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Hey everyone,
First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):
- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)
Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).
We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:
- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.
- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.
- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.
- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.
- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.
There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.
We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.
2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.
Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim
48 -
Not one feature.
All analytics systems in general.
Whether it's implementing some tracking script, or building a custom backend for it.
So called "growth hackers" will hate me for this, but I find the results from analytics tools absolutely useless.
I don't subscribe to this whole "data driven" way of doing things, because when you dig down, the data is almost always wrong.
We removed a table view in favor of a tile overview because the majority seemed to use it. Small detail: The tiles were default (bias!), and the table didn't render well on mobile, but when speaking to users they told us they actually liked the table better — we just had to fix it.
Nokia almost went under because of this. Their analytics tools showed them that people loved solid dependable feature phones and hated the slow as fuck smartphones with bad touchscreens — the reality was that people hated details about smartphones, but loved the concept.
Analytics are biased.
They tell dangerous lies.
Did you really have zero Android/Firefox users, or do those users use blocking extensions?
Did people really like page B, or was A's design better except for the incessant crashing?
If a feature increased signups, did you also look at churn? Did you just create a bait marketing campaign with a sudden peak which scares away loyal customers?
The opinions and feelings of users are not objective and easily classifiable, they're fuzzy and detailed with lots of asterisks.
Invite 10 random people to use your product in exchange for a gift coupon, and film them interacting & commenting on usability.
I promise you, those ten people will provide better data than your JS snippet can drag out of a million users.
This talk is pretty great, go watch it:
https://go.ted.com/CyNo6 -
GUI user: "How can you work from such a basic text interface like that terminal?"
Me: "How can you work with all those stupid buttons that more often than not can't do jack shit?"
Being a Powerline user, I do think that design matters a lot. But so does usability (I don't want my programs to take half a minute to load their bloated UI's) and the ability to use every feature that this or that piece of software has in its command line arguments but not necessarily as a GUI option.9 -
One step through the door my wife whips around, a look so disgusted she barely seems human. "What's that smell?" she cries. "It's you! You smell like...like bad code!"
Indeed, I am covered with the scent of the forbidden love child of a man who read half a chapter on if-then statements and then pushed out into the world, earthworm-like, a mangled misshapened gelatinous mass that my employer gave the title of line-of-business application purely out of pity.
For more days than I'd like to count I have been porting a ColdFusion 5 application to .NET. Initially written in 2000 and last touched in 2006, it has a data architecture comparable to Dresden after the second world war. It features a table solely comprised of seven columns of IDs so that joins can be made between other tables lacking a common key. Columns that should be contained within a single table spread out among multiple tables. Single columns containing data that should be multiple columns (with handy flags to separate the subsets). A view with 14 joins that playfully displays unintended results. And so much more spread out over almost 200 stored procedures, views, triggers, and tables on the SQL server, and dozens of additional ADO-like SQL statements within the ColdFusion itself. Fortunately, the application overcomes these issues by having absolutely no data validation while allowing nulls pretty much everywhere.
When I am done this will be a very nice ASP.NET MVC app with at least 150 less stored procs, views, and tables. Auto-generated duplicate entries will be a thing of the past. Pop-up windows that inexplicably refresh the underlying screen to display a different part of the program than the one the user wants will be eliminated. And a UI based on the colors of a Rubik's Cube with usability that Mr. Rubik would find challenging will disappear with only the trauma of using it left behind.
Sadly, this is not my worse legacy code experience. Just the most recent. Just the most recent stench added to a lifetime of bathing in code rot.3 -
We live in a world where portability is more important than usability.
I've got to buy a fucking adapter just to get enough USB ports to use a mouse and keyboard with a monitor, as well as ports for other things like my laptop fan.
It's also becoming evident with the lack of headphone jacks to save that 0.000001" of phone size. It's fucking bullshit that adapters are required to charge phones and listen to music at the same time.11 -
PM ordered me to not use encryption for customer authentication links because we want to be able so send same link if the user loose it. "we have to prioritize usability over security". At least I can tell future hackers it's not my fault..
10 -
Client wanted to add "password usability" features such as:
Password1 === pASSWORD1
Him: Facebook and Google do it
Me: You're not Facebook or Google
Him: Well sure, not without this feature
Me: 🤔11 -
Hi everyone, long time no see.
Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.
Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.
She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.
The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.
She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).
"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"
Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.
There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.
So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.11 -
---WiFi Vision: X-Ray Vision using ambient WiFi signals now possible---
“X-Ray Vision” using WiFi signals isn’t new, though previous methods required knowledge of specific WiFi transmitter placements and connection to the network in question. These limitations made WiFi vision an unlikely security breach, until now.
Cybersecurity researchers at the University of California and University of Chicago have succeeded in detecting the presence and movement of human targets using only ambient WiFi signals and a smartphone.
The researchers designed and implemented a 2-step attack: the 1st step uses statistical data mining from standard off-the-shelf smartphone WiFi detection to “sniff” out WiFi transmitter placements. The 2nd step involves placement of a WiFi sniffer to continuously monitor WiFi transmissions.
Three proposed defenses to the WiFi vision attack are Geofencing, WiFi rate limiting, and signal obfuscation.
Geofencing, or reducing the spatial range of WiFi devices, is a great defense against the attack. For its advantages, however, geofencing is impractical and unlikely to be adopted by most, as the simplest geofencing tactic would also heavily degrade WiFi connectivity.
WiFi rate limiting is effective against the 2nd step attack, but not against the 1st step attack. This is a simple defense to implement, but because of the ubiquity of IoT devices, it is unlikely to be widely adopted as it would reduce the usability of such devices.
Signal obfuscation adds noise to WiFi signals, effectively neutralizing the attack. This is the most user-friendly of all proposed defenses, with minimal impact to user WiFi devices. The biggest drawback to this tactic is the increased bandwidth of WiFi consumption, though compared to the downsides of the other mentioned defenses, signal obfuscation remains the most likely to be widely adopted and optimized for this kind of attack.
For more info, please see journal article linked below.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/...9 -
So I just got this email from a tech company, I registered to send my CV some years ago , about a dev Job openning.
The descripition included:
Java and Angular ( first red flag )
So I go to their site to check it out ...
No https, ping the domain returns an ip from another continent with 500+ ms latency.
Major flaws on the site usability...
Super dumb password recovery method...
I'm fucking outta here dude. I might send them a proposition to fix their servers and at least put it behind letsencrypt though...
And these morons have big clients, like my bank... wtf...4 -
I see too many back-end rants against front-ends.
Should we talk about table layouts, malformed html, programatically generated spaghetti wrong markup, css absurd class naming, infinite div wrapping (div-itis), awful usability, poor legibility, terrible typography, wrong color palettes and user-unfriedly design? To name a few horrors i've seen so far.
Some people won't admit that their contempt against HTML and CSS being 'not real code' actually hides their inability or unwillingness to learn it. Or they need the feeling of superiority.11 -
YouTube. Hate and love for it just like I would for an abusive partner.
Ads!
Wanna build a website with Wix? Fuck no!
Wanna manage WordPress over SSH? Fuck no!
.. well I kind of do but a turd remains a turd regardless of how it's maintained. WordPress can go die from a torture as long as the time everyone has wasted on it loading already. So no, I don't give a flying fuck about WordPress' new interface.
Wanna buy a new Samsung phone despite just having bought a OnePlus already? YOUTUBE, HOW ABOUT YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF AND YOUR SHITTY ALGO?!!
Quality videos though, so many engineering videos and all for free. How amazing is that? I quite like them.
But if I try to like a video and particularly the fucking comments on it, don't you fucking dare putting your fat fingers 1 pixel next to the like button, because then obviously you want to reply to the comment and have a pop-up with the whole comment and all its replies, and an automatically popped up text input field, just so you have to tap back 2 times just to try liking the bloody comment again. Rinse and repeat that 2 times at best, 5 times at worst. What's not to like, right?!
God fucking dammit. At least now I know why those random mentions without any meaningful other text are there in most comment sections. Usability over 9000!!!11 -
Wow, I'm going to have a hard time remembering this one.
IT have changed after so many years the password criteria for our machines, to the point it's a bit ridiculous.
Like I'm all for securing your accounts and using random passwords but, this is rough.
Minimum of 14 chars
Not the past 6 passwords
Must contain several %}*]=[^{
Must contains numbers
Must contain upper case letters
Must contain Lower case letters
Must not end in a number
Must sacrifice a virgin on every login
Must be changed every 30 days22 -
I dont see why recruiters find it relevant to ask how many lines of code a piece of software has. Like seriously why!?!?!?!
It by no means measures the quality of the code or the usability or complexity of the software.6 -
Windows 10 had one groundbreaking UI innovation, but no one adopted it and even Windows 11 discareded this revolutionary idea:
BUTTONS NEXT TO EACH OTHER AND AT THE EDGE OF A BOX DON"T NEED AN ADDITIONAL MARGIN
Windows 10 was the first and last OS where I never accidentally clicked right next to the X on a window, in a passive area that had no other purpose so it might as well have belonged to that motherfucking button.
I passionately hate this trend, adopted nowadays by every OS, that everything needs to be rounded, separated from the things around it, and "allowed to breathe". They don't breathe. They're not alive. They're fucking UI elements and the space between them is unused, lost space.
The only interaction a button has with its surroundings is that it pushes other content away to make room for itself and responds to the cursor. It doesn't wiggle, it doesn't grow and shrink, and it ESPECIALLY doesn't fucking breathe. Please, just let me click the motherfucking button.
Relatedly, do you know of a good, preferably bluish dark GTK theme that provides window decorations that stretch the full height of the titlebar and are laid out next to each other at the very end of the bar without gaps?8 -
When the design agency changes the whole fucking UI 1 week before release because they think the usability is not good enough.
FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING PLACENTA EATING LOBOTOMIZED ADOBE FRANKENSTEINS2 -
the internet was so good before corporate interests took everything over and made it garbage
before you found real people, instead of shills
real hobbies, instead of someone wanting to sell you knockoff shit by pretending to have information on your hobby
real information, instead of stupid politics which pretend information doesn't exist and keep changing Wikipedia pages or brigading forums with spam or reporting websites or servers as violating rules to remove innocent people and ruin their shit
before you could find tools and use them
and there were no ads
even when there were ads they were just banner ads where you got free iPods and maybe a virus
but they didn't subscribe you to their service monthly and then play psychological tricks on you so you couldn't cancel
even when the popups came we had popup blockers, and the web browsers were on our side and made the feature widespread and viewed the popups as malicious, and now the world's biggest ad company serves the most popular "open source" browser and is in a war against usability because they have to display their brain malware ads to you or else
and you'd get excited to get an email, instead of annoyed it's more fucking corporate spam you don't want from a random website that required you to give your email address so you could've bought a trinket for your friend Bob's birthday that one time and now their subscriber list keeps "forgetting" you unsubscribed
phones have a billion sensors but the app stores are so infested with bullshit none of it matters
it's all rot
everything is starving and making your life worse
we used to do so much with so little
and now we have so much and leave it all on the table to throw poop at each other
don't forget that brigade science tells you nostalgia is you remembering something to be better than it was. be gaslit. webpages disappear now, too. they get changed. archive.org has the records, and got DDoSed the other day. I knew this day would happen. everyone who lies would love for there to be no archives, no records. to burn the modern books5 -
Add a random string (like "AnyBrowser/1.2.3") to your user agent string, and get warnings about unsupported browsers, reduced functionality, and Google drive completely refusing to start at all.
It's the very same browser, just another user agent string. Ever heard of feature detection? Ever heard of usability, accessibility, progressive enhancement? How can developers be so lost in 2022?
I just tried to reproduce the reason why Vivaldi stopped adding their brand to user agent strings but sails under false flag pretending to be Google chrome. So it doesn't show up in browser statistics either and Google people can keep thinking everyone is using their shitware.3 -
Linux is hard to learn and master. That's fine with me. Windows is intuitive, but not user-friendly. Linux has a steep learning curve, but then is far more user-friendly than any other operating system. To me, that steep learning curve was far more than worth it, as I now have a desktop that does whatever I want, and behaves exactly as I want.
People come to Linux hoping that it will be easy to pick up, and then get angry when it isn't. Then they claim that the community is toxic, because Linux users are happy with something they think is broken.
Linux is hard to learn, and that's fine. That's valuable, to me. That's part of the appeal to me(and millions of others). Linux is unforgiving when you lack the knowledge gained in that steep learning curve. That's fine with me too. As its userbase grows, so too does the number of knowledgeable people who work to make it better and invent more amazing things for it.
If Linux was easy to learn, it wouldn't be as good as it is, and to me, that's reason enough to love it.41 -
(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!
I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.
Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing
The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.
Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..
I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)
Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.1 -
watching the online course for CEH... dude used the Death Star as a tangible example of how exploits work.
IDK if I should love it for the nerdiness, or be slightly sad that someone needs that type of example of what a vulnerability vs an exploit is, when they're going for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification...
Might be better in an introduction to Network Security class?
Also, while discussing the security, usability, and functionality triangle, he reference the Staples "Easy Button" - does one thing, not very secure, and not very functional (in that it has more than one function)...1 -
- Fuck mobile apps that open links in embedded browser windows
- Fuck Wordpress page builders that use the single content field as an embedded IDrag&DropE.
- Fuck unindented HTML markup
- Fuck plugins with "pro" versions that provide more than 50% of the advertised features.
- Fuck building an app with a SPA framework and then adding SSR cuz ur SEO is fucked.
- Fuck Javascript transitions that are meant to make a site look fancy but slow it the fuck down.
Fuck it.
Vent your frustrations9 -
Dual Boot Linux & Windows.
I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.
1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.
2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.
I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.
So, who already did this? Raise your hands!26 -
Dear customer, disregarding the bullshit your agency has dumped into Figma, I hereby deliver a clean, minimalist, and usable website without carousel sliders, chatbots, call-to-action teasers for newsletter signup, and muted auto-play videos consuming your end users' bandwidth.
One day you will understand and be grateful, too!3 -
Is it just the novice in me that finds the Haskell community's misguided obsession over character count really annoying? Learn You a Haskell For Greater Good states
> Shorter code means less bugs
A lot of people and resources seem to share this opinion, but it's obviously false. Simpler code means less bugs, but look at this function which just means "apply this applicative to each element of a list"
> sequence :: (Applicative f) => [f a] -> f [a]
> sequence = foldr (liftA2 (:)) (pure [])
This isn't "less buggy", it's fucking madness. The same in JS, the king of unreadable languages, would be:
function sequence(seq, val, apply = (f, x) => f(x)) {
seq.map(f => apply(f, val))
}
Seriously, how can you design a strictly typed language that gets beaten by JS in readability?16 -
I'm getting annoyed with the increasing number of platforms that implement the "Oops, something went wrong" vague error message.9
-
I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.
Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.
But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle
There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.
So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:
Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.
Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.
The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!
The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.
Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.
4 -
I'm a perfectionist and like things done the right way, but had to learn to let go and remind myself it's the clients site and their choice. No amount of logic and reasoning is going to stop a hellbent client from wanting the dumb things they want, even when it's bad for design, performance, usability and/or SEO.1
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Gender Bending For Fun and Profit.
I love how in the 'make your avatar' area, if you select female, and then click facial hair, theres nothing to select from.
Like a massive fuck you to every gender bending "down with meritocracy" purple haired dicksniffer in sanfran.
Also I'm sorely disappoint for desk items, theres no
1. giant dildos
2. anime figures/weeb shit
3. mini monoliths (I asked the site devs about this, they replied "we can't do that dave.")
4. a shirtless option for my female avatar
5. edgy scrolling numbers and code, like in the matrix
6. hoodies. They're the modern leather jacket.
7. Big nasty gnarly biker beard which I'm currently in the process of growing. How am I supposed to intimidate other anonymous cowards and mock them over the size of their beard compared to my own avatar's e-beard size? It's quiet girthy and lengthy, I assure you!
This is completely unrelated, but I thought devducks were like quick one-off debug sessions that could be bought from other devrant users.
I was disappointed when I discovered it was just merch.
On the otherhand I'm glad as fuck it's not. Site would be flooded by broken-english speaking goat humping dickheads.
How am I supposed to show off my ability to code with completely unrelated avatar change ups when no one will allow me to emasculate my avatar?16 -
The project I have been working on on/ off since Christmas is finally interesting enough to show off!
In short, it's a faux GUI system in the console, with a lot of advanced features that you would see in web browsers and other professional GUI systems.
Most of the core items are now implemented, and it's only time to make it functional in a usability sense.
Here's the tech demo; readme.md is a HUGE essay about everything that's going on. Plus some pretty damn good instructions on how to get it running:
https://github.com/AlgoRythm-Dylan/...
Happy to hear your thoughts!16 -
!rant
I'm a developer turning into product designer guys. But I'll never forget my roots, my development origin. What I'm learning is, most of the UX designer are ignorant about development and developers in general and many developers are ignorant about usability. My future aim would be to build a well communication bridge between these two entities and get designer to empathize with developers and vice versa.13 -
Friend: why do you hate react so much ?
Me: Because web development should be all about browser compatibility ( yeah even for that shitty ie8 ) and usability not spa and shitty made animation that breaks when you switch from landscape to portrait .
Friend: then why do you use it ?
Me: money. -
Idk if I'm happier about the usability of the app or the image notifications with the not-yet-crashed background activity or the super cute anime wallpapers but the thing works and looks pretty xD what else could you want from a minor side project :')
4 -
Noticed a new version of our primary customer management application was deployed to my machine. Its been a while since I've seen it, so I decide to see all the 'improvements' over the 'old' one (~18 year old app written in Delphi).
Wow, it's slow, several seconds to open. Tried to open my account..really, really slow.
Notice a lonely edit box with no label, and button right next to it with no caption, so I click it and get the attached error.
Tried to place an order, I must have done something 'out of sequence' because I clicked another button and the whole app crashed.
In less than 5 minutes I found a dozen or so UX failures. I suck pretty bad at UI, but good lord...what the frack happened to basic usability.
1 -
(popup) ERROR OCCURRED!
But we're not going to tell you what it is...
Or at hint what the root cause is...
Let alone tell you how to fix it...
2 -
Do you guys think that in terms of a design, we're in a refresh loop?
Like, I don't think the goal of a design is to be user friendly and optimal for all human eyes. There's a million ways sideways to achieve that.
I think the real thing most designers go for is to just make something look "new". And every few years that needs to be redone. Forever. In an infinite loop.
Fuck actual usability, thought-out layouts, contrast rules, what-the-fuck ever. 99% of the goal is to make it look "modern"10 -
[See image]
This guy is wrong in so many ways.
"Windows/macOS is the best choice for the average user. Prove me wrong."
There are actually many Gnu/Linux based operating systems that's really easy to install and use. For example Debian/any Debian based OS.
There are avarage users that use a Gnu/Linux based operating system because guess what. They think its better and it is.
Lets do a little comparision shall we.
- - - - - Windows 10 - - Debian
Cost $139 Free
Spyware Yes. No
Freedom Limited. A lot
"[Windows] It's easy to set up, easy to use and has all the software you could possibly want. And it gets the job done. What more do you need? I don't see any reason for the average joe to use it. [Linux]"
Well as I said earlier, there are Gnu/Linux based operating systems thats easy to set up too.
And by "[Windows] has all the software you could possibly want." I guess you mean that you can download all software you could possibly want because having every single piece of software (even the ones you dont need or use) on your computer is extremely space inefficient.
"Linux is far from being mainstream, I doubt it's ever gonna happen, in fact"
Yes, Linux isn't mainstream but by the increasing number of people getting to know about Linux it eventually will be mainstream.
"[Linux is] Unusable for non-developers, non-geeks.
Depends heavily on what Gnu/Linux based operating system youre on. If youre on Ubuntu, no. If youre on Arch, yes. Just dont blame Linux for it.
"Lots of usability problems, lots of elitism, lots of deniers ("works for me", "you just don't use it right", "Just git-pull the -latest branch, recompile, mess with 12 conf files and it should work")"
That depends totally on what you're trying to. As the many in the Linux community is open source contributors, the support around open source software is huge and if you have a problem then you can get a genuine answer from someone.
"Linux is a hobby OS because you literally need to make it your 'hobby' to just to figure out how the damn thing works."
First of all, Linux isnt a OS, its a kernel. Second, no you dont. You dont have to know how it works. If you do, yes it can take a while but you dont have to.
"Linux sucks and will never break into the computer market because Linux still struggles with very basic tasks."
Ever heard of System76? What basic tasks does Linux struggle with? I call bullshit.
"It should be possible to configure pretty much everything via GUI (in the end Windows and macOS allow this) which is still not a case for some situations and operations."
Most things is possible to configure via a GUI and if it isnt, use the terminal. Its not so hard
https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/...
21 -
Dear fellow developers: Let's talk about the Internet. If you're reading this post, you've probably heard of it and are comfortable using it on a regular basis. You may even develop software that works over the internet, and that's fine and great! But you have to draw the line somewhere, and that line has been pushed farther and farther back as time goes on.
Let's talk about video games. The first game that really got me into FPSes was Team Fortress 2. Back in the day, it had a great community of casual and competitive groups alike, and there were hats! Underneath the hood was a massive number of servers. Some were officially hosted, some were run by independent communities. It had a built-in browser and central index where you could find every publically-available server and connect to it. You could even manually input connection details if that failed. In my opinion, this was a near-perfect combination of optimal user-experience and maximum freedom to run whatever the hell you wanted to. Even today, if Valve decided to stop hosting official servers, the smaller communities could still stay afloat. Fifteen years in the future, after all demand has died off, someone can still recover the server software and play a game with their kids.
Now, contrast that to a game like Overwatch. Also a very pivotal game in the FPS world, and much more modern, but what's the underlying difference in implementation? NO SUPPORT FOR SELF-HOSTED SERVERS. What does that mean when Blizzard decides to stop hosting its central servers? IT DIES. There will be no more multiplayer experience, not now, not ever. You will never be able to fully share this part of your history with future generations.
Another great example is the evolution of voice chat software. While I will agree that Discord revolutionized the market, it took away our freedom to run our own server on our own hardware. I used to run a Mumble server, now it has fallen out of use and I miss it so much.
Over time, client software has become more and more dependent on centrally-hosted services. Not many people will think about how this will impact the future usability of the product, and this will kill our code when it becomes legacy and the company decides to stop supporting it. We will have nothing to give to future generations; nobody will be able to run it in an emulator and fully re-experience it like we can do with older games and software.
This is one of the worst regressions of our time. Think about services like IRC, SMTP, SSH, even HTTP, how you're so easily able to connect to any server running those protocols and how the Internet would change if those were replaced with proprietary software that depended on a central service.
(Relevant talk (16:42): https://youtu.be/_e6BKJPnb5o?t=1002)6 -
To all web devs adding cookie-nags on your companys pages: stop that! Now! No where does that cookie law require you to ruin your site with nagging popups. Where's the focus on usability?
And the rule about informed consent? Which normal user (like my mother) knows what that means anyway? I call bs! Politicians, don't get me started.
Every user on the internet goes JMIGA: Just Make It Go Away, click whatever making that crap disappear.
What user will go "holy shit, they're using cookies!! I'm outta here!" No one in the history of the internet, that's who. Argh.9 -
I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.
First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.
That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.
This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.
We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.
TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.9 -
Jared wtf were you thinking! He is a wild man 😊 Final 5 minutes thru rolling credits was very cool.
Lot of communication and usability lessons to be learned during the episode.
Season finale next week. Can't wait!2 -
Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.
I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.
What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.
My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.
Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...
I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.
We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.
Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit. -
In cour company we need an online dashboard that monitors logfiles from various interface processes.
My collage and me, the newest company members (for almost 2 years) get the task to build this and get it presented as some intern project where we can try out some more recent technologies/frameworks.
Now in the first meeting our senior team leader told us we shoeldn't use the noew hot buzzword js frameworks.
Reason? They are not proven and wil probably lose popularity next year and we don't want to migrate everything every half year. Plus he had negeative experiences with Angular in some project he had to work on, probably just because his limited JS skils.
So he wants us to use jQuery to build a modern web application.
I get it you don't want to migrate to TheNewHotThing(tm) every year. Guess what? You fucking don't have to. If I build sonting in Vue.js now, it won't stop working when a new framework comes along.
Look at our own fucking ASP.NET Web Forms prooject, that stil works. Just don't deny the usability of modern frameworks.
5 -
Don't understand what the hype about Elementary OS was. Used for ca. half a year, do not see any benefit.
If this is supposed to provide "usability" on a Linux kernel, then I am sorry, but in this regard it is a tremendous failure.
All tasks take long, there are all sorts of bugs, today I needed a multi-monitor setup for a presentation "real quick", dear lord was that a shitshow.
Nah, this thing is not for me.14 -
Watching an android wear on iOS video and they are complaining that android wear is limited on iOS and they love the look and usability of android wear compared to watch OS...
Of course it's bloody limited, you can't even use Apple devices with android so be happy you even get basic support :-P
(Yes I am a Google fan boy so android for lyf)3 -
when your project manager makes you redo the same tickets over and over because she keeps messing up her usability tests
-
Ok, so we have the Spotify Agile Model now (tribes, squads, chapters, etc). I have seen it implemented in a few large companies, and they seem to be doing ok.
It's just... doesn't anyone worry about the product that came out of this great way of working?
Spotify is great as a service, but it has to have one of the worst usability/success ratios of any modern mobile / web app. You can almost feel the various squads doing their own thing, not thinking about the whole experience.
Doesn't the product count when considering using someone's way of working? Is the Spotify Agile Model the project management equivalent of Twitter's Bootstrap?5 -
I just pulled an all-nighter to write an usability testing protocol in Microsoft Word for a medical mobile app.
- statement of consent and privacy declaration; easy: 1 hour
- structuring the protocol and writing the different use cases; easy: 1-2 hours
- layouting the document so the tables don't look like utter shit and adding dotted lines into the columns so the user can write in it without fucking up the whole document when resizing a simple column width; a fucking nightmare: 5 hours
Why is the creation of a nice layout so inefficient to the point where I'd rather design a form in CSS and send it to my printer, get your shit together!3 -
I just created an Oracle account just to comment on a mysql bug report in order to inform people to use mariadb as a fix ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
^w should delete back a word, not to the beginning of the line! This is broken because instead of readline, Oracle's mysql-client uses editline.
Yet why the fuck do you compile mysql-client with editLine wrapper that breaks the common keybindings?
Licenses is why. Oracle wants to avoid using GNU GPL, and readline uses just that, so they use editline since it has BSD. And they just don't seem to give a damn if it breaks usability.1 -
Snapchat is by far the worst app ever developed. I like the concept but the actual development of the app is fucking garbage. It hurts my head that they haven't given a fuck about usability, optimisation or anything for that matter considering its one of the top social media platforms. It disgusts me, though Instagram has completely ripped off Snapchat in so many ways; they've done a hell of a better job at it and if people weren't so tired to SC I'm sure it would be dead by now.
Slow UI, slow gestures, probably the highest amount of bugs and crashes, shit camera because it thinks it can do a better job than the native API at rendering, painfully slow upload, stupid "featured" stories that you cannot get rid off and slow the fuck out of the app, battery drain even worse than FB, oh and not to forget that once you accidentally enable your location it's impossible to switch it off, the best you can do is hide it from everyone. I can probably go on and on with the endless issues this shit has.5 -
Today I was enjoying a coffee and browsing the Internet on my phone for information on making mulled wine (planning on brewing some and wasn't sure whether to add ingredients during the fermentation stage or after) and came across this incredible example of what is wrong with websites these days.
I actually didn't spot the "close" for the subscription popup before leaving the page and later reviewing the screenshot.
1 -
Show a comment field below a discussion, with rich text and link functionality, to inspire people to craft a detailed answer.
Maybe they will forget to type Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before hitting send.
So when they do, show a message that "you must be logged in to comment". Use a JS SPA to make sure that there is no way for users to restore their drafted comment. Don't show it after they logged in. When they use their browser's back button, they surely want to exit the application, so make sure to discard any transient data in that case.
Seen on WordPress.org using their infamous Gutenberg block editor.7 -
"Non-technical" users must have some magic skill that goes beyond my understanding. How can anyone work with no-code page builders? I tried Wix, Webflow, Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, and Semplice. Each one sucks in their way, but they have one thing in common: their UI behaves even more erratically than Microsoft Word.
Is there a "non-technical personal computer user" class where people learn that logic? How did they manage to hide their secret understanding from developers? Or what did I miss?8 -
I think the fact that even Apple can't unlock your phone if you forget your passcode proves that they use very naive encryption method.
Suppose my data is "Hey This is Some Data" and Passcode is 1234, I could just Jumble this data using that passcode and It will be difficult to decrypt without Passcode. And If data is huge, it will be fairly impossible to do so. But that doesn't make it a good encryption method.
Such encryption, though safe is not practical, Imagine if there was no "Forget Password" Option on any account, I usually forgot my password very often when I was a child.
Apple has been doing such things for years, Using Bad things as a selling point. Apple users are dumb anyways because they don't want to control their phone.
Reset Password is a weak point which might be exploited but in such cases, usability is more important than security. Any service which doesn't allow resetting Password is a shitty service and I would never use such a service, They are too naive.696 -
promises in JavaScript have really spoiled me
it's the most optimal way to do async without leaving much on the table
there's a promises library in rust and the guy who wrote it says it sucks because it spawns new thread every time you execute a bunch of promises
and I finally, through my fogged brain, managed to get the bright idea to write what I want to make in rust in JavaScript and holy hell it's sexy to work with promises. there's no performance left on the table. you do things as fast as possible
but if I take this JavaScript usability code I made and make it possible syntax-wise in rust I don't see how I would be able to do it without starting new operating system threads every time I execute any promises (or set)
I can take the overhead hit but this sounds retarded
and this isn't even touching upon how in rust everything needs to have a predetermined data type. so you can do lambdas and capture variables and send in variables into a thread that way, but to return the return object must be a consistent type (synchronizing the order data was sent in to the data sent out aside, haven't written that yet should be fine though)
which is fine if you are making a threadpool and it'll all be returning one data type
but this means you can't reuse a threadpool you made elsewhere in the program
the only thing that could fix async is to literally be compiler-enabled. it would have to work like generics and automatically make an enum of every type that can return, and only then could you re-use the threadpool23 -
Super brilliant idea for Windows: when logging on with a password that is only slightly mistyped, or with the consecutively appended number from the previous month, it should still be accepted. So much more usability - Microsoft just cannot reject that!8
-
When I accidentally move a folder inside another in Windows File Explorer when all I wanted was to open the folder.2
-
An actual text from my CS Human-Machine Interfaces book:
"How do users react when a vending machine "eats" their money and doesn't give the product? Most likely, they will kick the machine in hopes of it returning him the money. Therefore, if we build a machine which has a "Cancel" button which returns the money in the lower part of the machine (the "kick zone") we would be improving the usability of the system a lot'
1st reaction: Wait, what the fuck?
2nd reaction: It ain't stupid if it works, I can't argue with that 🤔2 -
Windows, the operating system which is so much more user-friendly than Linux, or so they say, cannot be operated by my family members without constant support helping them to find files they downloaded and want to send in an email for example. So I have to stretch my mind between my family's non-tech end-user perspective and Microsoft's Windows 11 UI, both of which deviate from my developer's perspective, each in its own surprising way.5
-
Maybe I don't even want to understand what "programming" means. Although I keep visiting StackOverflow almost daily to find useful advice on topics that do matter to me, when I post a question myself, they mostly get deleted for being "offtopic", not real "programming" questions, prone to attract "opinionated answers" or too much concerned about usability in real life? 🤔8
-
One thing I hate about laptops is touchpads. Another thing I hate about laptops is the point stick and its buttons. Fortunately, these can both be disabled, but Dell's solution for this has some usability issues. What can't be disabled though is the third thing I hate about laptops: The keyboard. Sure, it is made small to give the laptop nifty and portable outer dimensions. Yet, there is like an inch border used for nothing on each side of the keyboard, and if you have to carry along an external keyboard how portable is that?10
-
Add wifi they said..
It'll be a simple addition that adds a ton more usability they said...
Now just tack on access point mode, everything is already there.. that'll be quick and easy they said..
..... no, no, it's not... It's a fucking pain in the ass dammit!! -
Everything jetbrains. It has so much increased in performance and usability over the last couple of years and is the perfect tool for me.
-
Client Agency: "Well why did it take you so long to style the clickdummy?"
Me: "well I did not anticipate that you had that set up by a student who does it know his css. I had to fix many usability problems first."
Client: "To me it looks just like before. What did you do exactly?"
Me: "Are you serious? That thing was not at all usable before."
Client: "The functions were all there in the first place!"
Me: "Yes, but I one does not know where to click, that is no use, is it?"
Client: "Ok then what ever...I somehow feel like like you have gotten less efficient these days. "
Me: -.-""""!!!!
Client: "so would you please include some effects and make it shiny? I just wanted you to make it shiny."
Me: -___- "ok then"
-----
Client: "Now it's awesome, thanks."2 -
Twitter comments are shit
How the fuck to use them? Why don't they just show one under another? If post has more than 2 replies it can be clicked to open its direct replies, some of them are shown in main thread, some of them are shown under opened thread. Some replies from main thread are shown under child thread. And to make it even worse any comment of sub thread can be expanded as well showing some random replies that could be expanded recursievly so you may end in main thread again. It is just impossible to read all replies in chonological order. Show me the moron who made this, I wanna kill him....1 -
Started porting one application written in php to:
Golang(and some libraries to make certain sht simpler like GORM and Gorilla amongst a couple of others, most shit is STD shit already built in)
Java Spring(I know it well, but wanted to try this particular app in it, lots of boilerplate although the coded is solid AF)
.NET Core API, which I separated in a series of modules for the domain interface, the persistence logic, the actual api etc, I really dig it. It has a basic React frontend in Typescript whereas the other 2 versions are using the standard Go html/template package and the Twig interface for Spring.
My favorite thus far is Golang. I find it extremely easy to extend, the language reads good enough for a retard like myself to make sense of it fairly easy, really easy to test and experiment with it, any idea I get for something to add(say users and stuff) took me less than 30 mins to figure out while reading the actual documentation, as in the base documentation or just the source code.
I know the language is retard proof, and I am highly enjoying this. Not to say that the other two are bad, not at all, been using C# and Java for years now, but I highly appreciate being able to concentrate on functionality rather than all the fucking architectural boilerplate needed to run basic shit in the other two frameworks. Thus far Golang has been a breath of fresh air the likes Clojure gives me, while not even being a profound or mind blowing language in terms of features(since other than the interface{} and goroutines i can't think of shit) and have not reached a scenario in which I am stuck or dying to have generics one bit for the overall business logic.
The app is growing like crazy in terms of code since the original php application was huge to begin with, but dear me this shit is as simple as it can get without being too technical. Might move it to production once all usability tests pass and force the rest of the staff to learn it. I have one lead dev that damn near refuses to touch anything other than php, and a very eager to try shit out content administrator that comes from a Java and C# background.
all I want to say is how much I love go haha4 -
I'm getting tired of coding. Not really the coding part, the dealing with people who tell me what to code and why part. Sort of considering making a move into a scrum master or PM role just so I can get fired when I say "No, we're not changing everything they've been working on in the middle of the sprint" or maybe "Yeah, no we're not going to put in a bunch of tickets to change the UI/UX without first talking to the designers, because that's what they do. Yes, I realize we aren't Facebook, but do you realize we "compete" with them because a huge number of people will compare our usability to theirs? (even if just subconsciously)"2
-
Dear Quora
I logged out of your site because somehow you had me logged in and I don't like being tracked.
In the future, don't be petty by reloading all my OTHER tabs the moment you detect im logged out, intentionally breaking/disabling the backbutton, and then demanding I log back in.
kthnxbai.
Sincerely
- unsubscribed from your useless god damn spam emails.
If I can't even fucking read your site after logging out, like I USED to be able to, and you go so far as to detect my log out on OTHER tabs, disable/break the backbutton on all the OTHER tabs, and reload the page, then your site is useless as dogshit to me.
If I were the CEO of the executive who made this dumbfuck marketing decision I would fire him.
And then spitefuck his wife to drive home the message of how god damned fired he is.3 -
"Ideal" online banking:
1. Force users to change passwords often.
2. Implement possibility to login if forgot password.
3. Make it impossible to chage password if forgot one.5 -
woow PHPStorm is such an incredibly buggy piece of shit .... how can anyone work with such a buggy IDE?
It randomly looses settings on restart. A lot of functionality is just so poorly tested. Anyone ever really tried to work with the integrated DB tool?
Or the CSV plugin? there are countless bugs in both usability and function-wise.
But I guess that's because it's just plugins ... you know .. you don't need to use them ...
Is the PHP code formatter a plugin too? Guess I don't have to use it at all, if it randomly scrambles whole lines if I format with a missing } or some other improper syntax. Right, overall it's my fault, right??
Fuck you PHPStorm, and you IntelliJ too. you're not better at all.12 -
Yeah, the newest Firefox-Android update killed compatibility for a fuckton of add-ons once again.
The usability is strong in this one.1 -
Ok, let's do the opposite (reference to a previous rant).
Should a frontend developer know about:
- Data structures and algorithms?
- User interface design patterns and usability?
- User experience heuristics?
- Accessibility?
- Design tools?
- How websites work on the browser after the frameworks have done their job?
- Data flow, and artifacts like user stories?13 -
happy rant 😄
just finished our group software project in uni (5 students, a way too complicated game) and just got the highest possible mark of all!!🤩🤩🤩
the project was focused on having a working, bug-free game, so yeah our game was UGLY AS FUCK😅 ... but 99% no bugs😎
best group in years😇
next chapter:
human-computer-interaction(is that the translation for Mensch-Computer-Interaktion?), we'll take our games and bitch about their usability and design😅
by the way i was responsible for the design/ux and did a kinda crap job because of too little time😐😅1 -
TL;DR: Have you ever been on a serious company where you have to DRAW a high fidelity mockup of the software in the design phase?
So I'm in my last year of college and I have a class called Interactive systems design, which is basically about usability and how to design the frontend of your app so it's intuitive, pretty and easy to use.
So we work in groups to design a project for the entire semester, following a long and tedious process of research and planning which includes writing absurdly long documents, doing interviews with potential users and more.
Now that we've done all of that, the teacher insists that we make paper mockups of our app before we do a digital one using Balsamiq or other programs. He wants the paper mockups to be "interactive", so we have to draw them and then record a video where someone "clicks" on the mockup with their fingers and another person moves the papers around to make it look like an actual app that's doing something.
The teacher still insists this is something almost every company does when designing a project, so it's very important that we learn to do this kind of stuff. He's kidding, right? Have you guys ever drawn a mockup of an app instead of using some mockup software?7 -
How to fuck up a simple feature in terms of usability and functionality and take two freaking years (!) for it?
Just use some low code dogshit like the crap that SAP provides.1 -
Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?
Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.
Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.
Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.
Worst developer experiences:
Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.
"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.2 -
"Back-end" ahahahaha
Translating:
Back-end developer (São Paulo / Brazil)
Vacant job: Back-end developer
Assignments: Work as a Back-end developer, PHP, and MySQL. Develop tools/applications for the web with a DB.
Technical skills: Technical knowledge in PHP, Framework Code Igniter, HTML5, JavaScript (jQuery, Bootstrap, Json, and Ajax), responsive layouts and WordPress.
Projecting and modeling DB Knowledge. Good knowledge of usability, Cross-browser (IE7+, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari).
Desirable: Knowledge on Graphic Design and Front-end projects
1 -
when you give the lead to devs you'll often get all utility and no usability, but give it to non devs and you'll get neither3
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Couple of years ago i was working on a custom webshop with a third party designer and a manager. The manager didnt do his job right in my eyes. Didn't have overview of the tasks and was way too busy/lazy/stressed whatever.
Eventually i could go figure things out with the designer myself because he wanted some crazy menu structure.
So crazy i knew for sure that the usability wouldn't come to good.
Eventually deadline was past due and the projectmanager got me fired.
While back the brand i made the shop for went bankrupt.
What comes around gets around eventually.2 -
Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?
A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."
Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".
me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".
How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?10 -
I just heard about "Julia Programming language" where they're kinda combining speed of C and usability of Python into one language. Just wanted to ask how big is it? Does anyone has anything to share on this topic?4
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tools people REALLY wanna use are written like garbage
and also very active, in terms of tickets and pull requests
but the code is overly complex for no reason and a mess, turns out
I looked at the codebase and I have no clue what's going on
then found the API it's calling and I'm sitting here going "Jesus fuck I could've just wrote my own"
it's actually really strange, I see this pattern often of tools tons of people rely on and want to use but they're coded horribly, tons of bugs, and the code is entirely incomprehensible. though all the low effort pull requests is a new one I guess, generally there's no activity or the maintainer is just gone (maybe it's AI?)
anyway then I looked at the API it's wrapping and I'm confused why this library has such shit usability, and furthermore why the hell the code was like that cuz I read that first for about an hour and just kept going in circles. bruh what
guess I'll find out tomorrow if I'm signing up for unanticipated complexity or these people really did mess this up2 -
Some long thoughts about state of desktop operating systems.
I always hated window management on desktop. There is basically no difference in usability between mobile and desktop in terms of application management. There is still finite amount of apps you can have in focus and you need to switch between them so they’re left from your screen.
What you end up is finite amount of screens you can connect into your computer or pounding switch context shortcut every other second.
We pushed computing so far and screen resolutions doubled from 1024x768 but the active desktop size is still the same.
For me adding additional display to laptop is not an option. What I love with remote work is that I can lay in my bed or on sofa or wherever I want to and write some code. My point is I don’t want to be stuck to my desk if I want to write / debug something.
Back to the desktop I think there is missing part of our state of desktop right now. The most we have are virtual desktops we can switch between but we can’t get parts of two desktops on same screen.
What I would love to test / develop is smooth infinite desktop with pinch and zoom - drag and drop navigation between my apps.
The problematic thing is determination of where user want’s to focus - is it fullscreen app or multiple apps on same screen and how to handle partially visible windows.
But I would love to test it. Maybe one day I switch to linux desktop just to try to implement the infinite desktop as an alternative to virtual desktops.
Maybe some rich frustrated kid would make it someday while I’m stuck at working my shit ass to pay for being able to have a decent life on this fucking planet…
I wish I can retire to focus on such things.2 -
Trying to delete a text field in a WYSIWYG Low-/No-Code Page Builder for WordPress...
"Notice: You cant' save an empty text field." - only Button: "Ok fine!"
Parody? Usability?
3 -
Facebook doesn't even let users select text without opening dev tools? Either it's broken or broken by design. I think it used to be possible 10 years ago, but maybe I'm just fooling myself about the good old days. What a shit show the internet has become. Sad!5
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Technology usability for human race test 1
Imagine you get out of prison after 30 years and you want to call somebody.
Now find person who will borrow you phone or find phone booth.
Well good luck !8 -
How the hell do you interrupt a download in Sublime FTP???!!! Any obvious hot key such as Ctrl+C doesn't work, and there's not a word about how to interrupt an operation in the docs of Sublime FTP.15
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What causes a mobile app UI to run slow or laggy? and Can a framework cause an app UI to run slow or Laggy?4
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This week started of so great...
Monday the client called if we can put the project live this week. Impossible since we’re already stressed out with a tight schedule .
“But what if we put more developers on the project?”
NO!
Now im busy with one of the latest pages and ofcourse the designer has a special opinion about the usability.
Asked second opinion by lead developer.
“Its all wrong and thats a learning point. So just do it like this and that”
Resulting in fucking responsive problems i already foresee.
I’m so screwed -
The usability of perfmon on windows sucks! There is just no way for me to increase the size of the lower section of the main window where all my counters are listed. This is fine if I'm monitoring only 4-5 counters, but, that is never the case. Hoping that microsoft does something about this.
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When you go to "Oh they do it cheap", don't expect results...
Changed my PC build around 2 years ago.
Went from Core i7 / Nvidia to Ryzen 9 / AMD
Welp, AMD is totaly unstable.
I've invested 5k $ so I'm gonna ride it, but NEVER, EVER EVER again I'm buying AMD CPU or GPU.
Shit is unstable as fuck. I have latency issues, CPU issues, Video issues almost every week.
With Intel/nVidia cvombo I had before, I had issues maybe once every 3-4 months.
So yeah, buy low cost AMD, you pay the price later in usability. Fuck them.21 -
Hi everyone! I'm in need of some help regarding the approach to my bachelor thesis.
The practical stuff is basically clickstream/task and usability analysis on an existing platform and creating mockup improvements for some processes. I was thinking about using a spider to generate a tree (or another datastructure) regarding all the different tasks available and then trying to optimise said tree, thus automatically optimising the processes within. I'm having however issues imagining how this optimisation might be generalised for more than this one platform.
Basically, I'm a bit lost and grasping for any pointers in any direction regarding these ideas.3 -
Does anyone know a good GUI-based file search program similar to "search everything" on windows? That program is fucking awesome! Web search has given me ANGRYSearch, which comes close but has some usability problems. Is there yet a better program I haven't discovered yet?3
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Need help/advise: 💻 Anyone's experience with Linux on MacBooks - I've had a lot of tried, including Arch, Ubuntu, Cent and probably more I can't remember.
🔴The issue is always the Desktop manager / UI / Window manager: either it's too 👹 ugly, or too heavy(read Ubuntu default).
Want to find the ultimate compromise with reasonable support for hardware, yet with high usability.
Things like multi-touch gestures are a bonus🔥(I know there's extra bins I can install for that)
I don't mind something more to configure, but would rather stick with apt-get and similar rather than having to manually build everything 😉
As you probably understood by now - I need something close to MacOS yet Linux based 😎8 -
the time capture software of my enployer lokks like a 10y old got the task to programm a website without thinking about comfort or usability -_-
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how can there be any usability issue in google search console that lighthouse did not warn about before?3
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To the UI/UXs... Which of these approaches is more Mobile User Friendly?
- A single screen with all 12 form fields visible to the user, where only four of these fields are optional and inputs are validated on submission.
----- OR -----
- A single screen with fields split into 12 sub screens, a form progress bar at the top, a next and previous button with "skip" button for optional fields, with inputs validated progressively.
You can imagine the contents of the form like the ones on surveys. I have already implemented the second option but in doubts of its friendliness, I also had previously implemented something similar to the first but with criticism from colleges stating it's too much fields in one screen.
I would love to see from your view and learn from your experience... What do you think?8 -
You know
When I first saw etherum talking about am distributed state machine i thought wow. Not very practical but NEAT. I envisioned being able to make a byte code that could be stored in transactions and run by individual clients in an async function and each step of the resulting execution and the values of managed ram would be stored at intervals so other clients could take over and execute a few more statements and compare what should always be expected results that are identical
A grand incredibly inefficient system however really neato from the theoretical computer nerd standpoint !
Boy was I disappointed lol all it is a basic contracts language but yet they state it could be like a word computer ! How ? I thought maybe if you had enough nodes participating maybe you could store registers and the like in transaction values ? Wouldn’t that be the way ?
Seems like as a word computer they’re stuck somewhere between very simplistic js and something prior to amptron in usability yet they advertised as a world computer
Am i missing something ? I mean you could create something that would translate higher level code into smal numeric statements and then send it additions values but what would it be useful for and how would you actually. Store anything ? -
QA (Quality Assurance) software testing https://aimprosoft.com/services/... is a process of verifying and validating software products to ensure that they meet certain standards of quality. This process involves testing software applications for defects, bugs, and errors to ensure that they function as intended and meet the needs of end-users.
There are different types of QA software testing, including:
Functional Testing: This type of testing involves checking the functionality of the software to ensure that it performs as intended.
Performance Testing: This type of testing involves checking the performance of the software under various conditions to ensure that it meets performance requirements.
Security Testing: This type of testing involves checking the security of the software to ensure that it is free from vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.
Usability Testing: This type of testing involves checking the user interface and user experience of the software to ensure that it is easy to use and meets the needs of end-users.
Compatibility Testing: This type of testing involves checking the compatibility of the software with different devices, operating systems, and browsers to ensure that it works as intended on different platforms.
Overall, QA software testing is an essential part of the software development process, as it helps to ensure that the software is of high quality and meets the needs of end-users.2 -
self.content != rant
my proposed project was accounting system for small scale businesses. after painstakingly copy pasting codes xD from an existing project(which i have previously made during college days), although i have already anticipated this idea and wasnt really planning to create a five-star-in-usability kinda system for a small project, i realised that i cant make accounting a standalone system, it has to be a module. just a module. but i dont like that, it defeats the grand purpose of what i really want my system to be, it has to be a standalone system with fewer user inputs.
welp. gotta do what u gotta do now. create additional modules(inventory, invoicing, etc). also deadline's a couple of weeks from today. -
I equate design to usability. A bad design and UI = bad usability.
For our current project I gave some feedback on issues I had with the presentation, citing usability problems because the design is wrong and I wanted to spend more time designing it in a way that makes sense and flows better.
My boss and manager responded with "functionality over design". And if they want a better design they have to pay more. But that means giving them a product that is overly messy and complicated to use. It wouldn't be a big job to improve the design.
Any thoughts on this? -
My coding style is mostly influenced by good old personal preference, but also because of a certain internship where there was a lot of gain to be had by making everything as reusable and testable as possible.
I guess you could say my motto is usability, readability and flexibility:
I like tidy, reusable code with an emphasis on keeping code readable. I've always liked modular things I guess...
And I despise two things: curly brackets on the next line and spaces for indentation... But way worse is having no brackets at all (looking at you Python): it's clearer to have lower-level code inside some sort of "container" markers i.e. brackets (also gives more IDE functionality like color-coding hierarchically).
Indentation should always be tabs so anyone can have their own width of indentation set through their IDE, making it way more accessible to fellow colleagues!
And I also like having parameterized code over hard-coded functions: way more flexible.
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