SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
PLEX, this last week pushed out changes to its ROKU users (I am one). That made using PLEX nearly impossible for some people. Light and Dark gray color palate. White text on light gray background, to the point of the PLEX 1/4 screen height logo and spinning-working throbber being lost on the background.
So war ensues... See Plex.tv support forums if you must.
My question to you all, "What is TECH's responsibility to the Handicapped?".
Should good TECH also have a backdoor method allowing those with usability issues to still use the product, when TECH changes directions? What about lifetime pre-paid services that are now unusable? Should there be immediate return of funds, so we can buy the second best solution (now the best choice for us)? Should any change be signed off by a third party auditor to insure continued usability?
So again, asked differently, what is TECH's moral responsibility?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by black6host on Monday December 17 2018, @11:21PM (10 children)
I've long said that you never remove functionality from your software, especially if it's commercial. You never know how people are using it. I know this from both a developer and end user point of view. I think it's ok to move some features that are not used much but be prepared to educate your users either by good documentation , or via support channels. IMO, this includes the user interface.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:25AM (8 children)
One of the earliest (and excellent) rules of GUI design was to not move things around on your users. They develop habits based upon the functionality they use, and moving stuff around, either contextually or from version to version, is a bad idea, as it prevents those habits from forming (or ends up having the user do the wrong things.) The guideline was for controls that were not presently relevant to become disabled rather than move around or disappear entirely.
For an example of the former, in GMail, when you don't have an email in the list selected, the toolbar is...
[ ] Refresh More
...but when you have selected one or more emails, the toolbar begins...
[ ] Archive Spam Delete
...and yet again, if you're working in a label-based "mailbox-ish" thing, the toolbar begins...
[ ] Remove_Label Spam Delete
The consequence of this, and other context-based changes of this toolbar, is that your use of GMail features here must be considerably more mindful than they would need to be if the GUI wasn't unstable. That means past a particular point, the user can never get used to the interface, as what the interface is is constantly altering. You get to spend (I would argue, waste) your mental horsepower on the GUI instead of whatever it is you're trying to work with.
In the GMail example, a habitual click on the first toolbar element, intending to archive an item, ends up removing it from the mailbox (Remove_Label) in the context of a mailbox because the button has completely changed roles. Then you have to go find it, put it back, etc.
For an example of version-to-version disruption, I'll just point at Photoshop, which has utterly confused its users time and time gain to such a degree that it is mind-boggling.
The key to not doing this in application design is planning ahead so that if/when "more" becomes necessary, you have an intuitive, reasonable and non-disruptive place to put it. This, in turn, requires careful thinking about the classes of things your application does, and might do in the future when you design the GUI in the first place.
This isn't just an IMHO of mine. These are ideas that were codified as far back as the 1980's, when GUIs began to pop up in many venues within a fairly short span of time. I've never run into a good argument for making GUIs change in the intervening years. The most common one is "but the new!" to which I refer straight back to "but plan your application."
The only time it is reasonable to move things around is when you know, right up front, that there will be so many things that there must be a great deal of room for them; in that case, putting them in their own region where they do not disrupt the rest of the GUI is the way to go. Letting users build their own stable toolbox/caddy is also very helpful to them.
For instance, in one graphics applications I wrote which had really ridiculous numbers of things it could do, I did both: set it up so that users could create a tool caddy of their favorite tools, and made sure that when tools various were in scope, the controls and options did not disrupt the rest of the GUI. This was (waves hands vaguely) a Photoshop-class application; extensive image and image sequence manipulation. So it can certainly be done. Planning. That's the key.
Yes, sometimes things have to change. No, it shouldn't happen often, and it really shouldn't happen to the main GUI during the course of one invocation of an application unless you've completely changed what you're intending to do.
--
Yes sir, two copies of "Math For Dummies" at $16.95.
That'll be $50.00
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)
Gmail isn't much better. Every time they advertise a UI refresh I know I'm going to get calls from all sorts of relatives and neighbours who will be kicked back to day 0 of using Gmail just because some latte-sipping hipster cretin at Google has decided they need to rearrange the UI deckchairs yet again.
(Score: 4, Funny) by fyngyrz on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:32PM
You, sir or madame, win the "awesome phrase of the day" contest. 😊
--
I think I'll slip into something more comfortable.
Like a coma.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @06:26PM (1 child)
Overall a nice posting, and I like your use of abbr tags, but...
IMHO was "In My Humble Opinion," not "honest". So now you know.
Ehh, maybe I should just let you kids stomp over my lawn.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:49PM
I've always heard it the other way. I've added that to the IMHO definition. Thanks!
--
I may be apathetic, but I don't care.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:58PM (3 children)
I think it's also a matter of how well you understand the software in question, which fits the topic of TFA pretty well too.
If you generally know how email works, and what Gmail reasonably can and cannot do, then swapping out those options in that way makes perfect sense. If I select a single mail, I might want a reply button. If I select five emails, I almost certainly don't, because that doesn't make much sense. (In theory you could make it work, but I don't know any mail client that would allow bulk replies like that.) I don't want a massive toolbar full of options that I can't use; just show me what is relevant to what I've already done. However...I can also see that someone like my father wouldn't know anything about that, and it's entirely possible he might decide one day that he needs to send the same reply to three people, and get really frustrated when he can't find the reply button after selecting those mails.
Ultimately that's the same disconnect that causes problem for those with disabilities. The people who design software will design something that makes sense to them, with all of their knowledge about the inner workings of that software and all of their experience/frustrations/appreciation for other software that they're familiar with.
This, I think, presents diversity (ACTUAL diversity, not the "clones of different colors" diversity which many organizations practice these days) as a kind of corollary to the practice of "dogfooding". It definitely helps to find and fix both bugs and just plain annoying behavior if the people writing the code have to use that same software every single day...but the more homogeneous the workforce, the less effective that will be.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:49PM (2 children)
The point I was making is that software that makes you spend more effort than you need to in order to understand it or even access it is poorly designed. And software that makes you re-evaluate and/or re-locate the available options every time they are presented is exactly that.
Then it should be disabled. Not missing.
Disable/enable clearly indicates what is relevant if you're actually looking for something specific, and doesn't require re-evaluation of interface activity. What you need to use is always where you expect it to be, so it's much easier to access, even for beginners and disabled users, but also for fully abled, experienced users. That's ideal.
What an unstable interface does is forces your mind to work on things it doesn't need to work on. While you may indeed be comfortable with that, it's not the best way for a GUI to operate, and it inconveniences the heck out of new users, casual users, visually impaired users, etc.
As long as point-n-click or any other visual-to-physical mapping mechanism is the interface paradigm, stability is better than instability. For example, with applications that transition to voice interfaces, this will no longer be an issue. But as of now, we're still stuck with locating things at/on screens for anything of any real sophistication.
--
Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of political intercourse.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:14PM (1 child)
Sure. But how do we define "more effort than you need"? Learning Emacs requires a TON of effort, but plenty of users would attest that it's well worth the effort for the efficiency it gives you. Software that tries to be too smart and do too much for you is damn annoying, because it's always getting in your way and making you revert its changes (Microsoft Office is an excellent example...). Software that does too little automatically is ALSO a pain in the ass though. If 'mount' can tell just by looking at the filesystem what type it is, then there's no reason for it to force me to specify that option.
I never had to re-evaluate or re-location options back when I was using Gmail. I knew what I was trying to do, and I knew what sequence of actions I needed to take, and I knew where the right buttons were going to appear. No problem. And hell, if I wanted to move those buttons around, I knew how to do that too.
There's a limit to the screen space available. I don't want to be losing room for content so that I can stare at a big list of buttons that are irrelevant and unusable. Although I think an ideal system would probably use both -- a toolbar that changes depending on what content is active, and a full menu system which does not. I don't want to have to click through a bunch of menus just to find the 'reply' button, but a decent piece of software is probably going to have too many options to have them all just one click away at all times. Let those menus be user-configurable too though, because not everybody is going to be using the same functions all the time.
I think you're mixing up different usages of "stable". An interface can change depending on your actions while still being stable. They certainly shouldn't just randomly move buttons around in the next version -- if it gives me "Reply | Reply All | Forward | Delete" when I open a message, it should give me the same list of options when I open a message in the next version, and it certainly shouldn't do something like swapping the locations of Reply and Delete. But it doesn't have to show me the same exact options when I'm reading a message vs when I'm looking at my inbox, for the same reason that the answering service at the local public library has a different set of options than the answering service for my doctors office. Context is important, and giving different options in a different context is not a problem, it's a typical expectation.
Flooding your users with unusable and irrelevant information is almost as bad as giving them no information at all.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday December 20 2018, @01:31AM
Easily: effort that you spend on a task that gains you nothing. Like re-reading the toolbar to see what buttons are there now, and where you have to go to get at it, as opposed to the last time you looked at it. It's useless even for the abled, and for the disabled, it's tedious and a significant roadblock. New users have to read no matter what. Users with some time under their belts will internalize the positions and the functionality and their efficiency will significantly increase if the GUI is stable. If it is unstable, they either can't do that, or it will take a lot longer, and in addition, a risk factor of a button in a particular place doing something unintended now exists. Positions map to functionality with software users, and such mapping increases their efficiency. Unless it isn't there, in which case they have a steeper hill to climb.
No, you had most likely just internalized the relearning you'd done, and were able to use that because you have, or had, good vision and motor skills. Or you were reading them — every time. I absolutely guarantee you that if you'd simply read those buttons once and then never again, you'd be right in here complaining about how you unintentionally had done this or that, and would be able to trace the cause directly to the fact that the buttons and their associated functionality physically move around. I also guarantee you that if you were significantly impaired, that relearning would have been a process that involved many invective-laced sessions.
Already addressed in my first post in the thread.
At most, this argues for a user-selectable, optional unstable mode vs. a default stable mode. In this particular case (GMail), it doesn't — because the menu is quite sparse. However, you don't have to read the disabled buttons. In a good UI, the fact that they are unavailable at the moment is very clearly indicated in a way that obviates having to read them at all. The ones that are operative at any moment will stand out visually — and they'll be right where they always are. If you're actually reading, you'll see them easily without having to read anything but them, and if you're using motor memory, it'll just work.
I think I've been reasonably clear about how I've been employing the term here, but I will provide a specific definition for your benefit:
These concepts apply without confusion in the context of a single session, in the context of multiple sessions, and in the context of version-to-version changes/updates.
You're shooting your argument in the foot here. You've said that you know where things are regardless of the instability, but you're also saying that you can't learn where things are when they don't move. It's either one or the other — because in either case, you have to learn every button you use. In the stable case, you learn them and they don't move. If your argument focuses on how much you have to read, then you actually don't know where the buttons are anyway, so you have not learned where things are, and you're not seeing the forest for the trees. Also, a disabled button should be very clearly indicated as disabled. No need to read it, it's dimmed, you can't use it anyway. Zip, on to the next button, presuming you're still reading them (inexperienced user syndrome.)
There are no fewer active buttons in a stable interface; the things you can use remain right where you expect them to be, every time. Whereas in order to learn to use them in an unstable interface, you have to learn what they do and learn where they are and when you should click here or there, or, you have to reread them every time to see what your options are. The learning load is higher for the unstable case than it is for the stable case, every time, and it persists much longer.
For example (applies directly to GMail, as it happens):
Unstable way: Delete is in 2nd position. Or first, if (condition obtains.) Results hitting 2nd button vary. They may cause harm or at the very least, a lot of extra effort. You can't have a habit tied to hitting the second button, because it will (not may, but will) bite you. You must either read/interpret the buttons every time (text vs. icon) or learn how the interface mutates through its various unstable modes.
Stable way: Delete is in 2nd position. Results hitting second button will ALWAYS delete, unless button is disabled, in which case, no harm done (but it's right where it always should be, so habit of hitting second button is tied — in a stable manner — to actually deleting things.)
Right. And an interface that mutates shovels extra information at them every time it mutates which increases the cognitive (and physical, and time, when we're talking about the disabled) load on the user. So you really shouldn't do it unless you are absolutely forced to (and again, I've already addressed that point.) Again, disable the button properly and the user will ignore it. No extra- or re-learning required.
The last word is yours. I have made my points repeatedly, and am satisfied that I have been clear enough.
--
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:27AM
Don't we already provide a GUI for the handicapped who can't figure out how to use a CLI? That's already a pretty big concession.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @11:22PM (9 children)
Why is TECH in caps? Does it stand for something.
Also, in my experience the way google treats the handicapped is the worst. They are constantly changing around the design and placement of settings and the settings themselves. I used to work with someone who was visually handicapped and every update to chrome would waste multiple days getting it usable again.
Perhaps windows 10 is worse about all that, but I haven't used it.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday December 17 2018, @11:52PM (8 children)
Did they submit feedback about this? Seems like Google would be interested in getting their accessibilty correct to avoid having another laser sight on the regulator-supplied bullseye on their chest. Unless nobody in Washington cares about the disabled (which is possible).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:00AM (5 children)
How would they submit feedback? The only obvious feedback method is when the browser crashes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by coolgopher on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:18AM (4 children)
Even as a paid-up Google Apps user, there isn't (or at least wasn't) any way of getting in touch with them. No support other than the all-users forum, which as far as I could tell wasn't actually frequented by any Google employees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:49AM (3 children)
Is that better or worse than firefox which offers a sad face or happy face?
https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/ [mozilla.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:25PM
don't be a moron. you can still report bugs via the tracker. the happy/sad face is just for sending random feedback. one way.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:05PM (1 child)
Next time look at the ENTIRE form, not just the first question. Click one of those faces and they'll ask for more information before it lets you submit anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:17PM
Then they should indicate that somehow.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:36AM (1 child)
Nobody with real power. There were a lot of good laws (like ADA) passed in the late 60s, early 70s, and it seems like everybody is sort of letting that coast on automatic since then. They've never been fully enforced, but there are massive streams of federal funding going out to support compliance.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:27AM
Trump could help (hes not a fan of google) but hes under sealed grand jury investigation for questioning the validity of the national debt during the 2016 campaign. This is highly illegal according to the 14th amendment: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/trump-national-debt/ [nationalreview.com]
https://www.politicususa.com/2018/12/16/entire-courthouse-floor-cleared-for-muellers-mystery-grand-jury-witness.html [politicususa.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @11:30PM (8 children)
https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics [acm.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @11:38PM (6 children)
Outdated... needs to be changed...doesn't mention anything about transsexuals.
(Score: 3, Touché) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:09AM (5 children)
"Computing professionals should consider whether the
results of their efforts will respect diversity, will be
used in socially responsible ways, will meet social
needs, and will be broadly accessible."
Respecting diversity is respecting diversity. *Enumerating* diversities is retarded and ghey.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:47PM (4 children)
What does "respect diversity" mean?
It's poor wording. We should respect other individuals that have earned it. We should extend common courtesy to anyone and everyone who does the same. We should value basic human rights, pledge our support for them, and actively defend them when needed.
Diversity itself does not deserve respect. Individuals who earn respect through their actions deserve respect.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:28PM
oh no, it's racist not to reverse discriminate to prove how unracist you are. also, everyone is equal but somehow having people of different races, sexual orientation or flavor of gender dimorphism is better for the project.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday December 18 2018, @08:12PM
No. We should respect *all* other individuals, period, unless their actions prove that they do *not* deserve it.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 19 2018, @01:59PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @05:53PM
I would say that diversity itself DOES deserve respect. Diversity it what keeps us all from being wiped out by a by one bad flu strain or whatever other disease. Diversity is also why you can sometimes spend a day looking for a bug, only to have someone else find the issue five minutes after you show them. Diversity is the driving force behind natural selection and evolution -- without it we'd all still be freakin' microbes at best.
Diversity is strength. It increases the attack surface that any attackers must deal with, while simultaneously increasing the number of tools you have available to use against them. Lack of diversity is why things like Heartbleed and Spectre are so harmful -- damn near every PC and server out there is running the same code, so they're all vulnerable at once. If the code base was more diverse, the impact would be smaller. If the coders were more diverse, maybe one of them would have thought of and patched that issue before the product was released.
Actual diversity is absolutely essential to damn near everything that we as a species do, and to damn near every life form that has ever existed. I think that ought to be enough to earn the concept a bit of respect...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:05AM
Alas, that would seem to cover the shitty "oh sorry, we made those changes without even thinking of you, I guess we could tweak something to undo the mess we created" type of attentionthat only gets given to those with the balls to complain. Which is better than the even more common devnulling of such complaints.
Yours, visually impaired web user.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:15AM
Sounds very unhealthy. I never knew ROKUs had mouths.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
Most IT techs are built by (relatively speaking) emotionally "handicapped" nerds. You frame the request right, and you may get the result you want. But then how far do you want to go, where do you draw a line, e.g. lgbtq-xyz?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @02:49AM
Why do you think girls who like girls are handicapped?
Have you been huffing systemd? Try some of the legal weed for the emotional handicap instead.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:20AM (11 children)
When you lose customers you lose money. When you do it without good reason, you're a fucking moron. That preempts any need for debate of morality.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:25AM (3 children)
When you lose customers you lose money. When you do it without good reason, you're Google
Hint, YOU aren't the customer, and they could care less about your opinion.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:19AM (2 children)
You think so? You really might want to put more thought into that. Whether you consider people the product or the customer, losing either loses you money.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:09AM (1 child)
Maybe Google should put more thought into it, considering they seem hellbent on ruining every single 'service' (really, they're disservices at this point) they have. Same with so many other large corporations.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:46PM
That's generally what happens when you put an MBA in charge of a company that was made successful by actual innovators. They don't generally have the ability to generate quality, only to seek rent and capture income via regulation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:03AM (3 children)
Plex seems to simply be following the rest of the sheep. Some idiots at Apple and Google decided that a flat UI with poor contrast and indistinguishable control elements was a good thing. Microsoft followed suit, adding their own gaudy touches. The sheep who develop applications for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android followed the leaders and the customers suffer the results.
Unfortunately, the loss of money you refer to doesn't seem to be happening, else the flat-and-low-contrast-is-good design morons would have been given the boot by now and we'd be enjoying a reversion to usable UIs.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:25AM (2 children)
It's happening. Most people are sheep and will take what is forced upon them but not all people.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
In my experience, software developers and devops people make the choices they do not for the users or their employer, but to enhance their resumes in anticipation of their next gig. A cool-lloking UI helps no one, but it does get you an interview with a cooler company, and hat's all that matters.
I know in my case my career has suffered because I felt an obligation to be cost-effective and maintain existing codebases while my peers all jumped ship for the new shiny. If I had a dime for every bad new idea a coworker pushed through and leveraged into a cooler job elsewhere while I had to stay and clean up the mess...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:09PM
Mine has flourished for the same reasons. I guess we're marketing our skills to entirely different customers.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:42AM (1 child)
Does a billionaire care if his business loses thousands, or even millions? Perhaps at a certain point, making more money is no longer the goal.
Not everything in life is economics.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:47PM
Depends on the billionaire. If they want to lose money, that's absolutely their right though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:19PM
And yet, the tech industry has routinely done things that serve no particular purpose, but still represent a massive issue for the disabled. Those flash sites are a pretty good example, the blind cannot use them and yet since they're pretty they were very popular for a while.
Making things disabled friendly, is not rocket surgery at this point. It is somewhat inconvenient at times, but the technology does exist to allow virtually everybody to use modern technology with some modifications. And you don't always have to do the modifications yourself. If you include appropriate API access sometimes folks will do it for you.
Really, the whole thing is dickish and self-centered. Most of the things that the industry is doing that thwart accessibility are obnoxious even for folks that aren't disabled. Things like infinite scroll and those terrible interfaces that are pretty, pretty useless, come straight to mind.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:22AM
Hostility towards disabled people, sure, but also hostility to users in general.
It's become a cultural thing for software makers to give their user base the finger.
I think part of it is the dumbing down of the software makers' skills over time, too.
What moron buys a monitor that brags about its contrast specs only to put up a non-functional grey on grey scheme that can't even display itself on many monitors? It all displays "white."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:28AM (1 child)
You mean like "ADA compliance" in the sense that even if you don't live in the USA everyone's still gotta be mostly compliant?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:39AM
"would you like cookies?" NO. HELLS NO. FUCK YOUR COOKIES. and stop taking up my vertical screen space.
oh, wait. that's an eu thing. worldwide. perhaps less intrusiveness all around?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by J_Darnley on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:49AM (2 children)
> Light and Dark gray color palate. White text on light gray background
Probably the ultimate sin. Either white on black, or black on white. Perhaps an "off white" as the background is permissible. I bet this change was coupled with a lightweight font.
> a backdoor method allowing those with usability issues to still use the product
If a "backdoor" exists it is for all people to use. I'm not against that. I like to abuse my software to use it in the manner I deem appropriate.
> What about lifetime pre-paid services that are now unusable?
No doubt some legalese gets them out of having to provide some service in perpetuity. Don't go for a license or service that can be revoked. Buy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:14AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:19PM
What the fuck happened to just making software CONFIGURABLE?
I do not want black on white nor white on black. Too much damn eye strain. Obviously the colors must be distinct enough to quickly and clearly tell the difference, but once that is accomplished the next goal is for the full screen to maintain a similar brightness so your eyes aren't constantly adjusting every time you glace to a different part of the screen. If you decide you're going to force the entire goddamn world to use your one and only color scheme, then you can't possibly hit the right balance for every single person's eyesight and monitor configuration and everything else. Give me ten options, you can probably get pretty close. Let me punch in my own damn color codes, and it'll be perfect for anyone who wants it to be.
We need more of this, definitely. I wouldn't call it a "backdoor" though; I'd call it "obeying the Unix philosophy". Make each program as small as possible. Split the backend from the UI, and give me the information I need to control that backend with CLI arguments or by hand-crafting TCP packets if I really feel like doing it that way. This also makes it easy for someone else to produce an alternative UI that might work better for some users. But that requires companies to actually consider their users rather than just their profits....
Open source does this pretty well though. You can fork the whole damn project...or you can just contribute the code for a checkbox in the settings menu that will do what you need. Usually that's a pretty easy choice. In my experience, open source projects generally (though certainly not always) have much more robust configuration options, and I suspect this reason is a large part of that.
If you bought a "perpetual" license for any kind of software product, you're a goddamn moron (their marketing department are scumbags too, but that goes without saying). Should be pretty obvious they can't actually provide that. Get them to guarantee some minimum lifespan in the license so you can know what the hell you're actually buying...otherwise you might as well just take that money to a casino.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:35AM (2 children)
More properly, you should be asking, "What moral responsibility do individuals who work in tech have?"
Given that corporations have no morality and no goal other than to enrich themselves and their investors/stockholders. for corporations your question is moot.
Morality is only relevant to individuals. Individuals make moral choices. Because morality is inherently an individual thing. There are those who claim to follow a common moral code, but that's disingenuous. All moral choices are individual ones.
As to the question you should have asked, that's a good question. One might hope that individuals recognize the value in making their products/services accessible. However, all too often people ignore the moral questions and focus on more material issues.
What's more, if those who are in control of a particular product/project/service make (in your mind) questionable moral judgements, those working on such a product may not have any say about it.
Given the variability of both moral codes and how individuals hew to those codes, I posit that morality is a poor mechanism for incentivizing corporations (with no morality) and those who work on such products (variability of moral codes/adhesion to such codes) to support accessibility or any other feature(s).
I'd say that appealing to the self-interest of those involved might be more effective.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:43AM (1 child)
Corporations are people too, you know... [wikipedia.org] They should be held to the same standard. After all, with the same rights, come the same responsibilities...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:38AM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:38AM (2 children)
Migrating from contrast colours into blurry, gray-on-gray colour palette is designed to make advertisements more visible. It always ends this way. It's customer's choice will it be accepted, usually is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:00AM
Damn it! Once you know, you can never unknow. Thanks, I think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @07:45AM
Well, fuck. At least now it makes sense.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:34AM (5 children)
You could start by thinking about why you default to the description of someone as 'handicapped' rather than something like 'people with a disability'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @08:41AM (3 children)
Yeah! How about 'differently abled' instead of 'disabled', you insensitive clod!
(grin)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:30AM (2 children)
The problem with "differently abled" is that the term implies different abilities, which may be upsetting. How about "equally abled", or "eqabled (e-cabled)"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @11:29AM (1 child)
I'm Spasticus! Spasticus! Spasticus! Autisticus!
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday December 18 2018, @01:40PM
I'm Spasticus! Spasticus! Spasticus! Autisticus!
For anyone who does not get the reference: Ian Dury [wikipedia.org] and Youtube video:The song [youtube.com]YouTube:Ian Dury talking about the song [youtube.com].
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:30PM
Stupid terminology. My color vision, as well as my poor vision, is indeed a handicap. It is not a disability, or Uncle Sam would offer me some disability pay. In golf, you get a handicap, not a disability.
Screw that politically correct nonsense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @06:06AM (1 child)
How much of an obligation people have to help others has no definite answer. All you can say is that if enough people feel like they are getting the short end of the stick, they will force society to accommodate them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:25PM
This worked better when there were options. In many cases, there really aren't alternatives out there. As evil as FB is, there haven't really been other options that had the number of people on. Meaning that until FB got caught doing all those horrible things, there wasn't much reason for most people to leave.
Similarly, it's incredibly hard to leave Amazon as doing so requires doing a lot more work to find things to buy and probably dealing with a large number of other stores.
It's not that coding and building things for the disabled is necessarily that hard, a nice clean interface with appropriate mouseover text and built to resize alone goes most of the way towards being accessible to everybody. But, most companies aren't even doing that. Some of the interfaces I've seen are downright hostile to people who aren't disabled, and those who are are completely fucked.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @09:41AM (4 children)
this is what you should expect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:21PM (2 children)
Oh please! This is now an endemic problem, free or non-free!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)
Oh please right back at you! If a free software project does something you disagree with, you can always fix it or even fork it.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 18 2018, @04:32PM
Why not both? Fix it and fork it too? It's kinda like getting married, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @03:44PM
KDE isn't proprietary and they still had grey fetish nonetheless at one point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:34PM (9 children)
you want to fund closed source shit then act surprised when they screw you in a different way? you fund the enemy of free humanity but have the gall to whine? who gives a shit about your fucking entertainment gui. use kody, you silly fucker. i don't know if it's accessible but they would probably be open to those changes if not.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday December 18 2018, @08:17PM (8 children)
Oh please. If Open Source is so great, why is Gnome so moronic? Have they checked behind their couch cushions yet to figure out where they misplaced their missing maximize button yet?
The problem is that developers no longer care about what the user wants or needs. They only care about what is convenient for them.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:55PM (7 children)
Because the people who don't like it don't use it. Open source gives you that choice. Some people hated Gnome so they jumped to KDE or XFCE or Enlightenment or whatever. Other people hated Gnome so they forked it and kept maintaining the older version. Other people hated Gnome so they contributed patches to change what they didn't like. The parent comment didn't say open source was perfect; they said it gives you freedom. Nobody is trying to force you to use that atrocious Fischer-Price UI if you don't want to.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday December 19 2018, @09:28PM (6 children)
That's true, except for when they can't for whatever reason. Just because there is the *theoretical* possibility of freedom, doesn't mean it happens in reality. You have the exact same "freedom" in the closed source world as you do in the open. Don't like Word? Use Word Pro. Or DocsToGo. Or Google docs.
Also, I used gnome as an example, but there are plenty of others. For example, I've discovered a very frustrating thing where Linux just won't pipe audio through HDMI. It just won't. I have a zbox and a gigabyte laptop. Same problem on both. I've tried 4 or so different distributions. Same problem. Dunno what the problem is. Bug in PulseAudio? Bad hardware detection? I spent several hours trying to figure it out to no avail. All I know is that if I boot Windows, it works but if I boot Linux, it doesn't.
So as an end user, what would you have me do? Because I am technical, I *could* try ripping out PulseAudio and replacing it with ALSA. Hell, I could try installing slackware and building up my system bit by bit, package by package. But you know what Fuck that. I have a family and a mortgage, and a job that's a higher priority for me than figure out why "Linux" still hasn't figured out how to play nicely with technology that is now almost 2 decades old. Maybe Open Source doesn't cost me money, but it sure in hell costs me time, which is just as valuable.
The parent tried to claim that closed source will "screw you" and open source won't. My point is that there is nothing preventing you from getting screwed by Open Source software as well. The only difference is the method in which the screwing occurs.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
You don't know what free software means, do you? That's OK but please do educate yourself before speaking up. PLEASE.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday December 20 2018, @07:34PM
I understand it just fine, TYVM. My point, which the GP is too arrogant to acknowledge, is that from an end user perspective software freedom means absolutely nothing because they don't have the skill to capitalize on it.
To an end user, moving from Word to LibreOffice, or LibreOffice to Abiword, is no different than moving from Word to Google Docs.
This is the massive white elephant in the room that OSS folks seem to go out of their way to ignore. It's not good enough to just write software. You have to think about the audience that you are writing that software for.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 20 2018, @01:20PM (3 children)
Yeah, if you ignore the DEFINING FEATURE, if you ignore the things that make them different, then of course they look the same!
Switching to a different program is one solution, and it's a very easy one so it's the one most people tend to take. But it's not the only option. My point was merely that these compatible alternatives only exist because the original was open source. What's your alternative to Windows, ReactOS? Good luck using that for anything significant...
But the only thing preventing you from fixing your issue is that you clearly don't think it's worth your time to do so. If it was a big enough problem for you, you would get it fixed. Unlike proprietary software, you can do that yourself. You don't have to go beg some company to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in modifying their software just for you. You can write the code yourself, and you can learn how to do that just by surfing the web...or you can hire someone to do it for you if you don't have the time or inclination.
Freedom doesn't mean you're never going to have a problem. It just means that when you DO have a problem, you have plenty of options to resolve it. The side effect is that you also get a ton of examples of how other people have solved similar problems, and often one of those solutions will be suitable. Sometimes it isn't and you've gotta go your own way. With open source, that's possible. With proprietary software, all you can do is follow corporate.
And FWIW, I've had some minor issues with Linux distros in the past where I couldn't get them to STOP outputting audio through HDMI, so it's certainly possible. But then after a few hours I found the setting and fixed it, so I haven't used that particular feature in maybe three years now...you wouldn't happen to be using an NVidia card, would you?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday December 20 2018, @07:20PM (2 children)
That's all well and good, but the ONLY reason I have the option of fixing the issue is because I am technical. If I wasn't technical, then what would my option be?
My point is that from an average end-user perspective, having software freedom is completely meaningless if all the options suck equally and I don't have the skill to evaluate and/or fix the differences that are relevant to me.
And yes, my laptop has one of those Nvidia Optimus abominations where the connections crisscross between the dedicated GTX1070 and the integrated intel-whatever chip. And I can't use the Nouveau driver because the whole OS locks up on boot when I try so I have to disable it on boot and install the Nvidia blob. But I have to use the out of date one that comes from the Ubuntu PPA because installing the Nvidia provided one breaks everything.
But the zbox I'm using as a media centre has only the intel chip and has the same problem. In that case I ended up saying hell with it and just used the SPDIF instead.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 20 2018, @07:58PM (1 child)
Already answered that one:
None of us are born "technical". I taught myself how to program in sixth grade by reading tutorials on cplusplus.com. Anyone can do the same. Or hire someone else who did.
Yup. My laptop's got an NVidia card and I had similar driver issues. First and last NVidia product I will ever buy. The proprietary driver sucks because NVidia doesn't give a damn, and the open source driver isn't fully functional because NVidia doesn't give a damn.
Never heard of the zbox before though, that looks like an interesting device....quite surprising that you're having that kind of issue with an Intel card. Of course, you probably wouldn't have these issues if you used an open standard instead of a proprietary one like HDMI...that thing is *designed* to break your connectivity. ;)
Seriously though...I'm sure you could fix it with enough googling and maybe a couple forum posts...Pulseaudio is a bit obnoxious (of course it is, it's Poettering crap...) and it tries to hide shit from you, so you've gotta find someone who knows where to look to figure out the issue. Or you can just use a different connector, as you already did, because it gives you that flexibility and that's a much lazier solution. :)
But once again, nobody said it was easy, just that it gives you freedom. You know what would make life pretty damn easy? Being locked in a padded cell. Don't have to get a job, don't have to pay your bills, don't have to worry about a single damn thing. But is that really all that matters? Is it better to be a child and simply do whatever your parents say, or is it better to be an adult and make your own damn choices -- and deal with your own consequences too?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday December 20 2018, @09:12PM
If I get a cookie with that, I would be seriously tempted. After the last couple days I've had, I could really really use a cookie. :P
The problem with HDMI is that it's now effectively ubiquitous. It's exceedingly difficult to find something that *isn't* HDMI. So we're basically SOL regardless.
You omitted the one option that most people invariably pick. Throw their hands up in the air, claim that this is crap, and walk away to look for something that does do what they want.
Depending on what the issue is, sometimes it's just not worth solving. For example, with this Nvidia issue, my solution is to say, "hell with it" and have Windows installed on a separate partition. I don't need audio /w HDMI often enough to justify the time I would need to spend solving the issue. At some point if I'm bored I may try just for the sake of solving it, but at this point I can't return the device and get my money back, so the work around is good enough to keep me going.
With the ZBox, threw my hands up in the air because I already had a tiresome day and I didn't want to dick around with temperamental hardware. I just wanted to unwind with a movie and a glass of wine. Of course, if I did the same thing today I'd probably just use a raspberry Pi now since it's now performant enough to do so. (Oh wait, even THAT uses HDMI.... >_ )
It's really unfortunate that Nvidia's head is shoved so far that it turned itself into a Klein bottle, but if I want a laptop that can play fancier games (I like Skyrim, sorry not sorry...), then to my knowledge there is no other option. Intel performance is crap for anything other than powerpoint presentations, and last I checked, AMD has not only virtually zero laptop presence but their drivers are crap too.
(Or I can go Apple and spend $5000 on $1000 worth of hardware, yadda yadda)
...what were we talking about again?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday December 18 2018, @08:15PM (5 children)
It's not just handicapped people, although they are overwhelmingly affected.
The problem is why has the tech industry at large decided that idiotic design patterns trumped good sense? We had this all figured out a couple decades ago. Since then, what do we have? Playstation button icons have replaced basic navigation symbols. Menus have been replaced by that idiotic 3 lined hamburger whatever. Low-contrast design.
IMO this is just another symptom of "modern" development practices. Make things more convenient for the developer, not the user. Heck, the exploding Javascript "ecosystem" has proven that developers have effectively pointed their middle finger at quality, efficient code. Let the sucker using the product just throw more hardware at the problem cause the developer either has no concept, or no care, that their code run like a quadriplegic elephant in a tar pit.
At least, that's the only explanation I can think of as to why product quality has collapsed across the board in recent years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:24PM
Its the use of AB testing. This is just a form of NHST (testing a strawman null hypothesis that two different things affect the outcome in exactly the same way, then concluding whatever your favorite thing is) which destroys every field it touches.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @07:13PM (3 children)
It's...complicated, probably.
As I posted above, I think a large part of it is the disconnect between developers and users. Devs don't know who is using the software or why; they just build something that makes sense to them and dump it on the world and see what happens. Hell, most of the time the devs aren't even using their own software. I don't REALLY have a clue what half of the code I work on is actually doing -- I know I need to move data that matches certain conditions from point A to point B. I don't know what that data is actually doing, I don't know how it is used by the business application, I just know they told me to find a way to get it somewhere. I write software for pharmacies and I haven't visited a pharmacy even once in the past five years, and I got ZERO training on what these people do all day, so I don't have a clue.
At the same time, that disconnect goes both ways. Users don't want to learn how the software works. They just want magic. People complain about their "piece of shit calculator" because it gave the wrong answer -- after they typed in the wrong numbers. But hey, if Word can detect typos in text, why can't the calculator detect typos in numbers? They don't even understand why that very question is so absurd.
And as a developer you can try to do right and still find that it doesn't matter at all, which is rather frustrating and may be another factor which leads to these ultra simplistic designs. You spend hours to produce pages and pages of documentation clearly showing every feature the user needs...and they stuff it to the bottom of a filing cabinet and call you every damn day asking questions that are already documented. So you convert it to an online copy and send them that...and they never even open it. So you integrate the documentation into the product itself, and they blindly click through the instructions without reading them then call you and ask what to do next. Every time. And that's probably exactly what we deserve for trying to put a computer in every single person's hands. Now half your users are essentially illiterate. Good fuckin' luck....
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday December 19 2018, @09:00PM (2 children)
What you are saying is true, however ultimately it is still the developer's responsibility (or the project manager, consulting company, whereever the buck stops...) to figure out what will most benefit the user. Per your pharmacy example, if nobody on your team has visited a pharmacy and watched what they do, that is a MASSIVE problem. Your product is almost guaranteed to be difficult to use. I was involved in a project once where software was designed by people who would never actually use it. The software was complete crap, cost a great deal of money, and was ultimately abandoned because the people using it were *this* close to open revolt over it.
Eating your own dog food is critical to a successful product, regardless of what that product is.
The thing is, software development is not a new field at this point. There is almost 50 years of experience now, and none of these problems are new. There is more than enough documentation around that describes good UI principals and good software design. There are plenty of real world examples, good and bad. But developers are just as bad about reading documentation as users are, so all this documentation may as well not have been written.
We already know full well that users rarely read the documentation. So as you said, that needs to be accommodated, to as reasonable an extent as possible. Unless it's a very specialized piece of software, your software should be easily discoverable. The UI should be obvious to use and guide users to correct usage. But the current UI fad is to make interfaces look as hipster as possible. Standardized controls are for losers, apparently. I remember when I first tried the snapchap app on my phone. That was the single most stupidest UI I had ever seen. Absolutely nothing was obvious. It was totally undiscoverable, unless you counted randomly tapping on literally everything just to see what happened. While I did eventually figure out how to use it (I treated it as a curious puzzle rather than a chat app), I was so affronted by how shockingly bad the UI was that I never used it again
And again, I bring up that idiotic hamburger menu button. I see it all over the place now, and I hate it every single time. If you need a menu interface, make a f__king menu interface. If having a menu is too complicated, then redesign your UI because you've clearly done it wrong.
And as other people have mentioned, don't redo your UI every version just for the sake of "freshening it up". It has zero benefit, unless you count additional retraining costs for existing users as a benefit. Why is iPhone so popular? Because it (generally) works, and it stays working. You pick up an iPhone with iOS1 or iOS12, you will be able to use either one. Is the UI boring an uninspired? You betcha. And that's the point. If I wanted surprises, I'd buy a Kinder Egg.
As an aside... One nice feature that a lot of applications used to have, is that you could click a ? button, then click the thing you wanted to know about, and help would pop up. Nobody does that anymore. Why? I dunno. Because it's "outdated" and "old"?
I realize I'm going off on tangents but there's just so much area to cover. The thing is, it's not just UI. It's all the possible ways in which users interact with software. Not just day to day usage but installation and maintenance, etc. The thing that really pisses me off, is the sheer arrogance that I've seen developers exhibit. They literally expect the world to just revolve around them just because they wrote some code. Ansible is a great example of that. They will happily break fundamental grammars in a point release, and expect everyone to just drop what they're doing rewrite all their playbooks to accomodate it. This has resulted in people having to design entire continuous integration pipelines JUST for their playbooks. Ansible is supposed to *facilitate* things like infrastructure automation and continuous integration, but instead all they've done is add another layer of complexity to an already complex mix. Ansible could have been a fantastic product, but instead it's only barely passable because Ansible developers don't give a flying fig about how much of a burden they are placing on already overwhelmed sysadmins.
I could go on and on and on about the stuff I've seen but I've already written a long enough essay already. But ultimately, while yes users can be raving asshats (it's unfortunately unavoidable and you're right, there's only so much you can do about them...), that doesn't obviate the developer's responsibility of making a product that is fit for purpose for at least the targeted user base. This means developers need to spend more time thinking about how their product is going to behave, well before they've so much as written their first line.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday December 20 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
Yup...lack of foresight, lack of investment, standard MBA crap. We've got so many people coming in on six month contracts that a proper, complete training process would eat up the majority of that time and nothing would get done. Nobody wants to invest in employees; they want "more bodies on this project" which they can just throw away when they're done. And then they brag about this lack of investment as "efficiency" and "innovation".
There's also fifty years of "Cheap, fast, good: Pick two" with "good" almost always being the one that gets thrown out. The devs suck because nobody ever wants to hire a good dev until there's a crisis that nobody else can figure out. Until then they just want cheap code monkeys. Management is more concerned with how many releases they can push out in a year than in how many defects are found in each one...defects are internal, while the number of releases gets bragged about in shareholder documents. Ignoring quality is the standard formula for short-term stock market success (and then cashing out before everything crashes down around you.)
Well, I tend to avoid mobile apps and social media these days so I can't say too much about those...except that the UI changes are likely focused on emphasizing advertisements as others have mentioned elsewhere in these comments. If you're clicking around randomly on the screen, you're more likely to click an ad. I recall a particularly egregious case of this from that Angry Birds game a few years ago -- it was something along the lines of tap once to aim and tap again to fire...and as soon as you start to aim a full-screen ad would pop up. So if you went to click to fire too quickly you'd hit the ad instead. This isn't stupid developers, this isn't people failing to read and understand the science of UI design...it's a bad UI because management explicitly paid for a bad UI.
But we also have the "cheap/fast/good" issue again -- nobody wants to pay for a custom designed UI, which is how we end up with a bunch of "universal" frameworks (ie, Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla CMSes and such replacing traditional web development) -- but you can't always keep it simple if it's designed to do everything for everyone. It's generally better to start from the ground up and building only what you need rather than starting with everything including the kitchen sink and trying to strip it all out again. But it costs more to do it that way, and nobody's going to pay for it.
Agreed. I think that might be an attempt to avoid localization costs? You don't have to translate if there's no text. And "English" can still be a localization issue for US-based corporations...I was just in a meeting where the head of the department had to explain to some project leads what the word "pending" meant. We've got code files where the file names have words like "Perscirption" -- the people writing pharmacy software can't spell the word "prescription" and can't be bothered to look it up and nobody in management seems to think that's a problem because *something* still manages to hit the production servers "on time", even if it's crap and missing half the requested features...
Yup, said that myself in another comment. That stuff is infuriating. But you've gotta keep moving the ads around in order to get people to click them by mistake...if they don't click the ads, you don't get profit and you can't pay the devs because most users won't pay for the software just because it's marginally easier to learn.I stopped using Facebook about a year ago and I *still* hear the complaints every few months when they change their interface. But you suggest that maybe those people should stop using Facebook and they call you a crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. People whine about it, but as far as I can tell they seem to prefer this to the alternatives...
Although your comments about iOS bring up a somewhat different point. I see no real difference between the iOS interface strategy and the Facebook interface strategy. Either way I have zero control over it. Either way they tell me I can take it or leave it. With Android, the interface is more or less what I want it to be. Win Linux on my laptop my interface is some twisted mess of windowing, tiling, and straight CLI...and that's exactly how I want it. Settings should not change automatically by themselves, but it still needs to be possible to change them if the user wants to. "One size fits all" doesn't work any better for computer UIs than it does for clothing. Only good for cheap crap and small accessories.
Right...but keep in mind that most of these developers aren't doing this as a hobby (and when they do, the results are often much better)...generally they're writing what they're told to write. Developers will stop doing this crap when users decide that it's worth an extra five bucks to get a product that's not a complete steaming pile. You demand everything for free (or as close to it as possible) and you get what you pay for.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Thursday December 20 2018, @08:50PM
I can't disagree with anything you've written. I think the issue for me is that, because OSS developers are supposed to be free from the whole "stupid profit-motivated management decisions" problems, they have the freedom to do things "right". But when all is said and done it feels like zero progress is being made. Dealing with OSS software invariably is far more difficult than it needs to be, which results in negative experiences.
A fantastic example is a jailbroken iPhone. In theory, it's great. Having low level control of your phone, etc etc. But I eventually gave up jail breaking my phone, not because Apple made it too difficult, but because there was so little payoff for doing so. The majority of software available on Cydia was problematic for one reason or another. The few widgets and doodads that were worth getting were paid ones, and even those became pointless the moment Apple added a feature that did 90% of what the widget did.
I don't like my iPhone or iOS, and Apple's attitude pisses me off to high heaven, but when push comes to shove, it does what it says on the tin with minimal fuss. (More or less. Apple removed access to network sniffing so I can't use it to do wifi channel scanning anymore... grumble grumble...)
Ilsa