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I hate the over-proliferation of apps, but I also am sick and tired of “AI” being shoved down my throat.
Torn on this one, but I’m gonna stick with the devil I know (apps) since I’ve been largely able to mostly avoid it.
Interesting podcast on the topic
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-tech-bros-have-built-a-cult-around-ai
Those eps were excellent, as well as his piece in Rolling Stone.
Voice commands suck.
Even if you get perfect recognition and perfect parsing, speech is slow.
It’s so frustrating. Just try to give somebody else instructions while you can’t even point at the screen.
“Now go back. Nooo, not back to the opening screen. Back to the previous item we were looking at.”
My favorite is when a UI element is in a random position somewhere in the middle of the screen.
“And to get to the releases, there’s like… a heading in, like, the middle of the screen, but slightly to the right—ah, it’s below that, alri—no, don’t click on that… you need to go back—you have to click on the heading …there we are.”
Like, fuck me, just display X- and Y-axes, and I’ll tell them pixel coordinates.
speech is slow
I type at like 120+wpm and I am still 100% certain I could speak faster than I type.
That said, I still hate voice recognition.
But a picture is worth a thousand words. Even just text with effective formatting and layout is a lot more efficient than speech for a huge variety is tasks.
It’s also loud.
I don’t need or want everyone sat in the same room as me to know every little thing I do on my phone. Leaving aside things that are actually private, that’s just a level of inane garbage that we all don’t need to know about each other.
Sometimes I just want to glance at the football scores without announcing to everyone: “OK Google, what is the current score for the football match between Swindon Town and Harrogate?”.
I don’t want to be ear-rape by people yelling at their phone (or whatever device).
Inconsiderate asshats already use speakerphone in public.
Ffs. Gonna start playing loud fart sounds from my phone next time someone does this.
And the conversations are always trivial, juvenile bullshit.
Yeah, I only meant in private. It’s not even really suitable for that. Except telling Siri to turn my lights off from bed.
In public fuck that shit hard.
ive never understood why the ‘browser app’ isnt leveraged more. they are general purpose, multimedia, secure and mature. we spent decades making the mobile browsers very useful, and then build apps that just encapsulate a website. what an incredibly inefficiency
That’s horrendous but in their head, having you have an app on your home screen is a constant reminder of their brand. “free” advertisement
Apps can harvest more data. Aside from use cases where high performance is required, that’s about the only reason.
A shocking number of users would be hard pressed to figure out how to type in a url to a mobile web browser… or even know what that is, and they deserve a nice user interface too. App stores make it easier to find, too.
These same users are the ones downloading malware and getting their info stolen.
- Websites can have a nice user interface.
- Proper QR code usage makes sure users no longer have to type in URLs.
- Most of these user would use a search engine by default anyway.
- Browsers have bookmarks and website can have icons on home screens.
Counter point: Once in a while, people should be expected to reach up a little bit instead of society constantly dumbing itself down.
Unfortunately, the lowest common denominator is becoming more and more common.
“Please type an 11 digit printer number to continue. You have 5 seconds.”
That should keep 'm out.
A url shortcut would be indistinguishable from an app to these people, plus they’d have a more consistent user experience
Apps are super efficient just not for the consumer. Not only do they get our money through buying their overpriced product they can sell the “depersonalized” data they scraped while you were using the app
The answer is app stores. People need to find your app, and web apps usually don’t show up there. Also the web ecosystem is inherently slower to adopt new features, and it has historically been harder to build very custom experiences on it.
A lot of “real” apps are just browser apps wrapped in a system web view with the assets pre-installed. That goes for both desktop and mobile apps.
What we really need more of, IMHO, are PWAs. They combine the benefits of regular web apps with with those of “native” apps built on web technology.
yea I went ahead and just tailored my own app experience: https://s.marko.tech
Wow this is really cool. Mind if I ask how you built this? It runs so well on anything.
woooo thank you! it’s a react front end; pretty much all custom with some integrations like youtube player and maps. the back end is a python flask mongo api and I just scrape lots of sources for media. there’s some ai scripting for taxonomies, spam detection, sentiment analysis, etc.
Thank you. Well done dude.
How did you get started with webapps? Any good resources?
it’s just building a regular website pretty much with some extra meta tags
What is this? It seems like it would be really handy, but I’m not sure what it is. Is it like a launcher, or all in one?
yea I have it set as my start page / new tab in browser. it’s just an aggregator of a bunch of media sources and stuff I look at on the web. I have a logged in view too which tracks history / read articles / podcasts etc. hit / for search. i is available keyboard commands - but this is a personal project mostly but im thinking to make a public version
“AI” 🤮
I like the usefulness of AI but if they think they can replace android they’re mistaken.
The article had lots of nonsense, but it seemed like the main point is someone wanting to build a portable “Alexa”-like device. It seems like it could be essentially a phone and do a lot of things a phone could do, but less, and slower
Fleeing Jack the ripper, only to fall into the hands of T. Bundy.
