The technology literally can NEVER be there. It is completely impossible to positively identify a bulge in clothing as a handgun. But that doesn’t stop irresponsible salesmen from making the claim anyway.
Citizen is really enshittified, so any alternative would be better. I don’t object to them charging for their service, but they use all kinds of predatory editorial tactics and push notifications and marketing copy to instill primal fear that your neighborhood is imminently burning down and you will get shot if you don’t subscribe to a higher tier of service from them. Crime is way down in the US but you really don’t feel that way when you are a subscriber/user of Citizen.
Dart/Flutter was never a technical issue, but a political/monopolistic issue. The underlying monopoly has not changed, so I don't really see a path forward unless the chromium team magically changes leadership.
I guess my point is, if the big Chromium team couldn't pull something like this off, who else would? At this point major web updates tend to get born in one of the big tech companies funding web development, either directly or indirectly (Mozilla being funded by Google)
I personally don't think dart/flutter was good enough of a solution to be worth everyone's time. When this actually happens it will be more of a paradigm shift than that.
That's why (which I said in the other comment) what needs to happen is that innovating in this space needs to become a lot easier.
> We do not USE the thing we're building by and large.
Yes, thankyou, that's quite obvious judging by the quality of most software.
It really is amazing how bad most software made for non-developers is. Like, as software engineers, we understand how essential version control is. We made git and github for ourselves. But nobody has bothered building that functionality for people who edit word documents all day. Or people who edit video, or animators, or 3d modellers, or 100 different jobs. Word and google docs have track changes. But they don't let you bounce between branches or make pull requests. You usually can't time travel, or bisect, or git blame, or any of the other things we take for granted. My partner works in a CMS all day at work. Every change she makes is pushed directly to production. There's no review process. No staging. No testing. No change control or rollback. If anyone messes something up, they get blamed for "taking down the app". As a software engineer, I look on in horror.
I believe the more cognitive distance there is between 20-something silicon valley tech bros and your particular use case, the worse your software is going to be. If you're a manchild living in san francisco who can't be bothered driving, doing your laundry or shopping for groceries, you're in good hands. There is a startup that will solve your problem! But the further from that "ideal" you get, the worse. Here in Melbourne, I can't use my iphone to pay for public transit. Google maps couldn't really handle roundabouts (traffic circles) for a decade and change. (I guess they don't have those in California). Unicode support was only added recently because of Emoji. Until then, a huge amount of software butchered non-english text. I shudder to think how badly most software probably handles right to left languages. And the list goes on and on.
> My partner works in a CMS all day at work. Every change she makes is pushed directly to production. There's no review process. No staging. No testing. No change control or rollback. If anyone messes something up, they get blamed for "taking down the app". As a software engineer, I look on in horror.
Fwiw that just sounds like an immature CMS - I've seen review/approval workflows, branches, preview environments etc in more than one CMS. I take your overall point but maybe your partner doesn't have to live this way.
> I take your overall point but maybe your partner doesn't have to live this way.
I agree - but if a review system exists in the product, she's never seen it. They don't even have a staging system for testing changes. Its wild.
And for context, she works at a large organisation that's a household name here in Australia. This is a large organisation thats been around for well over 50 years. They have an engineering team and thousands of employees.
I don't know if the software is bad or if its misconfigured. But the status quo outside of our industry is jaw-droppingly terrible.
Yeah absolutely. I worked at a startup awhile ago with a really incredible designer. She insisted that everyone in the company sit in on one or two user interview sessions she had organised with our potential users. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
I highly recommended doing the same if you can swing it. Its equal parts insightful and motivating. And the clients generally love it - since it shows your team really cares about their problems and use case.
Well my comment wasn’t really on usability or UX per se, just noting that the narrative of needing race car drivers is inaccurate. You don’t need to reverse B-trees to program normal software.
Also usability concerns have nothing to do with reversing B-trees.
Very true. My dad (late 60s) has written a DNS server, but still nearly fell for an email scam when he was sleep deprived and at the airport believing his flight was overbooked and he was going to be kicked.
