills me about today's app centered smartphone web, everything is a unique little microcosm that is slightly different than the others in a way that is obnoxious. Perhaps it is the difference between being a consumer of content and a producer. As a producer of content I would like to think I have control over how I can obtain and distribute it, but technically you end up acting as a consumer of the product that "allow you" to produce... end rant
You would still have to visit the post office and she'd have to wait for delivery, so you're right about that.
Is the photo storage and sharing market ripe for a (re)disruption?
--- [1] http://www.npr.org/2012/05/24/153634897/why-printer-ink-is-t...
In 10 years you probably will have migrated these photo to the cloud and you will both have to pay a recurring costs for life to keep your data (that will die with you), or the photo will die with the service.
In 20 years, you will be more likely to find the old documents made on papers by your ancestors than any of your digital productions to your grand kids. And if you still have them entropy will win. You will not be able to find the relevant piece of data.
Analogic photo is the only long term low cost solution for now.
Whereas microfilms are still less expensive then and now, and still guaranteed to be more durable with less operational costs.
Those who sacrifice a cheap reliability for the illusion of an expensive ease of use deserve neither one, nor the other.
Benjamin Franklin
Little by little, we abstract ourselves away.
I'm good now ;)
I had a Fujifilm digital camera which saved photos to an xD card. I'd plug it into my computer's USB port, it registered as a mass-storage device, and I'd pull the photos. If I wanted to send them privately, I could email them. If I wanted to share them with the public, I'd throw them up on a web host and link them from my LiveJournal (I was actually hosting my own site at the time, through a server in my living room, but any of the gazillion free webhosts at the time would've worked).
There were other options, too. My cousin used Ophoto. I think Flickr was around then. Facebook Photos came out about 9 years ago, I think, so I wouldn't have long to wait.
Pardon my ignorance, but what's a DTA?
I remember using DTA for the first time back in the day and going "Oh wow, nice!". It just such a basic facility to provide. Resumable downloads should be available in all browsers.
But no, doing some user profile shit that no one wants: that's what they spend time on.
I can, and I sometimes wish I couldn't - so that web and mobile experience wouldn't be so goddamn annoying.
I think it's a mix of both ignorance of better options, and familiarity with the status-quo.
People actually BUY computers bundled with those (Windows loaded with crapware). And work their way through it. It's so painful.
Then set up a company that make fresh PC with windows installs without crapware and you have a business model right there. Choice is just a matter of people starting doing it. Or you know, buy a Linux computer (sure, the choice is not great there either, but it's something that a few manufacturers offer online: Lenovo, System75 and a couple others).
I always told friends to go to the small independent shop over the road where they will get a better deal. But then they have to speak to someone who will baffle them with jargon. Its far easier to see the 40% discount offer (from the initially high prices) as some sort of bargain. I have wasted hours uninstalling crap from PC World machines. One came with 3 firewalls and it wouldn't connect to the internet.
I agree with 90% of the points in the article, but I also know that others have implemented similar solutions and only fews have, instead, tackled the same problems with a different, better implemented, solutions.
Anyway, the most annoying example is Skype, I really hate the "oh it looks like is a Live Account, redirecting..." flow, it's annoying.
It's the same everywhere. Shit flows from the walls, up through the streets, through and within everything we interact with, because we've managed to build a civilisation on "that'll do" and "well, forever!" so far, and through some unlikely sequence of sheer fluke we're here to talk about it.
The internet is a bodge job. The web is a bodge job. This finely made bit of machinery I type this on is a bodge job - and so are my shoes, this chair, the postman outside, the tarmac on the street and the governance of our societies.
We put up with it because we go through a phase of learning "the way things are", and then go one of several ways:
- Accept and/or support the status quo
- Realise things could be better but realise that your task is so huge you cannot begin to do anything about it, and revert to the above.
- Try to work with others to change things for the better.
The third camp are the ones who make the bodge jobs, because they ultimately realise that time is the one true constraint, and you don't know what perfection is until you've seen it. We're solving a big old NP problem called "humanity" one excruciating step at a time.
Anyway, it's up to us to go make some better bodge jobs, which'll do for now, and not forever.
Still, its technical history is that of bodge jobs, even if its matter is free of the constraints other "works" require.
Implementation rarely is hard. Some problems brought up in TFA were already solved years, if not decades ago. There's no reason we should have problem downloading photos from our phones and sending them to family. And it was easier in the pre-smartphone/early smartphone era than it is today.
I blame the same force that gave us our progress - capitalism, the market economy, and the mindset it promotes among management. In established markets, all the easy things have already been solved - you can't win any more customers by creating quality products. You have to squeeze money out of perfectly working things. This is where the engine of capitalism stops being aligned with humanity's needs.
There's a business term for all that crap - "value-added". When you see some "value-added" thing it means that the company is about to shit on you to get more money, either from you or someone else. We didn't have that much crapware on computers until vendors realized they could get paid by third parties by bundling their worthless (for end-user) crap. It's a gamble that worked well for the companies - people will deal with crap because they don't have any other choice, and vendors get more profit.
Then there's completely purposeful degradation. Some of the things we had much better 60 years ago than today: shoes, clothes, kettles, lightbulbs, utensils, kitchenware, various home appliances. Sure, they weren't that shiny and plastic, they didn't have an army of "designers" behind them, but they fucking worked and they still fucking work today. I still have a microwave bought ~20 years ago in Sweden, and it fucking works and never had a single glitch. My grandfathers have equipment bought when they were young, whereas my shoes and clothes degrade within half a year or less.
This is the problem. We know very well how to make good things. But making good things is not profitable compared to shitting on your customers.
However, since so much is "free as in beer" people have to layer on a bunch of stuff to monetize everything.
People aren't trying to build better mousetraps. They are trying to monetize the mousetrapping experience for social. No, wait, we have to throw all that out because we are trying to capture mindshare for mousetrapping on mobile.
I disagree, and that's why I brought crapware bundled with PCs and all the non-tech products which get progressively worse. We buy this stuff. Companies aren't giving laptops or coffee makers for free. But we've reached the point of overall-pretty-good computer or coffee maker some time ago. The dynamics works like this: a company can get a little bit more money by bundling some crap or adding some non-feature. This lets them undercut their competitors. Soon, everyone follows, and you see a continuous increase of crap. A race to the bottom.
The end-game is not incremental improvements. It's as bad products as possible, that are still good enough that people will buy them.
At least we have options on the web, plus the option to improve/fix things (relatively speaking). He can always send his photos as attachments in an email, or put them up on dropbox and send the link etc. Offline? Different story altogether. That is why people put up with things online. When you get used to real life crap, these problems online seem small.
Then again, I guess it's my fault because I always put in the spaces because I'm a masochist who likes finding out how much the web sucks.
I use a very long generated password with all kinds of special characters so what does Google do after you successfully entered the username/password on the device during the native setup flow? It opens a WebView where you have to enter it AGAIN!
And why do I have to enter my Apple ID password after every single OS update again? I can't imagine what security concern prompted them to do this to us.
EDIT: 50 -> 100 comments. That rule about avoiding gratuitous negativity is obviously not working.
If that is so I don't want to be a member of a toxic community that lacks meaningful perspective on the evolutionary, path-dependent origins of problems with "web technologies".
It takes having a "meaningful perspective on the evolutionary, path-dependent origins of problems" to notice how insanely fucked up web/mobile is on so many levels - from absurd amount of crap we have to deal with as users to the fashion show IT industry is.
The first step to fixing a problem is noticing and admitting it.