johndoe4589

Let's not mince words. Ubuntu and linux OS'es in general are TRASH as far as user experience is concerned.

Lately I even tried elementaryOS, and it's worse than Ubuntu. They keep saying how it's not a copy of OS X, and it evidently isn't as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated. At least Ubuntu is looking ahead and thinking of touch interfaces.

Ubuntu is genuinely the only somewhat passable option for people who don't know, nor should know, what process thread is, or even how many cores are in their CPU. Ubuntu has a somewhat consistent UI but still suffers from all kind of major bloopers. I mean, what the fuck. It's 2017, and it still doesn't save the last window size & position in most apps. It drives me mad. Some do, some don't, so it ends up worse than not supporting it at all.

I got fed up with Windows and Ubuntu so I bought a five year old Mac Mini. Sierra looks amazing, and it runs silky smooth. I don't AAA game and this will most likely serve me very well for web development. Came with a big SSD drive too.

It's kinda sad nobody can compete with Apple. But if anybody will I don't think it's the "free software" world.

> Beautiful interface

Lol? It's 2017 and you're describing a text mode UI.

A "Beautiful theme" would be more appropriate.

Put simply digestion is one of the most expensive tasks for the body. It makes sense that giving the whole digestive system a break will free up energy in other parts of the body.

Same on the [10 day Vipassana retreats](http://www.dhamma.org/en-US/locations/directory), for "old students" (basically if you return for the 2nd time or more).

So as an "old student" I learned that there was no meal at 5pm. Instead we had hot water with lemon, I think we were allowed to eat a fruit :)

You get used to it pretty quickly.

That said, they have an AMAZING breakfast that is very filling.

And.. you sit for long periods so you can't assume the results are practical for "lay man" day jobs and activities. Could be for programming jobs...

Yeah, so we can have one store with strict policies that protect users and the value of the hardware; and a bunch of other shit stores that offer apps that can hijack our devices. That makes sense!

And then Apple is to blame, and can spend tons of dollahs and man hours to fix problems caused by your "open" alternatives.

What nobody does is look at a PC, and say, where can we simplify? If you start by assuming that a lambda user needs to be exposed to a complex file hierarchy for example, then you're not really thinking ahead. Then you come up with a hybrid device.

I'm sure Surface Pro is a great device, and it answers the needs of a certain demographic but "windows on the tablet" is not the answer to the computer of tomorrow. For what it's worth I heard from artists the Surface isn't a replacement for the Wacom as it has its problems.

I assume you're referring to the fact that iPad Pro doesn't accept USB keys, or lets you access filesystem etc. But what Apple achieved with the iPad Pro is to make a tablet first and foremost, with a fantastic touch interface. Not a hybrid device.

It's quite obvious that Apple is slowly converging iOS and OS X even as they say they are different beasts at the moment. Maybe that's why some power users's expectations are frustrated atm?

But that is also precisely why Apple is still WAY ahead of Microsoft and co. They will be able to make the desktop and tablets converge where you can carry your computer in your bag, and when you're home you put it in a dock and you have a full blown powerful desktop with the 5K Retina screen and maybe even a dedicated GPU in the dock fit for triple A gaming. I'm pretty sure that is where they are headed, since obviously you can't make a single "form factor" for both uses. And for people who don't need the full blown desktops you won't even need the dock, external screen, just the keyboard and you'll be able to do most computer tasks.

And that will be possible because they are already thinking ahead, while Microsoft will be stuck with their turd of a desktop and making funny hardware that kinda works for some uses, but can't quite decide what it does.

> The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago,

And the progress on Windows's side is what exactly?

For the end users, instead of business corporations, practically nothing changes. I swear every freaking version of Windows nearly everything about the user experience is similar to before. It looks nicer at first glance, but once you open some apps, particularly the windows apps like msconfig, disk management and such, you find yourself with UI from ten years ago.

Just look at the file copy window. What a joke. They made it look a bit nicer, they added a fancy animation while copying, but really, it didn't change at all. It stills sucks majorly at giving you a proper estimate of the time it will take to copy a file.

The single biggest change for me in Windows 7 was the ability to use Win + <number> to switch quickly between apps. It's incredibly useful, and thart's pretty much the ONLY real change in may day to day experience of Windows compared to earlier versions.

I was booted off YouTube streaming on my AppleTV. Then my main account disappeared from iOS GMail app, even though a secondary GMail account was still there.

Was afraid my accoutn was hacked. My GMail password is unique and quite long compared to my other pw so I doubt someone could find it.

I added the account again on the iOS GMail app and then signed in YouTube and it was back to normal... hmm.

I agree... yuck.

I do think if you take a step back and squint a little bit you can sense their design lacks a bit of contrast, but the black header bar is an ugly fix.

I like Medium for browsing front end dev articles in the morning.

But I think there is a big UX and design issue that should be questioned : the "feed".

This concept has been overused and it doesn't serve users. When I read on Medium, I'm in the mood for reading programming stuff, or design stuff, or other stories. But I'm rarely in the mood for reading a completely random feed of all those topics intermingled. That makes no sense to me.

And you can follow "Publications" but it doens't help very much, you still get a "feed" in the homepage. And the publications don't really work as a magazine rack.

That imho is the biggest weakness of their design.

How would I solve that? First off stop "feeding" people. I mean just the term is wrong. Why do we need to be "fed"? The assumption for this design I assume, is that a feed makes it easy to discover content and for the initial experience. But why should it remain the central piece of focus everytime you start the app?

I think it would make more sense to add the concept of magazines. That is why I think Flipboard works so well (at least for me). The problem with Flipboard is that it also treats every magazine as a feed, and is designed primarily as a RSS kind of consumption where old content is to be forgotten while only new content is relevant. Thus it also doesn't work as a repository of valuable articles. A lot of things are written that are timeless and both the Flipboard and Medium approach and insistence on "current day" writing/ stories reduces the value of these tools.

What I would suggest is to add the concept of magazines at the very least. Let people create "baskets" of interests, and let them drag and drop tags into these baskets. Then present those "smart magazines" with tags showing where there are updates?

----

As an aside my experience with Medium last month could be summed up in two words: "feminist rants".

Ever since I started using Medium, I thought.. I already use Flipboard and Feedly. So let's focus. There are some pretty cool CSS/Javascript articles on here so I decided to follow exclusively programming and design topics. I would read Medium in the morning to catch up on front end dev lang.

But.. Medium had another idea. My feed kept getting ridiculous feminist rants and other political B.S. I don't want to read. No matter how many times I pick "Show fewer stories like this" I couldn't get rid of them. This happened for several weeks.

I contacted them because I thought my account was the perfect example of something wrong with their recommendation algorithm. Why on earth did Medium keep saying I am interested in feminism when I NEVER recommended any such articles (they tend to have obnoxious click bait titles and terrible writing)?

I looked through every person that I may have followed or recommended. I could'nt find anything. The closest to a meaningful connection I could see is one female journalist who "liked" on of my responsoes. Mind you Medium considers a simple comment to someone else's story as a "story". As if a comment had the same value as writing an articile in the first place. But I digress...

So I blocked a couple people. First off, they don't disappear from the notifications pane. This is WRONG imho.

Secondly, it didn't change squat.

Eventually I became sick and tired of seeing feminist rants in the middle of my programming / design feed; so I deleted my account and started anew. Hey at least Medium got this right : you can delete your account entirely and it was easy.

So here is my tips for people who still want to use Medium:

- NEVER EVER follow anybody whom you aren't sure that they share your interests 100%. - NEVER EVER recommend any articles unless you reviewed the tags and all the tags are specific enough to your interests. (Medium loves to make all kind of tangential connections and also recommend you stuff based on extremely lose tags like "Journalism" or "Essay"... follow these and soon enough raging feminists will entertain your feed every day).

Funny enough even with these rules in place. When I created my new account I still got an influx of feminist/political rants (bad writing) but they were gone after a few days.

And I realize that I use Medium in a way they probably didn't mean to: I really focus my feed on an area of interest. But then again they designed this completely wrong putting things backwards. When I go into a newspaper shop, I browse the rack for magazeines I'm interested in. I don't go to the owner and say, "hey you got something from me to read?" And even if I did, he'd probably look at me weird for a moment, then he'd be like "well, what do you like to read?"

Presumably this is what the tags system is supposed to do. Many online sites lets you pick your "interests" whne you creat a new account. But the analogy stops herE. Because in a newspaper shop, I'd tell the guy "well, videogames, and uh.. science". And he 'd point me to magazines. He wouldn't print a "feed" to me of random crap from different sources.

---

PS: Also please stop writing "stories" in your iOS updates and tell your users what you changed or fixed, even if it's minor thing. Yeah, we get it you're all about "stories". Jesus. Stick to medium if you want to entertain people, and serve your users by describing what yo uactually changed or updated, even if it has to be the usual "misc performance fixes".

And people are going to learn when they are trying to fill their belly from day to day? You are putting this backwards. [Maslow's hierarchy of needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs) comes to mind.

I travelled to India for 3 months some years ago. I could live there with 300 EUR a month in a nice little hotel in Himachal Pradesh no less. I could have gotten a room for just 1 EUR a day which I saw with my own eyes, simple room clean in a Tibetan run building. But this hotel had wifi downstairs which they changed the password only every few days, I had a TV, full size bed, private bathroom and toilet with running water (no carrying buckets or rationing like the people living in the area), etc.

I remember back then, 2010 is not so long ago, I could eat plenty for less than 300 INR a day (so approx. 2-3 EUR). Like a nice bowl of Tibetan noodles was 80 INR if I remember, and that was filling for a third of the day, and that's not even 1 EUR (Of course if I bought a coca cola then I would have paid 100 INR or more).

When a foreigner can live there with 300 EUR a month and be quite comfortable;, just imagine the change of quality of life it makes to people in poverty if they had just 100 EUR a month.

> Ever launch an app on your iPhone and then get a pop-up warning that says the app may slow down your iPhone?

Noooooo :( Pleas say it ain't so...

"PDF Highlighter" by omz:software is one of my favorite apps on the iPad. The only PDF app that doesn't have a million things I don't need, and has a beautiful summary of all the highlights you make in your PDFS..plus Dropbox .. plus OCR. Oh, and highlight colors that don't look like they were put in by a 3 year old jesus. What's up with all those annotate aps using FF0 yellow or F00 red? What happened to design? Why do all these PDF apps have to suck so bad as a reading experience?

Sigh.

https://appadvice.com/app/pdf-highlighter/400191310

> That the world is not solid but made up of tiny particles

I'm not sure that's how most people understand it. "Tiny particles" still maintains the notion for most of us of a physical / materialist world when things truly exist, with some kind of an inner essence or structure or core, which we would associate to these "particles".

Se we think that a tree, or a car, is a bunch of those particles. And that we too are a bunch of particles. It doesn't shake the notion of physical existence so it has no profound impact on the way we see ourselves and the world and the way we behave.

It's very hard to let go of this view though. A very healthy and middle step that I wish was taught everywhere is to start looking at the world as an interdependent system, including us, and understand nothing truly exists in isolation.

They want an "installation" fee.

And then how does the renew process work?

True, it's just the transition atm is a bit painful.

My host is asking ~80 USD for multi domain SSL. It's not that bad, but they don't support Let's Encrypt yet afaik. Are they aware of this and trying to cash in on people who don't want the hassle of moving their sites?

On the other hand, if I buy there is none of that "auto renew" business...

I don't have "customers" though. I thought this was implicit but maybe I needed to clear that up. Sure makes no difference to security. But that is the consideration when Google pushes everyone to have to buy SSL, even those who just have a hobby. I've just been venting frustration a little bit as to seeing the web change from the playground it used to be to a much more regulated thing, but so it goes. Times change :)

Yes it's become very clear to me recently that to fall asleep more consistently I have to quit fiddling on the PC AND have to stop reading the iPad a good hour before sleep. (edit: basically, have to get into a "disengage" mode just relax and watch the telly or the Chromecast :) ..)

Oddly enough then, a TV screen just 2m away is fine, but reading on the iPad close to my face isn't and will keep me awake.

So I think the recipe for better sleep schedule is a combination of wllingly disengaging from the mental activity involved even in light browsing, as well as the light exposure. The first is much more significant. Think of it as some "zen" / meditation / "be present" time before bed. A good hour for me. I usually don't even care what's on the telly / chromecast, I watch Twitch and even when the hosts are noisy I can fall asleep.

It' a good time to point out that the f.lux solutions and the one included in iOS is just for comfort and does absolutely SQUAT to help you get to sleep.

TLDR

So disengaging from the dopamine feeding activity that sadly most apps are designed for nowadays, that is the key. A good hour before expected bedtime for me.

And I can really feel it in my body as well, stress settling down. Tip: put a heavy blanket on your lap to help you unwind, the pressure and warmth stresses you down.

The KEY here that seems to be missed is that the light exposure late at night is related to the mental activity, often dopamine inducing activity of surfing or playing games. Think about it, why else would you expose yourself to a glaring light late in the evening? WHat purpose? The only reason we do so is to scroll the Twitter feed, read the news, click yet another link to another webpage, and on and on.

I agree. I don't think I'm going to tell them until after I moved though :p In any case they are hostgat0r and while the service is good overall, I hear they've been bought and it's not quite as good as it used to be. They gave me SSH, and even moved server when my site was being a bit sluggish (optimized the queries since)... so hmm.

I genuinely don't have bad things to say about the hosting performance itself. But the documentation on their site is so bad, it alone makes me want to move on. Tired of spending hours trying to find the procedure to do this or that. And their live chat tkes forever to reply.

Matter of fact, they require a fee for an external certificate, and then apparently you have to buy a static IP too. So another option is to upgrade the shared hosting plan, to the one that has a SSL bundled in. But.. then it works only on one domain AFAIK, so if my app also has a forum , I still need a second certificate! WHat if I want an API on another subdomain like api.foobar.com ? Yet another certificate.

So I think I'll just have to move to a Let's Encrypt aware hosting.

Thanks so much for all the suggestions!

Well I can configure a Linux vm for development I guess I could handle that.

Wouldn't these VPS come with a sensible default?

How cheap? Would you have a suggestion? Thanks.

Not to mention, underlying my sentiment in my comments here, is that basically EVERY website out there can be broken. We hear about this every day now, Yahoo, Dropbox, and on and on.

If someone skilled wants to break your site, and they have a good reason to, they will. This is especially true for small sites / forums / blogs which the owners can not reasonably protect the way a corporation like Facebook can.

So on those smaller "hobby" / community sites it should be a given that using good passwords and precautions is necessary, as it always has been and a lot of people in my audience use dummy emails and tend to shy away from real names, etc.

So that's my main beef. Google is bullyish here, and is hitting the small guys, the pet projects, the "garage band" developers, and doesn't give these people a simple upgrade path. Hence, more and more I feel like pet projects and websites are going to disappear in favor of using third parties and I think this is a downside to all this fear mongering.

It's necessary but it's a painful change. The web isn't the playground that it used to be and I guess that's just the way it is.

That is 100% correct and I never questioned that in my comments here.

I have to realize I'm not the lambda user I guess, as it's obvious to me to use a different passsword betwene my main emails and other services.

It's certainly better for users to IMPLEMENT SSL. But to outright tell them a site is "insecure" is bully-ish from Google, and a half baked approach from them. How about they disrupt this ridiculous SSL certificate market instead? But they don't have the balls to do that so it's the website owners that are paying the cost.

Not to mention Let's Encrypt is something that need to be renewed and how long will it work or be reliable?

But anyway, not like we have a choice right!

I've never said SSL isn't important nor that I don't care about it.

My beef is how Google forces this change on everyone, but at the same time haven't the balls to shake things up and make SSL easily available for everyone.

Of course as there is a massive business out there selling empty air "certificates" which are jsu tnumbers on a database requiring next to no maintenance, for princely sums.

THAT is lame on Google.

But I guess this is the transition now that is going to be painful for lots of small sites / apps like me. I genuinely never heard this a year ago so they shoudl also have made a big announcement of this much sooner to give time to small guys like me to prepare.

As for the general security question. I understand the "insecure" aspect is mainly related to public networks, and indeed nowadays it's becoming increasingly coming to use public wifi networks on the go.

But some of reaction is also implicitly that using a good password was always a good measure before or after this change. Hence saying something is "insecure" outright is somewhat bullyish on Google's part. Of course it's insecure, so is using a car.

You're making lots of assumptions. My passwords are encrypted and "salted". My site properly handles input I'm not that dumb thank you very much. I like to question decisions like these. Just have to vent a bit I guess. Yes, it's a good thing, but I can't help to think it's still bullyish and a half hearted solution from Google.

In any case it looks like the first notice of this won't be as bad as I thought, it's a small "Not Secure" text... won't scare users too much while I move host and add SSL.

I know I guess I just have to vent some frustration.

Time to move on I guess.

Does anyone have good hosting suggestions for a web app that has a 1GB database and a few thousand active users?

I can only afford ~10-20 EUR a month on shared hosting atm.

I'm running a web app, isn't Cloudflare best for static / semi static content?

Like every other person who started a forum some years ago or a wordpress blog you mean?

Do you think web hosts offer SSL by default?

NO they don't. Duh. That's what is annoying in these comments. Everyone seems to shrug like SSL is standard feature nowadays, except is isn't.

> A substantial portion of web traffic has transitioned to HTTPS so far, and HTTPS usage is consistently increasing. We recently hit a milestone with more than half of Chrome desktop page loads now served over HTTPS

Well OBVIOUSLY when the traffic is increasingly going to the same top ten sites like Faceboo, Twitter and Co.

Kinda like how your antivirus tells you about how the formidable threats it saved your ass from today?

Or like "did you know your house COULD have been ransacked today, but it didn't happen!!"

Now all my users are going to hear that my site is insecure, when nothing at all changed.

How long ago did they announce that? I think just a couple months? They should have announced this much sooner.

It's going to hit me hard as my site is pretty niche and driving even more people away is the last thing I hoped for :( My shared hosting doesn't offer Let's Encrypt, and makes me pay to "install" a free certificate anyway. So I have to move everything to a different web host.