Hot take: if you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting. Any plain text editor will do. The rest is just fluff.
Opinião
Google wants to be the interface for the web
The opening of Google I/O this year (35-minute video recap) showed a Google less shy about transforming the web into raw material for its AIs.
Search will become (even more) a souped-up ChatGPT, and also the checkout counter for every online store, and YouTube will use video clips to create answer pages.
Notice that in all these announcements, Google/YouTube transforms itself into a curator and interface for web content, without attribution or with minimal credit given. You won’t visit websites anymore; you’ll visit Google — and you’ll stay there. On the flip side, whoever calls themselves a “content creator” is actually a content supplier for platforms. It’s always been that way for Meta (Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube; now it’s also the case for Google, even if unintentionally (myself included!).
All of this amounts to a complete betrayal of everything Google once stood for (and was) back then. Maybe people like this new incarnation because the web, poor thing, has long suffered from the pernicious incentives and destructive influence of Google itself, but nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.
By the way: Manual do Usuário project offers an instance of SearxNG, a metasearch engine that displays ten (or more) blue links to actual websites. It’s free. Use it and spread the word.
Leave our UI alone
It’s not new to me to feel uneasy when I find out some software I use has just gone through a “major update.”
Take the case of the Jellyfin app for Roku OS.
On March 26th, a major update — version 3.0.0 — was released, which the developers themselves dubbed as “😵💫The ‘Will Someone Please Explain To Me What Is Going On’ release 🤷”. Not a great sign. According to the changelog, it was based on a fork that’s quite different from the previous stable version it replaced.
I don’t follow the development of the Jellyfin app for Roku OS, so I got a bit of a shock when I turned on the TV and saw this update. It’s, well… different. The elements are all crammed on the screen, the exposed filters are way too distracting (and the “not played” filter is never remembered), and overall, it just looks off — subjective, I know.
By the way, I found out today that the old app was re-released on the Roku store as Jellyfin Legacy on April 1st. What a relief to go back to the old UI! The reason for keeping it available is that version 3.0.0 doesn’t work with older versions of the Jellyfin Server (10.7 and below). I couldn’t help but wonder if someone who’s been running a three years old outdated Jellyfin Server version will have the foresight to check the project’s repository when faced with an incompatible Roku OS app update, only to eventually discover that there’s a new — actually, the old — app available for download.
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Back in the day, I used to get excited about “major updates.” “Ooh, check out those Windows 7 visual effects!” “App XYZ is now easier to use!” and so on.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve changed. I tend to think that’s not really the case. There was a lot of room for improvement back then, and developers and designers, alongside us users, were all learning how to navigate new digital interfaces for a wide range of everyday activities. Today, it feels like most UI and UX changes are done for their own sake with little reasoning or obvious benefit to the end user.
Apple has been on this trend for a while now; the Settings apps debuting in macOS 13 Ventura, in 2022, was the pinnacle (so far) of this dumb, even hostile, trend. (Here’s a good analysis.) The possibility of a complete system overhaul this September, as the rumor mill suggests, already fills me with a huge sense of dread.
It’s interesting how this issue affects both proprietary software (like Apple’s) and open-sourced ones (like Jellyfin), though it feels like it happens more often with proprietary/closed software.
Is it too much to ask that they don’t mess with what isn’t broken? Or — even better — that they favor iterative improvements over abrupt changes?