That’s great and I’m glad that works for you.
But most people buying portable gaming handhelds are not doing that. And the people looking for things like that are likely landing closer to a surface or standard laptop, which Windows already supports well.
I don’t know that Microsoft has any business trying to make Windows support these devices better…
Windows is entirely built around two pillars:
Portable game machines are not an enterprise product. Nor do you care about broad hardware support or upgradability. Nor do you care about plugging in your parallel port printer from 1985. Nor do you care about running your ancient vb6 code to run your production machines over some random firewire card.
Windows’ goal is entirely oppositional to portable gaming devices. It makes almost no sense for them to try to support it, as it’d go against their entire model. For things like these, you want a thin, optimized-over-flexible, purpose built OS that does one thing: play games. Linux is already built to solve this problem way better than Windows.
But, Microsoft will probably be stupid enough to try anyway.
Now we just need that GFX software from intel / amd / nvidia that is available on windows, taking advantage of that newly supported hardware
Stop, you’re making me too hard. I might be able to like, ditch Windows if that happens.
It’s cold and has really shitty “inter item” contrast. I don’t get how they think this is an improvement.
Sure, it screenshots better. It makes a “nicer” picture in isolation.
Problem is, maps is a tool not a piece of art. I don’t care how “good” it looks. I care how effective it is at being a tool. If you can make it look better while still functioning, sure, no gripes here.
But the road contrast with the background has been severely increased. Problem is, roads are a step to getting somewhere. I’m not looking for roads. I’m looking for POIs. And when navigating, I’m looking for which road to take. Giving every road contrast against the background means everything else has less contrast against the roads.
I find it much harder to sift through seas of pins. But more importantly, the navigation “path” highlight has such little contrast to roads it’s even harder to discern where I’m supposed to be going at a glance. Previously there was a high contrast blue line against literally everything else so I could look away from the road and in a split second know which way it wants me to head.
Now I have to try to pick the deeper slightly contrasted line out of a sea of lines which are all in high contrast against the background. And they’re all even tinted blue. This removes two of your brains subconscious cues for picking these things out and it makes it significantly harder to discern without really paying more attention to the map. Which is literally not how navigation should work. Navigation is meant to be glanceable.
Honestly, this pushes me more to look for alternatives. But every other competing product is a joke and Google Maps still has the biggest feature set by miles so it’s pretty futile.
In my experience the contrast for navigation is worse. Unless I’m getting some separate A/B test or something, I don’t see how you could argue it’s better.
The background is essentially the same brightness as before, but roads are MUCH MUCH darker. And the nav is slightly darker. The route has less contrast with the roads around it and I’ve had a really hard time deciphering this on a dashboard/in sunlight. I really hope I’m just in some shitty A/B test or something.
I find that the opposite. There’s more contrast on everything. Previously, contrast of the path to follow made if clear where to go. Now that doesn’t have as much contrast from the rest so it’s harder to glance and see where to go. All of the roads stand out. But I don’t care about all of the roads. I care about the ONE road I’m trying to follow and that doesn’t stand our from the rest. That’s all I’m trying to “pick out” while driving and now that is harder.
It feels like “overly” busy because literally every item on the screen is trying to pop out from the background. That’s just noise and over attention grabbing. I don’t care about the 7 streets I’m passing popping out and grabbing attention. I barely even need to know they’re there, so the low contrast made sense.
I just strongly disagree with this. In light mode, roads are way more blaring. That makes them easier to see against the background. But makes it harder to see everything else. IE, if I drive to a 5 way intersection, it’s extremely difficult to tell which road is highlighted as the path for me to take. Because everything stands out, the actual DIRECTIONS don’t stand out from everything else.
I dont care about seeing roads that aren’t the ones I’m taking very well. While navigating, all I care about is where I’m going and maybe like counting how many cross roads or intersections till I turn. When I’m searching for things, I don’t care about roads, I care about seeing balloons. And as EVERYTHING has more contrast, the results/selections don’t stand out as much and it’s harder to read.
I do wonder if maybe this becomes a rural vs city sort of thing. Maybe that’s not a big problem with rural driving and fewer roads? But harder when there’s a bunch of roads in one place?
This shit is so much harder to read. I don’t understand how this is getting approved. Even driving navigation feels like a torrential horde of vomit with all the high contrast streets sliding by.
Sure, it might make for prettier screenshots, but it’s actually functionally harder to read, as the important/highlighted elements just don’t stand out as much when literally everything “stands out”. I feel like this has been a continued trend from Google Maps and this might be the final straw for me… I’ve already noticed having a harder time distinguishing turns.
I couldn’t agree more. Except maybe bits of the time line - it was barely beginning a decade ago - I’d say the past like 7 years have been bad though.
I really hate the move away from this. I don’t give a flying fuck whether the icons mismatch - I want to be able to find them quickly and that’s objectively harder when they’re all the same shape. Brains process shape/silhouette extremely quickly and subconsciously and its much easier to find “weird envelope with an M poking out” and “crinkled up map” than it is “dot on the GREEN squircle”.
I’ve been using custom launchers forever anyway, and I just use icon packs of the old style, but as that style gets older, it becomes harder and harder to match every app icon.
I never said anything about app icon color. But that is another kind of silly problem that it even exists. But being able to circumvent the problem by replacing the system doesn’t mean the system is fine. It’s just making the first party solution worse and worse.
It’s bland and boring. Why would you ever want all the apps on your phone to be the same color? I understand some amount of consistent theming and styling so you know what things are buttons, where to find certain settings, etc. But Material You pushes them all to use the same exact color theme. This makes it harder to distinguish between Messages, Chat, and every other messaging app that takes on the the Material You coloring. They’re all text, in the same font and color, on blobs that are the same color, with buttons that are all the same icon sets… Can I figure it out? Sure. But it all blends together. It’s bland. And soulless. It’s in a way “commoditizing” design and making everything samey. This is especially drastic after Material Pre-You was extremely heavy on color. Go look at all the old Material design stuff. Everything is vibrantly showing brand colors.
It’s dull. Holo was really dull. Material brought bright and saturated colors. Material You pushes back faded, low saturation, mushy, dull colors. Everything feels “dead”, especially in contrast.
Everything is the same squishy shapes. Android has a long history of things like app icons having distinct shapes and emphasis on outlines and sillouhettes. This is shoving back even harder on “everythijg is a circle or a squircle”
Pixel has absolutely butchered features and customization options in order to make way for… Pick a color?
Everything is fat and chunky. Buttons and margins are obscenely large. It feels childish. Material was sleek and efficient. You seems to take space for sake of taking space. It’s wasteful and dysfunctional. More stuff in the notification shade (like brightness) was pushed behind another swipe because they just don’t have space with all the quick settings having gobbled more space despite showing fewer shortcuts. This is just one example, but these things are everywhere.
Google does not take authoritarian control over app design of every app in their store. As such, devs take more time to update their apps. And so many apps just don’t bother for a while. This means every change comes at the cost of fragmentation. And Material You is explicitly pushing for further unification. So it’s inception is actively hurting its purpose. Case in point, skim through Googles own apps - they’re in varying states of migrated, so Googles own first party apps aren’t even consistent.
I understand this design could be appealing on paper, especially if you look at it in a vacuum. Objectively, it’s a pretty good design language. But Android’s previous design language was measurably better. It was objectively more efficient. So the people who have been using it blatantly are shown all the shortcomings. If you buy a new device with it, there’s no context and it seems decent. If you upgrade, tons of the things you use just disappear . Instantly. Which shows its problems much faster.
Google has literally walked backwards here. In many ways. And it’s half done, has problems, is bland, and blatantly less exciting and efficient than the thing it’s replacing.
While I agree cops looking for money to fund their departments is bad, people willfully endangering those around them is objectively worse.
Speed limits are put in place to keep roads safer. Tickets are a thing meant to incentivize you not to do the dangerous thing that can hurt those around you.
This is literally a tool to help you avoid said punishment, which assists you in doing the dangerous thing with impunity.
I agree cops can be bad. I agree they sometimes are searching for a problem. I agree they often cause other problems.
But speed limits literally and undeniably enforce safety. Something that allows you to circumvent them without recourse literally assists people in doing the unsafe thing.
Sure, cops can be bad. But speeding is unsafe and therefore bad too. It’s not black and white.
You know how else you can stop cops from making this money back? Without assisting in dangerous road behavior? Literally obeying the fucking driving laws. They can’t give you a speeding ticket if you’re not fucking speeding.
I really don’t understand how this shit is even legal.
“Tell me where I can and can’t break laws that were literally put in place so I don’t accidentally fucking kill someone”.
It’s literally built to help people avoid the punishment made to keep people from doing something that’s literally dangerous to the people around them.
What do you mean? Is it a bad idea to prompt people driving vehicles moving over 70 mph as to whether there was a speed trap? But then how will the next people know that need to stop speeding for the next couple miles before they can speed again without recourse?
If you’re an engine developer, it’s a reasonably common problem.
If you’re a game developer using a cross platform engine, it’s pretty uncommon, as the engine developer has already accounted for most of it.
If you’re somewhere in the middle, it’s probably somewhere in the middle.
It surprises me how many indie devs avoid some of the higher level / more popular engines for this reason alone. But I assume they just must enjoy that sort of stuff much more than I.
Yeah, I agree. They’ve made slight shifts over the years, but I feel like this looks enough like a different maps app.
I also feel lots of pieces of it include bits of the apple design that make their maps harder to read.
Google doesn’t need to change their color pallete, they just need to stop tossing 400 advertising pins everywhere you look.
There’s nothing “natural” about “natural” scrolling. It feels unnatural as fuck.
So please no.
Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn’t understand “clean” code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.