Peter wrote:
Python is a big fashion right now. About the only thing which has stayed constant is PHP This makes the job so unpleasant that most 40+ people (who would otherwise have continued to enjoy writing software into their “old age” if it was in their own business and developing their own products – like I do ) get out of that career ASAP and move into “project management”, or get out totally.
Actually I find it quite pleasant. Nothing would horrify me more than leaving writing software for project management.
Really, it’s Java (and to a lesser extent, C#) that’s been the constant. Well designed languages, that are solid, and easy to write maintainable code in. You can do all the heavy lifting with Java or C#, expose a REST API, and then let a front end guy deal with the trendy stuff. (Or pick something that’s a library not a framework, and do the front end yourself. A combination of something stable like Backbone with Bootstrap means it’s not too bad writing a responsive front end that works on nearly any device, but without getting tangled in a framework which only works well if you’re strictly doing nothing more than the designers envisaged).
The real pain is when you get a 3rd party development company foisted on you to do the front end, who wants to put things in the front end that have absolutely zero business being in the front end… something I am unfortunately stuck with.
Peter wrote:
And the old offline-mapdata programs (Tomtom, Sygic, etc) have lost so many users to GM that they have pretty well been abandoned and don’t run properly on current phones.
And that’s a real shame. The TomTom phone app was really good. Google Maps comes nowhere near close. (When you wrote GM, I thought you meant the satnavs fitted to GM cars, which are worse still. In-car user interfaces are often absurdly bad).
Here Maps still does offline maps (which is still necessary – I don’t want to have mobile data on and potentially pay massive roaming charges abroad).
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Somehow I wonder how these people can survive at all. And those around them…
My question whether I am a technophobe was rather tongue-in-cheek. But as to the real technophobes you are describing, some of their problems are caused by an inappropriate user interface presented to them. Too much of a choice is just as bad as not enough choice. The easiest way to accommodate technophobes on computers was known and described in software development textbooks 60 years ago. It’s a minimalistic interface similar to telephone hotlines: “To see incoming messages, press 1 on the keyboard. To write a new message, press 2…”
The problem is also aggravated by the improper use of interface metaphors and illogical terminology: “if the screen is called a DESKTOP, then why the image on it is called a WALLPAPER?”
GM (google maps) is very smart in the way it utilises the constant data flow from android phones to the Church of Google (same way as IOS devices stream data to the Church of Jobs) to see where traffic jams are. You get a warning based on 10 cars jamming a village on a Greek island where there is a wedding going on. Quite amazing. In fact it probably works even better in “poor” countries because IOS (Apple) device usage correlates heavily with wealth.
But at the same time it is extremely stupid in that it will send you round to the same closed road over and over, because it doesn’t know it is closed and there is no way you can tell it. The UI is designed for utterly thick users, with near-zero config options. We had 3 routes offered in one direction (of which 2 were quite difficult mountain roads) but only 1 in the other direction (a hard one, too) concurrently, with the other two not even displayed on the map (so you could not select them manually – that’s another UI challenge). They also seem to randomise the options offered…
The best satnav ever was Nokia Maps (a program Nokia bought in) which was totally offline and “just worked”. Everywhere, even the smallest Greek islands. But of course no live traffic info, etc, back then. That was 2014. Have things improved? Only in the traffic info, AFAICT. The UIs have got worse, usability-committee-designed for ever thicker people.
The problem is that while it is easy to pick out crappy UIs, deciding what a good UI should look like is not so easy. If you are IT-savvy then having config options is great, which implies that a UI for most people must be functionally crippled. It also means that a UI on any mobile device must be crippled, and indeed they all are, because while one could throw in the config options across multiple screens, almost nobody will dare to do that because they will get accused of intellectual elitism 
We had 3 routes offered in one direction (of which 2 were quite difficult mountain roads) but only 1 in the other direction (a hard one, too) concurrently, with the other two not even displayed on the map (so you could not select them manually – that’s another UI challenge
You can force GM to select whichever route you want by inserting as many waypoints as you want which is done the thick way by dropping a pin on the point of the map you want to use or the elitist way by typing the waypoint name into the box in either Greek or Roman characters.
Ultranomad wrote:
The easiest way to accommodate technophobes on computers was known and described in software development textbooks 60 years ago.
Err, yea, if they actually read the messages. Most of them however have a pop up phobia: The moment a pop up popps up they pop…. and call support to help. It never occurrs to them to read the message! I’ve been called out to such very difficult messages as “Press OK to close this window”. "Thank you for using xxxxx! " with a close button below. “You are trying to send a mail without a subject, do you really want to do that?” with a yes or no button. No would bring you back to the editor, yes would send.
On the phone this is especcially funny. “Help, I got a strange message”. “What does it say?” “HOW SHOULD I KNOW????”, “Err, can you read it to me?” “Erm, can I whatsapp it to you?” followed by a screen picture taken by a phone cam.
Many moons ago, one of the supporters of the company I worked for at the time got the better of one of them. Walking into the office I noticed one lady had her feet in a foot bath. Wondering what this was all about, she said that IT support had suggested it might help her problem, which, to her amazement it had. Having had a suspicion which practical joker could be behind this I asked later. His answer was: “I sent her to get the bucket to help with her photosynthesis, in the mean time I reset her password”. I doubt he’d get past the PC censors these days with that kind of thing though.
Is it technophobia that’s the problem, or that some people have lost the primitive anthropoid urge to try things and notice any improvement?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Err, yea, if they actually read the messages. Most of them however have a pop up phobia:
I actually meant a non-windowed interface. Just text and nothing more, to avoid distractions 
Peter wrote:
The best satnav ever was Nokia Maps (a program Nokia bought in) which was totally offline and “just worked”. Everywhere, even the smallest Greek islands. But of course no live traffic info, etc, back then. That was 2014. Have things improved? Only in the traffic info, AFAICT. The UIs have got worse, usability-committee-designed for ever thicker people.
Nokia Maps does still exist and is now called Here Maps. Besides route planning for drivers, it can also plan routes by public transport (with timetables and connections). Don’t remember about live highway traffic, though.
Thanks for that tip! Installed, and looks great. Nice clean UI, not the “5 year old child designed this with a 5mm marker pen” GM UI
