And once they've rolled that back to Picasa we have a hope of returning to pre-Hangouts as well.
It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels utterly justified.
How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users. Seems like such a naive idea these days.
I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk.
Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open.
When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it
5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)
You know what's really hilarious? I still use Second Life sometimes, which at the time received a certain amount of mockery because people were in effect using a huge, bloated 3D application for text chat. Thanks to the wonders of modern web technology, everyone's caught up in the bloat department so that Second Life's not actually much more RAM and CPU hungry than alternative options for text chat. Even though it's streaming and rendering a whole 3D virtual environment in real time.
Give it a few more years and I think you might get your wish, at least if you use Apple or Microsoft OSes.
The 90s marked the slow demise of native non-Internet connected applications.
The 2000s saw the rise of web apps.
The early 2010s marked the rise of mobile first/only native apps.
The late 2010s will see the rise of highly optimized singular platforms (MacOS/iOS, Win8/WinPhone, Android/ChromeOS?) designed to lock the user into the platform via tight inter app orchestration (native obviously) via cloud backed APIs.
I'm not so sure. We don't have the single-platform uberdominance that we used to have. Writing software for one platform will cause you to miss out on a very significant portion of users. And I think the trends in software, both on the development side and in the released units side, are showing more projects adopting a cross-platform strategy by default.
But there are some major problems still. There are no good, cross-platform UI toolkits. They either support native widgets and have terrible APIs, or they have great APIs and their own, unique interpretation of what "native widgets" means (i.e. they aren't at all).
I got so mad about the situation one day that I thought I might start my own UI toolkit project. Well, I only thought about it for about a minute before I realized how stupid that was. But when I think about the UI toolkit that has the most consistent support across all platforms, has the least enraging API, and the most potential to get better over time, I come to one conclusion...
HTML.
No. It's not great. I already said there are no good UI toolkits. But it's the only one that has the potential to make the world a nicer place.
The only way I see native making a comeback is if this Net Neutrality issue gets in the way. Even in 'native' software, the web is becoming increasingly present.
1. No deployment/client maintenance cost. The browser was already on every PC by the end of the 90s.
2. Connectivity. Web apps became the new thin clients with most UI coming from server side rendering and as well as data coming from the same servers.
3. Ubiquitous UI. Without getting cynical HTML/CSS is more or less the same on all browsers.
Native apps mitigate the first two advantages and cast the third point as extremely suspect or at least irrelevant.
1. Apple introduced the Mac App Store and wrote brick and mortar software retailers like Best Buy out the equation. Microsoft is scrambling to keep up by moving things that were traditionally licensed via complex enterprise bundles into a la carte offerings like Office 365.
2. Connectivity. As somebody that considers themselves a web dev I really want to see a Net Neutral web win. But with almost all relevant web app activity being powered on the back end by a JSON/XML API the UI is no longer tightly coupled to server side HTML.
Which brings us to point 3, the ubiquitous HTML UI...
Decision makers don't care
If you are a consumer or executive type you want your apps to look like all your other iOS apps. If you are a call center employee working on a web app you have no input into the app you work with anyway. Us web developers aren't doing HTML/CSS any favors by adopting frameworks that attempt to blur the lines between web and native apps like Angular, Ember, or Ionic.
Disclaimer: I would prefer perrylaj is right and I am wrong. I just don't think that will be the case.
I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML-bloatishness that people complain about).
Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.
My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of that app...
Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments.
As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be...
I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse-engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time.
I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.
It feels heartwarming and at the same time depressing to read this, which is point-perfect what I've been feeling ever since the release of Hangouts.
I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy).
Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has brought us. And they are being closed down :(
> Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.
SMS (1993), iMessage and Facebook Messenger all show what messages someone has read or not, even if the UI may be different.
You have to keep in mind that we've had millions of years of evolution encouraging us to pay attention to painful stimuli and mostly tune out pleasant ones. It's a hell of a lot more useful to notice there's a bear in the cave than to notice a new pleasantly gentle breeze.
These days, we probably experience multiple app updates every day. Most of them are totally unnoticeable. A few are probably slight improvements. Every now and then one gets a nice new feature but you aren't sure if the feature is new or you just never noticed it.
Updates that get worse are actually pretty rare. That's partially why you notice them so much: they stand out from the sea of innocuous changes you're bathed in every day.
You must be talking about cellphones or something. I know all of the updates that I'm getting on my machine, and they're usually improvements (unless GNOME.) I'm often expecting them. It's not any more than I was getting five years ago.
If you're talking about web services and applications, most major changes or announcements are bad.
Even GNOME usually has improvements, it's just the changes that make it worse can really stick out, and linger, and affect usability in major ways. For example, you should switch to Nemo because Nautilus has problems.
I've been using Picasa since version 1 but I disagree that G+ Photos is worse. I think the service has got quite a bit faster, smoother and easier to use over the last year.
It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels utterly justified.
How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users. Seems like such a naive idea these days.