johndoe4589

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

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as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated.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

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

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

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

> Beautiful interface

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

A "Beautiful theme" would be more appropriate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I agree... yuck.

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

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

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

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

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

That imho is the biggest weakness of their design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secondly, it didn't change squat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They want an "installation" fee.

And then how does the renew process work?