I always find it kind of fascinating how big companies can be so useless for so long, and then suddenly so active when things escalate — like, they had all the information, they knew what was going to happen, and still they didn't do anything about it until it became an emergency. Why?

I mean I do that too, but that's just ADHD, I don't think companies can have that.

I'm not going to link to or mention the specific app in question, because my point is not to shower hate on its developer.

But it would be hard to overstate the amount of rage and terror I feel about this.

This is in the description of a checkbook app. I am shopping checkbook apps for Android not because I thought it might be nice to have one, but because I absolutely need one.

And the problem with this is that all checkbook apps for Android, like almost all apps for Android, like almost all software these days, are utter garbage.

🧵

What is happening is that I have *real* software to do this task, but it's software I've been using for *20 years*. It is running on an OS that has been unsupported for over a decade on hardware that hasn't been manufactured for even longer. It is still occasionally possible to find NIB hardware on eBay – which is how I've made it this far – but at this point the batteries in those boxes are a decade old. It's amazing I've made it this far.

Yall. The software back then was SO MUCH BETTER than the software today.

🧵

There's a reason that I believe that we're headed for a societal collapse: it seems self-evident to me that we are living through one already. And by "we" I mean "I". Those of you who are younger, or came to modern computing technology later, literally have no idea the degradation in the power and affordances of software. You literally don't know what you're missing.

But ours is a society now where people think being able to set the color of your checkbook to match your moods is somehow a feature in a *financial application*.

🧵

Let me explain something to all you whippersnappers: once upon a time, software had to compete on the grounds of WHAT IT COULD DO. (Or, more accurately, what you could get it to do, which is similar but different.)

Consequently, to a first approximation, software lived and died by feature innovation, the software ecosystem was unbelievably rich with software that had strange, powerful feature sets.

🧵

For instance, did you know, once upon a time, Microsoft Word (both Mac and Windows), had the ability to link up MS Word files so that you could have one document across multiple files, and word would maintain page numbering throughout the whole conceptual document. You could write a book where each chapter was its own separate Word doc, and MS Word would manage the page numbers for you so that they were continuous through the book.

And Microsoft did this specifically so you didn't have to load the entire damn book into memory to edit it. There are a lot of reasons you might not want to do that, such as conserving memory for performance, and protecting your work from corruption due to mishap.

🧵

Microsoft ripped out that feature in, if I recall correctly, MS Word 6.

🧵

In the early days of Android, a friend of mine got an Android phone & was showing it off to me. He showed me Google Calendar, very proud.

"Oh. Huh. Does it support screening?"

"Screening? Probably – what is that?"

So I showed him what my Palm Pilot's calendar can do: with a single click, all of my calendar entries are converted to textless color-coded blocks, so I can literally hand my device to someone else so they can look at my calendar and see my schedule, but not be privy to any of the confidential information specific to events on it.

🧵

Speaking of my Palm Pilot – something I'm probably about to do a lot – the web browser on it, Blazer 5.0, had buttons in the UI to turn off JavaScript, images, and CSS. Individually. Not buried in the settings, which is in fact stupid, but right there, in easy reach for when you're browsing. Furthermore, it had failover default behaviors for rendering HTML that were actually graceful and worked correctly.

If you try to load HTML without CSS into any Android browser, you will get text so small that it is illegible. I have no idea why browsers these days are so incredibly stupid about this.

I want to be very clear what I am saying: Blazer 5.0 was actually a better browser than any modern browser. Now, these days it won't support modern websites, because modern websites have to be coded around the idiocy that is modern browsers, but you might be shocked how long I managed to continue to use it.

🧵

I use a 30-year-old text-based email system because no modern web-based (or for that matter app-based) email system remotely compares for features.

Gmail isn't actually good. And the Gmail app is actually kind of awful. It is a measure of how awful web-based email is that Gmail is regarded as the UX high water mark.

🧵

Can we talk about how stupid it is that I have to put little "🧵" icons in my threads to let people know they're threads? When I haven't people have complained – because collectively the way Mastodon apps represent threads is so inadequate, users viewing a boosted toot can't immediately tell from the indications provided by the app that something is a thread.

But apparently nobody goes "it's too hard to tell when a toot is boosted into my stream that it's part of a larger thread, so maybe the UI should indicate that more prominently". No, it's just up to the user to manually add some sort of character that the app should be displaying instead.

🧵

Software keeps sliding downhill.

Sure, there's enshittification. But there's this other thing too.

I mentioned how the app ecosystem for the Palm was so incredibly rich. To this day, I have trouble finding applications that are REMOTELY as powerful as the ones I was accustomed to using on the Palm.

But Palm died in the birth pains of the iPhone and of Android. When that happened, there was a kind of land rush of developers to make new apps for these two new ecologies. While some Palm developers did pivot, very few Palm apps were directly ported to iPhone or Android. Instead, it was developers who had no idea what was on the Palm developing, de novo, for the iPhone and Android.

🧵

So they were starting at ground zero. All of the maturity of feature set that was on the Palm was basically lost, because there was no continuity of clue.

Nothing about this story is specific of course to the transition from Palm OS to Android and iOS. Something like this happens every time there's a new platform.

We saw a very similar thing in the move from desktop apps to web-based apps. The web-based versions lacked many of the features of the desktop versions. Part of that was it was just hard to implement those things in the browser, back in the days of Netscape 4.7, before dynamic window rendering. I say this as someone who personally was responsible for the JavaScript front end of a very crude DHTML/RDBMS-backed statistics analysis package that worked under Netscape 4.7.

🧵

But then as people became accustomed to do more and more in the browser, they also became accustomed to their software doing less and less, and having fewer and fewer features.

The vast majority of people who joined the internet between 2000 and 2010 used email in the browser, and never knew anything else. They literally had no idea what they might be missing.

The same step happened again, moving from the web to phone apps.

🧵

Which is why I wound up asking for alternatives to Gmail for accessing Gmail on my phone here recently. (Everybody said use FairEmail, which is absolutely the right answer, but holy hell it still is missing a lot of things.)

With every new platform that comes out, the sophistication of software on that platform is reset to basically zero, or something not far from it.

But this means with the *acceleration* of new platforms coming out, there's less and less time for the software on a given platform to mature before it's superseded by the new hotness, and software maturity resets to zero again.

🧵

@Chip_Unicorn A great question, but I think the answer turns out to be no.

I know you're speaking in the general case, but let me illustrate with something very specific about the difference between Palm and Android.

Now, I know that the OS's are so different as to be hard to overstate that difference, and that right there is a huge issue, but an even bigger one has to do with the actual hardware.

🧵

@Chip_Unicorn

The Palm had *resistive* screens. Android, and all modern devices, have *capacitive* screens.

The Palm does not do multitouch, and more or less requires the use of a stylus. But that stylus has an incredibly fine point. It's basically one pixel.

Android, in contrast, uses finger touch, and has a contact surface the size of the fingertip.

This has a very surprising consequence.

Right now I am writing this on a OnePlus 9, in Tusky. The entire text area, above the keyboard display, in which I am working turns out to be almost exactly the size of the screen of a Palm T|X. Which I happen to know because I have one right here.

🧵

As for the gallery, take a look at Aves. That app topped everything I've ever tried before:

f-droid.org/packages/deckers.t…

Aves Libre | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

Gallery and metadata explorer

^f-droid.org