
Software Updates - levismaina
https://xkcd.com/2224/
======
s9w
Software getting worse, just out of my head:

\- VS2019 removed at least two important features from VS2017 (export of
profiler results and the concurrency profiler)

\- Firefox "new" extension API still means you can't remove the top tab bar
from tree style tabs (best FF extension) without hacks

\- Current Dropbox versions are incredibly invasive. They popup when opening a
word document. When pluggin in my Camera. And now started showing a glowing
red "error" because I "only" have a Pro account and no business account (when
using 0,4% of my storage). Also they still have no way of ignoring folders.

\- Malwarebytes Anti-Malware just jumped the shark two (?) years ago with its
redesign. It was so good back then

\- Skype is being almost completely unusable. Still popular because of the
name unfortunately

\- Imgur is a joke and became what it was literally founded to avoid

\- The new Reddit layout is borderline unusable. They will lose the rest of
the core users when they disable the old. subdomain

\- Teamviewer. How is it possible that such an program is not backwards
compatible between versions? Everytime I want to use it it's a dance to
quickly delete/find/install a version that the other side has

\- I don't understand how the "modern" Windows start menu works they
introduced in Win 8 I think. Luckily everyone I know uses classicshell

\- Phones have gotten almost to the point of being unusable. The latency,
audio quality, skipping and hearing your own voice made me avoid phone
conversations for years now. Even landlines are all digital and horribly
compressed. Humanity had that one nailed in the 60s.

~~~
chme
> \- The new Reddit layout is borderline unusable. They will lose the rest of
> the core users when they disable the old. subdomain

While I agree with you here, there is also a point that it might attract new
and younger users with its more 'modern' look.

Personally I like sites like HN or the old style wikipedia for its information
density and out of the way design. But that might just be the age talking
here. People that grow up now that mostly scroll by touching the screen with
their fingers have other requirements and ideas about good UI.

~~~
Crinus
I doubt age has anything to do with it (unless you imply younger people prefer
shitty interfaces) since Reddit's new site is awful even on mobile. I always
switch to i.reddit.com not only because it is _much_ faster, but also because
the new layout just unusable with somehow combining both oversized (even for
mobile standards) elements _and_ tiny elements all over the place, needing a
ton of taps to just read comments (which means you'll often mistap something
and the slow loading takes _ages_ ), popups getting in the way, etc.

It plainly sucks.

At least unlike other sites, they have the decency to leave the old UIs
around, so not everything is bad.

~~~
skinnymuch
I have yet to come across a normal friend who doesn’t think HN is a super ugly
site which essentially means if they had interest in the site, they prob
wouldn’t use it.

All the HN comments here about Reddit are talking about how they feel and
their bubble feels. Which I personally agree with. But I’m not representative
of every day user.

~~~
Crinus
There is no such thing as "every day user" though, every user is different and
if anything a major source of those UX issues people have is "designers" who
come up with imaginary "every day users" (usually to justify their own
preferences) instead of performing actual usability tests on real users (and
accepting when their ideas are bad or wrong) or just sticking with things that
we already know that works and perhaps tweaking them (but again accept when
they screw up and users say so and revert their changes instead of doubling
down on them).

~~~
skinnymuch
How about users who don’t know too much or don’t look too into the internet,
web dev, or web design. And don’t read up on tech (not gadget) news
specifically.

That keeps my point in tact and covers the vast majority of the population

------
buboard
Things i tried to keep using way longer than most:

-windows 7 (upgraded only for widi support - and i miss them)

\- skype (i d never upgrade if i could)

\- photoshop standalone (still use it)

\- office 2007 ( still use it)

\- dropbox (no option there)

\- old reddit

\- iphone 6

\- jquery (plan to avoid npm until it dies of natural causes)

\- windows movie maker / photos

In fact it s getting harder to think of things that are clearly better.

Not only are newer versions slower, they re lacking features that were working
just fine. Something happened in the past 4 years and suddenly worse became
cool again. There s def a worrying trend.

My theory: the mobilification of everything is destroying tech. It's a self-
fulfilling prophecy: make everything mobile-friendly so more people switch to
mobile-only (why?). Second, mobile has terrible user feedback mechanisms. It's
too burdensome to send feedback and the apps are so limited that there's
physically no space for asking to add new features on the screen. That's why
it's largely desktop apps that are affected - not server apps.

(Ironically, table-based HN has the best responsive behavior for reading text
on mobile than any "responsive" site).

~~~
thiht
> Ironically, table-based HN has the best responsive behavior for reading text
> on mobile than any "responsive" site

No it doesn't, HN literally sucks on mobile. From the top of my head:

\- On the front page I always click the stories title when I want to click on
the "xxx comments" link

\- When reading comments, it's impossible to use the tiny [-] buttons to
collapse threads

\- "code" blocks are still broken

~~~
29083011397778
The first two are some of the best things about browsing the site on a
BlackBerry with Firefox and Vimium: clicking links are only a keyboard
shortcut away.

Same goes for sites that don't scale nicely and have interfaces designed for
desktop. "Clicking" links is always easy.

------
nickjj
2 Windows programs that I've been using for ~15 years have done a great job at
avoiding the abyss.

They would be IrfanView[0] (image viewer) and foobar2000[1] (mp3 player).

Both programs are very minimal and have stayed true to their vision. Using
them today feels similar to how it was 5 or even 10 years ago, but at the same
time subtle improvements have been made too. Both are still under active
development, so it's not a matter of them not being updated for years.

[0]: [https://www.irfanview.com/](https://www.irfanview.com/)

[1]: [https://www.foobar2000.org/](https://www.foobar2000.org/)

~~~
theandrewbailey
I never stopped using Winamp. I've been whippin that llama for over 20 years.

~~~
roel_v
So have I. And if anyone would write a plugin for it so that I could play
Youtube Music through it (not sure if the API even allows that), I'd pay for
that.

------
latchkey
I just tried to fastlane a new beta version of my flutter iOS app up to the
app store today. It got rejected by Apple because I was using Xcode 11.2,
which was released on Nov 1st.

Apparently, on Nov 5th Apple released 11.2.1, but still haven't put it in the
App Store. I didn't know about it.

Ended up being a 7.3gb download and about 10 minutes to extract the .xip file
on my 12 core 2.9ghz macbook pro.

The struggle is real.

~~~
chooseaname
Wait, you can't put an app on the app store when your xcode version is not the
absolute latest? Why do iOS devs put up with th... oh, right, Apple.

~~~
machello13
No, it's not true in general, but in this case Xcode 11.2 had a bug that would
cause crashes in apps built with it. 11.2.1 fixes the issue.

------
rgrau
The two oldest pieces of software I currently use (Emacs and Postgres) manage
changes pretty well and somehow, they now scale at a ratio of features, speed,
and size that's pretty decent.

They probably evolve slower than newer younger players because of their
stability (and baggage).

I'd be interested in knowing what they do right.

~~~
buboard
> what they do right

Everything! But most importanlty, the people who make them use them. There are
so many bugs in skype nowadays that it's fair to assume its developers have
switched to something else!

------
donatj
I’ve been running Navicat 11 and 12 side by side for almost a year because of
missing features and a wrecked UI, with the newer version supporting newer
MariaDB features.

I just received a new work laptop and the license for 11 refused to
deactivate, so I can’t activate it on my new Laptop.

Usually IT or whoever would contact support but with a couple buyouts under us
it was licensed to a company that no longer exists.

Trying to talk IT into getting me a new expensive license for an outdated
piece of software I’m not even sure they’ll sell you so I can have a couple
convenience features is out of the question.

I’m very frustrated.

~~~
BubRoss
I think a lot of developers don't realize that features and functionality are
only a part of a program. Many times what a program like that accomplishes is
somewhat trivial and the interface is the whole point. Redesigning an
interface is basically redoing the most fundamental part of the program. The
design is why people use it.

------
yitchelle
I guess the abyss gets really deep when the hardware that can support this old
software is also out of support (aka dead and un-repairable).

~~~
inetknght
If it were a car you'd still be paying off the loan

------
Jyaif
Ultimately, the problem is that we are not good at creating stable APIs. If we
did have stable APIs, then once something (a feature, or even entire software)
is written agains this stable API it would be available forever.

This is IMO one of the greatest challenge the software engineering field needs
to solve.

~~~
drawkbox
It isn't just stable APIs but part of that is consistency of signatures,
methods and usage.

APIs used to be cleaner and more atomic, today they seem like very leaky
abstractions and breaking changes seem to be all the rage.

Previously, breaking changes were seen as a serious thing as it meant the API
signatures/functionality was missing and needed to be broken.

Today, breaking changes is just part of the "move fast and break things" fad
that developers don't even try to make a stable/consistent API anymore.

Lots of the problems are that development/engineering is no longer in the
hands of developers/engineering/product people or designers, it is pushed by
project managers and bizdev/MBAs/marketing/finance which is backwards. Good
products should be built, with lots of thought into long living APIs and
limited breaking changes and maintenance, that is then marketed and sold
because it is value, instead we get the exact opposite. Rarely does software
today ever get to a stable phase before the platform is version two'd, and
there is no time added for software quality or solid products, features and
underlying systems are in constant harvest and replanting.

Stable consistent APIs don't help lock-in and they don't sell books,
conferences, or allow large companies more control. For larger companies to
keep control they need to break standards, and regularly break their own
platforms to keep people updating and invested, it sucks and is why software
is so bad today.

~~~
Crinus
> Stable consistent APIs don't help lock-in

I do not think this is true, Windows has a lock-in on desktop explicitly
because it has a stable API that allowed it to amass a huge library of
software that keeps people relying on it to get that software working.

For the largest majority of people, Windows' worth is its stable API (even if
they do not realize it).

~~~
drawkbox
True but in terms of development platforms for Microsoft, it is constant
churn.

When they have a monopoly or near monopoly like Microsoft does with the
desktop and Windows, less need for churn to keep people on it but lack of
competitors. Azure has gone through lots of churn because of heavy
competition.

Maybe competition, which is good, causes all this breaking software changes
but change is good as well. Software change should just be a little more
stable and developer/engineer/product/designer led not just the
money/marketing/oversight pushed.

Unfortunately standards get wrecked when platforms are going for lock-in and
control, Microsoft/Google etc are all to blame for that. It isn't the
engineers pushing for that mostly. Standards at least promote some level of
stable APIs, but they don't lock-in and so big fish and sharks eat them up and
break them.

~~~
arvinsim
I find it curious that you left Apple out.

~~~
drawkbox
Apple does similar.

However Apple is greatly responsible for HTML5 and browsers today, as well as
the handheld gaming revolution on mobile.

Webkit, Canvas, SVG, OpenGL ES + WebGL (through Khronos sponsorship) and more
were open sourced or pushed by Apple.

Chrome/Safari basically every browser that is good came from Webkit and Apple
opening that up. Granted that originally game from KHTML and KJS libraries
from KDE but it exploded with Apple support.

I left them out because they still have some grace left.

Google and Microsoft squash standards and Microsoft is famous for "embrace,
extend, extinguish" which Google now employs.

Microsoft has been better recently but only because they lost developers
during the Ballmer era and they have a desktop monopoly and their new OS is
cloud where they are competitive with Azure so they are pushing standards more
and cross platform to win back developers.

Google is entering their Ballmer era currently.

Apple doesn't have the power for that yet with developers, though they are not
engineer/open focused typically and especially now in the COO era and have
their own Ballmer vibe currently, but they are still riding on some fuel from
Webkit, Canvas, SVG, HTML5, OpenGL ES + WebGL support which really helped
handheld gaming and web gaming.

------
evolve2k
Actually this would be cool as a real generatable graph. Who would you create
this?

I’m thinking with access to the git repo as well as the relevant package
manager you could get pretty close.

Good way to illustrate upgrade requirements to a product owner.

------
neelkadia
Reminds me Adobe CS4

