AI Is Becoming a Band-Aid over Bad, Broken Tech Industry Design Choices
AI Is Becoming a Band-Aid over Bad, Broken Tech Industry Design Choices
After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
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We have been trained to hoard apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any intuitive or easy way to organize them. And their solution isn’t to make things more organized or usable. No, our technological overlords have decided that disorganized chaos is fine as long as they can provide an automated search product to sift through the mess.
Ugh. Who's the teen writing for Scientific American?
This same complaint was made back in the oughts about search. "Everyone should just categorize and properly tag documents!"
Turns out users hate that.
I've actually tried to do that with pictures/art, but none of the tools I have to do so make it easy. The Windows photo viewer from Windows XP, which I can't seem to get anymore, was actually pretty okay at it.
But the truth is that even then it required more effort than I was willing to put in, and I was never able to anticipate every tag I would eventually want. If I didn't feel like tagging something the moment I saved it, it generally never got tagged.
At this point an AI to do it would be amazing. I have thousands and thousands of pieces of potential character art, but when I want something with specific features it's not easy to find.
I don't blame you. Even in a professional setting tagging is mind numbing and tedious. The only difference is without tagging you might miss an image that can be licensed and the business opportunity that needed it.
You should still be able to use the photo viewer:
https://winaero.com/how-to-enable-windows-photo-viewer-in-windows-11/amp/
(Unless I misunderstood and there was a photo organization tool in XP that I forgot about)
The one that can still be enabled is still not the original version that had the tools I'm thinking of; I've tried several guides to re-enable it and it does give me an older photo viewer, but never quite the one I had back in XP.
Windows is fairly good at running old EXEs. Trying spinning up an XP vm and just yanking the old photo viewer.
Imma jus leave this here: https://www.acdsee.com/en/index/
I don't even organize my physical mail. Ain't no way I'm organizing my email.
The time spent manually organizing things was low hanging fruitb to automate away. I'm glad it's mostly unnecessary now. The need to manually organize apps is the single biggest reason I never switched to iOS. (The search feature really doesn't eliminate that need, IMO, whereas on Android it's never been important).
You pretty much don't have to do that now on iOS either. They have the "App Library" feature which is similar to the drawer in android, I think (very little experience with Android.)
But yeah the general argument of "I want to do all of this tedious organization" eventually just scales back to "let me enter my own goddamn 1's and 0's."
Ooh, I'll take a closer look at my iPad later (I don't use it much; it's from my job for testing purposes).
Do all apps still appear in the home screen by necessity? On Android, I keep my home screen limited to just one page of apps, with everything else in the alphabetical drawer. In my past experience on iOS, I really hated how cluttered my home screen got. At one point I had like a dozen pages on my home screen. Uninstalling apps then left it all in disarray unless I sunk a lot of time into manually organizing it.
No you can set it now so that by default apps only appear on the library rather than the home screen. I do pretty much the same as you describe - 1-2 pages of apps, then the rest for app library. For a bonus tip, one thing I've pretty much also done since the beginning of time is have a "home" page, a "work" page, a "travel" page, an "entertainment" page (or use folders instead of pages) but since you can create Focus modes and tie that to locations, times, and a bunch of other things, and you can also tie pages to focus modes, it allows me basically to pick up my phone that has a home screen catering to the mode I'm in without ever really thinking about it.
Ugh. Who’s the teen writing for Scientific American?
Note that it's an opinion piece. It simply expresses the opinion of the author.