I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap. For example when I upgraded KitKat to Lollipop they fucked up my calendar. No month view? Seriously?
Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this.
Anyway back to your issue with picture downloads: I had the same problem and after 20 minues of searching I managed to find where can I download my FUCKING pictures:
- go to Google Drive
- Click "Apps"
- Click "More"
- Click "Photos"
- Click "All photos"
And here comes the tricky part:
- At the top left corner hold your left mouse button and drag a box around all your photos
Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November.
Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...
There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.
Yep. For me Google+ was the turning point. It started before that, but if you drew a line graph of Quality of Products for Google I think you'd see the Google+ rollout event on that line without it being pointed out.
I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.
Google Photos is a very recent addition to Google Drive[1]. I'm not sure the change even rolled out to everyone yet and still not all my photos have been migrated. They used to be only availble through the bizarre web interface within Google+ that OP described.
Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile.
I think that for some time now Google's services are mostly crap.
Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.
I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.
As with most software/hardware, the alternative is to not "upgrade" and put up with the negative comments you'll get (both from other people and websites) but if it's such a regression in functionality, should we really continue calling them "upgrades"? I feel like we've reached somewhat of a saturation point in the past few years. Meanwhile, with systems becoming more locked-down and proprietary, every new revision feels like it's incrementally taking control away from the user and replacing it with superficial beauty.
I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.
Gmail became so painful about two years ago. So I moved to Fastmail (wow, web UI can be THAT fast!). New Google Maps were broken for a couple of months. Google's own developer plugins like Game Services and AdMob are buggy and unintuitive.
Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.
The space at the end of the password entry was found in QA testing. Since we are an agile shop and run two week sprints that bug was left in and put on the backlog to be prioritized later. Gotta release every two weeks, even if it's utter crap. As long as the PBIs are completed, who cares about the users?
It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.
That reminds me of a bug I found during my first internship. The company had it's own niche social network centered around it's main product. On it, you were able to change your display name at any time, and if you added any spaces to the beginning or end of your username, you could hijack another users profile. That is, I could change my username to " snarfy", and if you clicked my display name to go to my profile, it would actually go to yours. A malicious user could use this to make inflammatory posts posing as a high profile user.
The bug was that the display name was first checked to see if it already existed before white space was stripped. Luckily this was fixed very quickly after it was found, as it existed in production.
My favourite was a recent banking webform which refused to recognise "0". Apparently it's not a real number. When I got through to support, they explained I had to leave the box blank to represent zero...
I live in the USA and have a credit card issued by an American bank. When I pay my bill online, I want the $ and comma to work like I've known they work ever since I was in first grade over 50 years ago.
I don't give a fuck about how the rest of the world does numbers and banking. That's their problem. If the UK were still using guineas and shillings, should I care about that?
No. Deal with foreign currency problems on their websites. If the rest of the world wants to use commas and periods backwards from the way we do, then solve that problem for them elsewhere. Don't make my life difficult just so you can use the same code for a website in Elbonia.
The rest of the world's problems are not my problems. Solve them, or don't. But don't make my life hard because you're* too fucking lazy to do the right thing.
Computers should exist to make peoples' lives easier. People shouldn't be required to make programmers' lives easier.
/rant off
*not you personally, I don't know what you do, it's just an indefinite pronoun
Sometimes I use the classic version of Gmail just because it loads the whole page in less than 1 second and I can read my e-mail in another 0.5 seconds. With the "modern" version I have to stare at a blank screen with a stupid progress bar for about 2-3 seconds before seeing anything.
I don't understand why this is OK. I don't understand why people listen to Google's advice on making fast websites when one of their main websites has a fucking loading bar.
> Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.
Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.
For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.
I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.
Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.
Does this actually work for you with a recent Android phone?
On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic error.
Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.
Many phones make this harder than it needs to be as well... my experience with a Motorola phone I had a few years ago:
Install driver X, restart your computer, unplug and replug the phone, shut down auto-starting "image manager" BS which came with the driver, look for (and fail to find) the raw mounted USB device, reload the propitiatory image manager, import the files, look for an export which actually exports the files and not a degraded version, and...
My phone and computer are on the same wireless network, so the cable is a little silly. I use an ftp server on my phone, and my file browser just deals with it like a normal folder. Adverts in the ftp server, though, a little ridiculous.
Yes please! I'm so tired of all the annoying bloat all over the web that makes (not only) older browsers die just thinking about visiting the sites. It looks like the "progress" nowadays is going for "more complex and resource-demanding with less features and control".
"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic or something very stable and non-computer related, so I could just work away in my shop and not have to ever touch this fucking demon box."
What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good physical labor in the lab.
"Sometimes I wish that I was like an air-cooled Porsche mechanic"
I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was correct on its parallel path.
Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use, straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the public hates them.
The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs" "Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core, practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our products"
About 2 months ago, I went to my grandma's funeral, and snapped some pics of family and friends with my new DSLR.
After two weeks, I realized that I wanted to share all these photos. I discovered OneDrive has a ridiculously easy interface for photos: upload folders of jpegs. I thought the web interface for looking at them was sexy too, with the photos featured prominently (not much text, no comments). It even has a "Download All" button! I sent a public view link to everyone. Damn, Microsoft is getting things right these days.
There's tons of problems with Google's services. They make radical changes that bloat them and slow them down. They cut services that people find useful because they're not as big as something like Maps or Gmail, or even for no reason at all. But no matter how much you complain, either on a blog post or to Google themselves, if you just come back to them at the end of the day you've changed nothing at all.
Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.
As much as I hate almost everything, I always ask myself what's the baseline for those assumptions? How easy should it be to do the mentioned tasks?
Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom. Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty.
I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some tasks to be much more laborious than others.
There's this, and then there's purposeful degradation. A lot of the problem TFA describes were already solved properly years ago. There was a much better experience getting photos from your phone in pre-smartphone era, where you could just hook it up to your computer via the USB-to-some-propertiary-port cable and it would register as mass storage device. Web used to be much cleaner and better to use than it is now.
One of the best blogs ever! Quote: "I have a pretty strict rule about not using computers in the evening time. (because computers inevitably make me furious and want to smash things and then I can't sleep)." Can't stop reading posts ...
Why is that funny, really? Some of his grievances can really only materialise because he uses the products. I have never had many of these problems, because I use none of these products. The point is that he wants to use "all Google products", yet they are in such a state as to make that impossible, at least for him. Somebody who would use them if they could use them is a much worse case for Google (or any other company, for that matter) than somebody who rejects them without an actual will to use them.
I think a lot of us have had thoughts like these, but damn man, reading that was like watching Lewis Black - you think you're witnessing someone having a stroke/heart attack.
To make things worse, people half ass the "mobile web" even harder! This is to the point where, when you click through a search engine result to a website and DON'T get forwarded to their garbage mobile site you are impressed!
Also, don't forget the zip code or phone number boxes that have the format as a "placeholder" type text in the textboxes on mobile that repeatedly force your keyboard to reset so that they can format you phone number for you.
[+] [-] edem|10 years ago|reply
Plus it always vibrates since silent mode is gone. I found this out the hard way. My phone is always in silent mode and after the upgrade one day it just vibrated off the desk and the display broke. I should sue Google for this.
Anyway back to your issue with picture downloads: I had the same problem and after 20 minues of searching I managed to find where can I download my FUCKING pictures:
- go to Google Drive
- Click "Apps"
- Click "More"
- Click "Photos"
- Click "All photos"
And here comes the tricky part:
- At the top left corner hold your left mouse button and drag a box around all your photos
- Unselect the ones you dont't want to download
- Click "More"
- Click "Download"
That's it just 9 easy steps.......no comment
[+] [-] cliveowen|10 years ago|reply
Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...
There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.
[+] [-] ebbv|10 years ago|reply
I don't work there, and never have, so I have no idea what the cause is. My guess is just the fact that the company has grown so much that maintaining the quality of people and thus products that they put out is impossible beyond a certain size.
[+] [-] blfr|10 years ago|reply
Despite that, I quite like Google's apps (and Google Apps). The month view in Calendar is back. The upgrade to Lollipop went smoothly for me and was a significant improvement. Some of them seem effectively abandoned (Blogger) but ones that aren't (Drive) are top notch: fast, attractive, full-featured, and with excellent integration between web and mobile.
[1] http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/03/photosindrive.html
[+] [-] bontoJR|10 years ago|reply
It seems a common feeling that is spreading during the last year... Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074704
[+] [-] 300bps|10 years ago|reply
Few people are willing to pay for quality web services which leads us on this cyclical path of new more friendly services coming out followed by monetization or shutdown of said services. These changes never benefit the users (i.e. product) of the services.
I think an example of this outside of Google is imgur.com. It started out as an extremely lightweight image sharing site for social networks. It's now morphed into an incredibly featured social network of its own.
[+] [-] userbinator|10 years ago|reply
I've made the decision to stop "upgrading" anything just for the sake of being newer, and to carefully examine the not-often-prominent disadvantages too. It often turns out, at least for me, that the new stuff they added is worthless and what they removed is what I really need.
[+] [-] def_illiterate|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wordbank|10 years ago|reply
Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.
[+] [-] jknightco|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eonw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarfy|10 years ago|reply
It's a sad day when I have to sneak bug fixes that annoy me in on my free time, but this seems to be the norm in an agile driven software world, at least my experience with it for the last ten years.
[+] [-] _lce0|10 years ago|reply
1. let's suppose a user have a password: (note the space)
2. also you store the password using some hashing function, which prevents you from knowing the password.3. two weeks later the bugfix goes live, the user cannot longer access the service.
Also, you cannot easily estimate how much benefit/annoyed users your _fix_ will endup having .. which makes it a higly risk change.
[+] [-] andrewstuart2|10 years ago|reply
Software can be working but not released until it's working well.
[+] [-] astolarz|10 years ago|reply
The bug was that the display name was first checked to see if it already existed before white space was stripped. Luckily this was fixed very quickly after it was found, as it existed in production.
[+] [-] jdg1|10 years ago|reply
That sounds sensible, but now you've just broken it for every country that uses comma as a decimal mark.
[+] [-] Ntrails|10 years ago|reply
Mind: Blown.
[+] [-] PhantomGremlin|10 years ago|reply
I don't give a fuck about how the rest of the world does numbers and banking. That's their problem. If the UK were still using guineas and shillings, should I care about that?
No. Deal with foreign currency problems on their websites. If the rest of the world wants to use commas and periods backwards from the way we do, then solve that problem for them elsewhere. Don't make my life difficult just so you can use the same code for a website in Elbonia.
The rest of the world's problems are not my problems. Solve them, or don't. But don't make my life hard because you're* too fucking lazy to do the right thing.
Computers should exist to make peoples' lives easier. People shouldn't be required to make programmers' lives easier.
/rant off
*not you personally, I don't know what you do, it's just an indefinite pronoun
[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoFreX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elchief|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harel|10 years ago|reply
Having said that - all his points are valid, though I'm not sure I'd bother to get that angry at stuff that is out of my contorl.
[+] [-] Goladus|10 years ago|reply
Part of the problem I think comes from feeling like you are in control in one moment then having that control taken from you for stupid or selfish reasons.
For example, I was listening to music with PowerAMP the other day on my android phone as I walked home from work. Spontaneously, my phone just switched over to playing a completely different playlist. It turns out some Google music app had taken over my phone out of the blue.
I tried to shut it off. I could not. I could stop the music, but there was no fucking "close" option anywhere in the app that I could find so that I could go back to listening using the app I had already fucking chosen to play my music with. I found a "send feeback" option (I sent a message "fuck this app how do I shut it off"). Eventually, I found the place in the Play Store where I could completely remove the "Google Play Music & Movies" app, which finally worked.
Seriously? In what fucking world does it make more sense to design an app that's easier to uninstall than to simply terminate. Yes I was mad. I was enjoying the music I was listening to on my walk home, when some fucking Google bullshittery interrupts my walk for no reason at all other than they are either incompetent or complete assholes.
[+] [-] avian|10 years ago|reply
On my Moto G, this is more like: connect USB cable, wait 2 minutes while the computer is mounting the MTP. See it fail. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Forgot to unlock screen on the phone. Unconnect cable, reconnect. Wait another 2 minutes. The drive mounts now. Select photos. Copy. Paste to hard drive. Wait 10 minutes while the computer is copying the files. See it fail with a cryptic error.
Utterly useless. From what I hear, this is a normal experience since Android switched from using USB mass storage to MTP.
[+] [-] jhasse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
Install driver X, restart your computer, unplug and replug the phone, shut down auto-starting "image manager" BS which came with the driver, look for (and fail to find) the raw mounted USB device, reload the propitiatory image manager, import the files, look for an export which actually exports the files and not a degraded version, and...
[+] [-] Aoyagi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] repsilat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aoyagi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goladus|10 years ago|reply
Oh there is more control. Just not for you, the user.
[+] [-] elliott34|10 years ago|reply
What was nice about working in scientific research back in undergrad in that whenever you got tired of coding the demon box, you could do some good physical labor in the lab.
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
I read the same and interpreted it somewhat different. Although your take was correct on its parallel path.
Web designers and SaaS architects ONLY design to impress other web designers and SaaS architects yet never eat their own dog food and don't care about the users. Its widely believed by non google employees that nobody ever got a job at Google (or whatever their personal definition of "win" is) by putting something into their portfolio that is simple, maintainable, easy to use, straightforward, clear, that they'd use themselves or the end users would like. This is a MAJOR systemic cultural malfunction in the business. Sooner or later some MBA will "discover" this and write a famous book about how shortsighted the internet techies were in the second or so decade of the widespread public internet. I bet it'll be titled "the era of internet tail fins" or something. Basically we're building 70s American muscle cars... we can impress each other, but they fall apart in two years if that and the public hates them.
The car analogy would be a bunch of mechanics standing around trying to impress each other "Yeah man I had one of those cars that needed the engine to be pulled from the car just to get access to replace the rearmost spark plugs" "Oh thats nothing, I had to do over 50 labor hours to replace the heater core, practically had to disassemble the entire car to fix that coolant leak" "well I don't have as impressive of a story but I worked on a car once that could only have its oil changed on a hyd lift with the passenger front wheel removed, impossible to do it otherwise". Now the mechanics are VERY impressed with the quantity and quality of work they had to do to accomplish what are fundamentally, normally, very simple tasks, and they're very impressed with the engineers that created those systems that guarantee them such amazing labor hours of wonderment. It must have taken petacycles of CAD/CAM work to make something that messed up that none the less technically kinda somehow works. HOWEVER, and this is critical, the general public just sees a lemon of an overpriced hard to fix car, and just wants a simple reliable toyota commuter car (which the mechanics mercilessly make fun of and insist no one wants despite actual sales figures). "So what, because teenagers, a group widely renowned for good taste and excellent judgment (LOL), love our products"
[+] [-] tomphoolery|10 years ago|reply
Why not?
"I get the numeric code sent to me. I go to Google Voice on my computer"
This seems like it defeats the purpose of 2FA. Am I wrong? Isn't 2FA supposed to work by proving that you own a device for which it was set up on?
"always download all the images made by Google Charts because that service will die at some point"
Probably. If it matters to you, learn some JavaScript and build stuff in highcharts. And next time, never rely on a service that you don't pay for.
Also, it's clear by this post you hate Google, especially its suite of exceptionally shitty products, and not the Web.
[+] [-] userbinator|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|10 years ago|reply
After two weeks, I realized that I wanted to share all these photos. I discovered OneDrive has a ridiculously easy interface for photos: upload folders of jpegs. I thought the web interface for looking at them was sexy too, with the photos featured prominently (not much text, no comments). It even has a "Download All" button! I sent a public view link to everyone. Damn, Microsoft is getting things right these days.
[+] [-] Lancey|10 years ago|reply
Not liking Google Photos? Get Dropbox on your phone and upload your pictures there! Blogger doesn't give you enough control? Use Wordpress or Medium instead, or run your own blog! Google has too many users on their services to care about you. If you want change, go out and make the change yourself.
[+] [-] eCa|10 years ago|reply
Fixed it.
(But I agree with regards to Maps Classic, it is superior to the new maps in almost all ways (for me, at least).)
[+] [-] discordianfish|10 years ago|reply
Back in the days, we needed a camera and film, took pictures and get them developed, got a envelope and a stamp and finally sent the pictures to Mom. Obviously this is way more work than using the web, even if it's shitty.
I think we assume we could do things better and are used to things that work better without realizing the differences in their details which causes some tasks to be much more laborious than others.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] profinger|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hudo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hudo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephpmay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmk2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] profinger|10 years ago|reply
Also, don't forget the zip code or phone number boxes that have the format as a "placeholder" type text in the textboxes on mobile that repeatedly force your keyboard to reset so that they can format you phone number for you.