165 karma · joined January 28, 2020
(Not affiliated with JetBrains in any way)
What year is this? 2010? No, application logs shouldn't reside on servers, and Devs shouldn't need access to servers either.
1. Needs an option to use Firefox as the browser, rather than using Chrome. And an option to open externally or a within the app. 2. Needs an option for the article title link to take me straight to the article. Yep, I could click the link icon, but it's a smaller area and clicking the title is intuitive. 3. When there's no thumbnail, the large placeholder with two letters and a garish background colour feels like wasted space. Either remove the placeholder, or improve the algorithm to insert an image. 4. A zoom slider for the front page grid would be nice. On a tablet there's plenty of layout optimization that could be done. 5. Duplicate link removal, and across different sites/domains/social networks 6. Some trend analysis to determine what's most important to read out of thousands of articles daily
Overall, it's already better than most of the existing feed readers out there IMO. But if you want my money, you gotta have every one of those feature enhancements checked.
Then raindrop.io appeared. It's another one-dev project, but it's like a polished delicious, has working browser extensions, and even it's own mobile app. Worth a look, no affiliation. (Now if only I could figure out whether it's created by the GRU cyber division to gather intelligence )
In my mind, they exist to win business, and provide confidence when clients need it.
A couple of years ago I inherited a software engineering department, near the bottom of a downward spiral shipping 25+ years of VB6 code to customers. Brought in external help, and we spent a year and a half rebuilding a modern version. During that project, I saw the most awful code on a daily basis. I still have nightmares about it!
Things that need love -
1. The UX. The navigation bar, tabs along the top of the chat window, separate chats and groups, ugh. In Slack, the navigation panel is tidy and chats and groups are in one consistent place, the chat header is minimal and functional.
2. Message formatting. Pasting code into a message doesn't automatically change the style to monospaced, and there's no syntax highlighting like in Slack.
3. Pasting a picture or attachment into the chat waits for another ENTER keypress before sending, presumably so that you can add some text alongside the picture. This seems counter intuitive, compared to the behaviour in messaging apps (whatsapp, fb, signal, etc).
4. Experience parity across all versions/platforms. It bugs me that Teams for Web is incapable of video and phone calls. But worse, the Linux version doesn't have feature parity with the Windows version. Useful tools such as remote control and video call background blurring don't exist.
5. More emojis! There are so many times when I've tried to use an emoji and it's just not there. Slack has this pretty well covered, as does every other messaging app out there.
6. @channel usage. If I type @channel, when the message is posted, it's converted to the channel name. So I type "Good morning @channel, just to let you know...", Teams will convert the message to "Good morning General, just to let you know..." - that makes no sense when you're reading it! Who's "General"!?
7. The General channel. WHY?! I can make it read only, I can't hide it, I can't rename it. UGH.
8. Sending a new message. I can type Ctrl+/chat name to start a new message, or click the icon (WHY is right aligned at the top of the navigation pane?). This should be as easy as Ctrl+K name messsage, like in Slack.
9. The linux version seems to run 2 threads, both using around 800mb of RAM. I wouldn't mind so much, but one of threads seems to be just for the system taskbar icon.
But you can see all the CORS issues this is throwing up. Rather than a 100% js app, why not call a function which fetches the content and caches it too? CORS issues begone, and caches too! You don't need an expensive server setup, have a look at AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.