>They're good at making apps fast and small, but not at making them usable.
I don't know which apps you are talking about, but I use apps built and designed by developers every day, and they all work great.
My problems start when Apps are NOT designed by developers, but rather people who have seen 100 videos about color theory, and know all the latest fonts their social media du jour is excited about, but very little about hardware, programming, and the difference between localhost and accessing a server over cheap WiFi from somewhere else on the planet.
Because these are the "apps" which do something ridiculously simple, but somehow manage to eat up 2-3GiB of RAM and let the laptops fans spin out of control.
>They're not small or fast -- though Moore's Law has made them usable anyway.
Moores Law is over however, and there is no justification for an app that, say, plays locally stored mp3s to require 2GiB of RAM and 10% CPU. If an application thinks this is justified, it will get to know my good friend `rm -rf`, beacause I have vlc running in ncurses mode right now, playing my entire playlist, and its eating less memory than the terminal emulator it's running in ;-)
The answer to bad software, and overloaded/overused/oversold frameworks is not "built more powerful computers" but "make better software".
>There never was a golden age when developers made good, small, fast apps.
Good != Beautifully designed.
Good means small, fast, portable, reliable, easy to install, easy to learn, easy to remove, does its job.
I don't know which apps you are talking about, but I use apps built and designed by developers every day, and they all work great.
My problems start when Apps are NOT designed by developers, but rather people who have seen 100 videos about color theory, and know all the latest fonts their social media du jour is excited about, but very little about hardware, programming, and the difference between localhost and accessing a server over cheap WiFi from somewhere else on the planet.
Because these are the "apps" which do something ridiculously simple, but somehow manage to eat up 2-3GiB of RAM and let the laptops fans spin out of control.
>They're not small or fast -- though Moore's Law has made them usable anyway.
Moores Law is over however, and there is no justification for an app that, say, plays locally stored mp3s to require 2GiB of RAM and 10% CPU. If an application thinks this is justified, it will get to know my good friend `rm -rf`, beacause I have vlc running in ncurses mode right now, playing my entire playlist, and its eating less memory than the terminal emulator it's running in ;-)
The answer to bad software, and overloaded/overused/oversold frameworks is not "built more powerful computers" but "make better software".
>There never was a golden age when developers made good, small, fast apps.
Good != Beautifully designed.
Good means small, fast, portable, reliable, easy to install, easy to learn, easy to remove, does its job.