zaidf · HackerTrans

قبل شهرينdiscuss

An entire generation of non developers are being onboarded to products built for developers because of AI. Exampl: a very non technical friend has built a bunch of business automations with Claude and a few days ago he just dropped in the conversation that he is using Cloudflare. “For what?” I asked because usually Claude will recommend Cercel before Cloudflare. But in this case, it recommended Cloudflare because of the Tunnels feature. Now he is using it for a lot more than Tunnels. Mostly just lets Claude use it whenever it makes sense.

“To what end?” was the default reaction when Amazon launched S3 in mid 2000s :)

zaidf

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

He was talking about Excel. Google Sheets with a tiny fraction of Excel features destroyed Excel except for a tiny minority of hardcore finance and Windows users.

zaidf

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.

zaidf

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...

Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.

zaidf

قبل 6 أشهرdiscuss

The problem is that CSS continues to be a pain in the ass, even as it evolves. There is no other reason why something like tailwind should have the traction it has.

zaidf

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

This is what C2PA is trying to do: https://c2pa.org/

zaidf

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.

Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.

zaidf

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.

This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.

It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?

The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.

Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.

iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!

I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.

zaidf

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

It’s not JavaScript if you can’t make an html page locally and open it in your browser without things like an http server or need to transpile.

zaidf

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

Dumb question: why do news websites have such a hard time keeping users logged in? Like I can go an entire year without getting logged out of gmail. But can't go more than a few days before getting logged out of news websites.

I have subscribed to news sites and still use something like archive.is because it is faster than my paid experience.

zaidf

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

I've been stunned by how many smart people talk so casually about LLMs becoming better at math. Do they just forget that a calculator that is wrong 1% of the time is a de facto calculator that doesn't work and should not be used?

zaidf

قبل 16 سنةdiscuss

You're talking about apples and oranges. Hardware and web apps are very different. Hardware still has lots of genuine inventions. Web apps--especially in the social space--all have the same kinda features at the end of the day.

So if you are a client and you come to me with an idea about a social network for plumbers that has an inbox feature, the max I might agree to is that I won't launch a similar product for his market...but I would be hesitant to even make that promise. I would never give away my right to have an inbox feature on a future venture, lol. Of course, you can totally make me agree that I will not reuse any code or specific modules I program for you will be yours.

zaidf

قبل 16 سنةdiscuss

  As for most other developers, when approached by "business guys" my typical reaction is to polite say no.

I have a reputation on campus as the guy to goto when you have ideas. For the past six months, I have rarely gone a week where someone hasn't "pitched" me an idea that they were looking for a programmer(me!) to code. These guys that come up with the ideas are ridiculous. They don't understand folks that do this are thinking of ideas 24x7 and that their idea which they think is awesome and just needs execution is not so awesome and never will be until you iterate like hell.

Luckily a lot of people try to make me promise that I will not copy their idea. I tell them upfront "WAIT! Please DON'T share your idea with me because chances are I have probably already had it in the past and may very well work on it in the future."

zaidf

قبل 19 سنةdiscuss

This has great potential!

Only suggestion I would have is go slower on the demo. I know you lost me very early into it switching between windows.

If you are looking for a wider audience than those who already know the context of dropbox, make a video where you lay out the case for use of dropbox using simple examples from user point of view(think a college student) and then in the demo show just the basic features. I got the feeling you tried to show too many features too quickly.

In general, I have realized it is much better to launch with something that does a few things REALLY well rather than a lot of things with little focus. When you launch with whole lot of features people assume you are competing with the big companies. When you launch small and do it well, it is easier to attract a user-base and THEN keep feeding it more advance features in form of updates.

Good luck! Looks slick from the UI.

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