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If anyone from Planetscale is reading this, please know I hate what you did to your website. I previously had it bookmarked as an example of excellent, usable website design. About a year ago it turned into a plaintext nightmare. The first time I saw the new design I genuinely thought that a CSS file had failed to load in my browser. It's awful.

*Edit:* It also fails to load other pages if you have JavaScript or XHR disabled.


Same. Love PlanetScale, love their previous website design. I struggle reading white text on black backgrounds, so I don't even try to read their product pages or blog posts since there's no light mode :( yes I know about reader mode

It feels it went from "professional Stripe level design that you admire and it inspires you" to just "hard to read black website", not sure what for.

(not fully functional) https://web.archive.org/web/20240811142248/https://planetsca...


There's definitely a light mode for planetscale.com (the docs, the blog, the changelog, and the UI). Should work on both desktop and mobile. Make sure your browser is requesting light mode. The browser doesn't always follow your OS-level preferences.

Was curious what it looks like now, and yea, not a fan of the fake hacker "we don't do CSS or styling". But then again maybe I was just used to their old design

Design is subjective of course. I love their new website and much prefer it to the old one.

Can you provide an example of a website you approve?

I'm not at all a fan of mass surveillance, but is it possible - just possible - that your statement might contain just a smidge of hyperbole?

10,000+ arrests a year for posting offensive tweets? The fact there is no freedom of speech in UK and the politicians will willfully arrest people for wrongthink is disgusting. It means that any rational person will keep their mouths shut for fear of getting arrested.

Have you read 1984? This sounds like something leading up to the situation in the book, certainly not the worst parts.

Orwell was a licenced critic even if anti-imperialist at heart he sold his soul to fight communism putting imperialist issues aside.

Modern web developers: "Oh I just use Gulp, Jenkins, Babel, Yarn, Bower, Grunt, Slurp, Vite, and Rollup"

Me: slowly backs away in disgust


I just checked out this game on Steam and was pretty excited to buy it until I read that it requires a kernel-level anticheat which acts as a rootkit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard

Why on earth is any self-respecting person installing this on their machine?


Because they want to play the game and don't know or care what a "kernel-level anticheat which acts as a rootkit" is. Which probably makes up 99.9% of their userbase.

FYI, it works on Linux, so as far as I'm aware, it only seems to care about you flying around.

It's almost 2026, you're supposed to keep gaming and personal PCs separate.

> made possible with support from Nixxes Software, best known for developing high-quality PC ports of Sony’s biggest PlayStation titles

Now if only Nixxes would stop using Sony's stupid proprietary audio system in PC games, I'd be happy. Every Sony game causes my sound card to freak out and I lose the ability to control anything - even volume. My surround speakers stop working completely and I'm effectively forced into accepting mono audio.


https://vimeo.com/39768998

> This video is not rated. Join vimeo to watch

No thanks. Here's a YouTube mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufs0Rwx8sOk


Giving Windows 11 the highest rating and XP one of the worst ratings clearly demonstrates that this author is not a serious person.


I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously, at all. It's a pretty unserious surface level critique of past GUIs based on 2025 standards. It's a bit like ranking the Coolest Looking Batman's - there's not really an honest metric outside of ones personal favorite.


Just because you disagree , doesn’t mean that your opinion holds any weight over theirs.

Especially because you’ve provided no rebuttal of substance, and resorted to name calling.


Windows 11 usability is garbage compared to Windows 10. Windows 10 already had multiple desktops, docking(which does need app to augment), sandboxing, and the start menu worked. Further win 10 does not gimp the OS if not activated, doesn't require an online account, and has an identical update mechanism to win11.

There is nothing superior or even functionally 'new' in Windows 11 besides compute burning eye candy and embedded backdoored encryption

If Windows 7 had multi core enhancement, driver downloading, and updated libraries it would still be a superior OS from a weight of resources perspective.


None of your points are relevant to the article at hand which is about the visual design of the OSs.


What name calling? Calling the author 'an unserious person' isn't name calling. Might be worth reading the article:

> "If you like Windows 8’s look, you are a bad person. You are the one Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Microsoft had no taste."

yeah you don't need to read very much of this to know this author hasn't exactly written a substantive article; they certainly aren't bothering to backup their claims with any reasoning. the whole post itself is 'this version of windows was ugly, this one wasn't etc'.


GP has a point tho. The article ranks vista over XP, and that's just ludicrous. Even Microsoft has admitted that vista was hot garbage.

It's even become a slang expression: a app can have a "Vista moment", meaning they released a version that was completely unusable and a stark regression from previous versions.

Meanwhile XP is widely regarded to have been the best windows version ever. The only version that even compares in terms of popularity is 7.

I get the feeling the author of the post hasn't actually used any of the older versions of windows, and was ranking solely based on some screenshots they found online. There's no other reasonable explanation for rating vista higher than XP.


Vista wasn't that bad from purely OS side. On a VM it runs pretty stable.

However, Microsoft made a huge change to how the OS and drivers worked. If you still use Windows, you are still benefitting from some of the changes.

However HW vendors usually ship rather broken drivers, it was doubly bad since Vista overhauled the driver interface. By the time all vendors fixed their shitty and badly tested drivers we already had 7. It is also partly Microsoft's fault since they had absolute chaos in Vista development due to shitty hacks on top of hacks that was the consumer OS (XP).

Similarly Vista was very heavy for its contemporary average hardware. By the time HW caught up, 7 was released.


What does anything you just said have to do with the article though, which specifically focuses on the UI?


This article wasn’t ranking the quality of the OS overall, just the UI


Is everyone who disagrees with you an unserious person, or just on this particular topic?


The disagreement isn't what makes him not serious; the hubris to declare Windows 11 the most usable OS does.

No one who has any real experience with *nix, legacy ios, legacy Windows, and modern Windows/ios UI/UX would rate win11 top without serious qualifiers


Agreed. Something has to be wrong with you if you were to prefer Windows 11 to basically anything else. GNOME 3, Ubuntu's whatever desktop environment, KDE, Omarchy, macOS, Windows 8-10 - it's all more consistent, easier to grasp and also looks better than Windows 11.


Incredible! In an astounding feat, it has only taken a mere two decades to enable the world's largest tech companies to provide the most basic levels of interopability.

At this breakneck speed of technological development, one can only imagine what wonderful boons await consumers in the next few decades.


It took the EU forcing Apple's hand. If it were up to Apple, you'd still need to buy an iPhone/iPod/iPad/iMac to get access to basic file sharing.


Apple could have implemented this a long time ago but decided not to implement Bluetooth file sharing.


AirDrop is faster and more secure and reliable than simple Bluetooth file sharing. There are a number of reasons they weren't going to do that.


Airdrop is a proprietary format and doesn’t work on my laptop, which runs FreeBSD.

Please stop excusing this anti social behaviour.


Tons of antitrust cases and people still believe this in 2025.


DAE remember in 2010 when Steve Jobs said that Facetime would be an open industry standard?


FaceTime got caught up in patent issues that precluded both opening it up and resulted in architecture changes: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat... .


This makes no sense as an explanation. They changed the architecture not to infringe on the patents. So the patents are not stopping them from opening up now.


Indeed. We have flying cars, FSD, AI and borderline AGI, robots, yet file sharing is like breakthrough in technologia.

This is why we need more scrutiny against big tech. Interop and platform openess.


The astounding feat of reinventing Bluetooth...


Airdrop has nothing to do with Bluetooth


Hopefully the speed of innovation will increase as Apple is forced to be less shitty of a platform owner.


They're might have exhausted their centennial budget of cooperation on trivial things!


I feel like we have finally entered the 21st century! Next stop moon bases and flying cars!


Why is the UX around photos and videos in WhatsApp Web so incredibly poor?

I have clients who regularly send me photos/videos to publish on websites. There are many usability issues around this:

1. There is no option to "download all", which means you need to click through every photo manually and hit the download icon.

2. When navigating through photos, the download icon is often hidden behind a submenu which means it takes two clicks to download a photo instead of one.

3. It's impossible to download videos without first having fully buffered them. This means you need to click through the full video to ensure it's streamed to your device before the download icon appears. This is super annoying especially with longer videos.

4. Bonus non-web annoyance: if a user sends you multiple photos, your phone goes insane with notifications and sounds like a rapid-fire pinball machine. DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING

As a web developer I find it incredibly difficult to even think of releasing software with these kinds of basic inadequacies.


The article text does not display properly on Firefox for me. The text gets cut off.


Same with me on Safari.


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