Web 4.0 the desktop!!!
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Oh look GoToMeeting has another update. Whee. I wonder what dumbshit they've got in store this time? I mean, after all, it is vitally important to continuously update an application that works perfectly, right?
Keeping in mind these are the same people who thought it was a good idea to change the notification sounds they've been using since forever. As in-- when you started a conference, and no one had joined yet, it would make an 'on hold' sound like BLONG. And when someone joined, it made a sound like "DLEEBOOP". So you could easily have the "on hold" noise going in the background and effectively ignore it-- it'd just be white noise. And then a different noise would play and you'd know someone had joined. But now everyone who had that ear-muscle memory is fucked, because you are now constantly hearing a sound that triggers the "someone has joined" reflex. And you ignore the actual "someone has joined" sound. Fucking idiots.
Anyways, I go to start a meeting-- and again, keep in mind, this is the desktop app. And what do I see?
http://i.imgur.com/fa3q8qW.png
Just look at that quality. A background that isn't 100% width or height of the container-- and that isn't even centered in the container-- and whose inner widgets aren't centered either. The spinner isn't centered to the inner box OR the window.
And the widget stays on screen a good 15-30 seconds, instead of opening instantly like it used to. Why? Well, because it used to open a local WinForm. Now it must be opening a CLOUD-ENABLED IOT WEB 4.88 WEBFORM WITH AJAX.
How do I know it's doing that? Well...
http://i.imgur.com/wfYUrA7.png
Because they fucked up that implementation, too.
So now I have to wait extra long, for a form that barely works, which has replaced a WinForm that used to work 100% perfectly-- all so the input form could look more like a tablet, even though this is explicitly a desktop application.
Could it be any better? Well, of course it could. They could make it a flat form so it takes me a while to even figure out that "New Meeting" is an input box and not a label. Because why use native widgets?
http://i.imgur.com/xHOQxnd.png
And even putting aside all the "omfg borders must cause cancer or something so let's not use them" mentality, they've fucked up the UI even more. Here, let me focus on the time input:
http://i.imgur.com/hJI0YCN.png
The whole time highlights. That must mean it's a dropdown list for selecting the start time. Right?
FUCKING WRONG. It's a drop down list that lets you select AM/PM. Even though the whole thing is higlighted, there's actually two fields. So if your first thought is to hit the dropdown button, you now only see AM/PM. Which means there's a 50% chance you just clicked that for no reason.
Fine, I'll click 2:00 itself. hmm, nothing happens. I guess that's because they got rid of the existing "time is a dropdown" widget, and replaced it with a plain textbox. So I have to actually type in the time, which is more work since I have to type in 3:00 (with the colon). I can't type 3. I can't type 300. Fuck.
Fucking useless brainworm-fucking UI designers need to die.
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@Lorne-Kates "PM" isn't even correctly aligned vertically.
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@Lorne-Kates
Citrix! Bringing you Enterprise-grade shit since 1999!
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@loopback0 said in Web 4.0 the desktop!!!:
@Lorne-Kates "PM" isn't even correctly aligned vertically.
That's okay, neither is the calendar icon. Which is why the bottom few pixels are cut off.
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@Lorne-Kates
Also, it probably works just fine if you have FireFox Current installed, but it only had FF22's rendering engine available to hook into
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@Lorne-Kates said in Web 4.0 the desktop!!!:
That's okay, neither is the calendar icon. Which is why the bottom few pixels are cut off.
Yeah but that bugs me way less because it's an icon and it's less obvious it doesn't align to the others.
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@loopback0 said in Web 4.0 the desktop!!!:
@Lorne-Kates "PM" isn't even correctly aligned vertically.
Ah, there was a reason for my **twitch**. Just hadn't pinned it down yet...
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These UI issues aside, I feel like one of the few people on Earth who doesn't consider GotoMeeting to be a horrible piece of shit. I think it's because the bar on conference call platforms is so low for me, I consider GotoMeeting to be the pinnacle of good conference call software because I've had such bad luck with the others, and I ignore all of its shortcomings because of it.
My company does frequent GTM calls, often internationally, and with different vendors and customers, each with their own weird proxies and networks, and I very rarely have issues with screen sharing or voice, and when I do, it's frequently an external problem like the Internet connection being generally sluggish or a crap headset. That alone makes it better than 99% of the other platforms in my experience.
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@The_Quiet_One
From an internal user perspective, I like the Skype for Business conferencing feature better (mostly because its Outlook integration doesn't shit the bed every few weeks).But once you get down to the nitty gritty of actually making Skype Meetings work for external users, all bets are off. Especially when you inherit a system that the previous guy did as a hobby project in between
real projectspaying customers.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Web 4.0 the desktop!!!:
I feel like one of the few people on Earth who doesn't consider GotoMeeting to be a horrible piece of shit.
GTM is actually very good at what it does. It just seems that Citrix is doing everything in their power to design around that.
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So that explains SSDS... it isn't just a piece of crap, it's Web 4.0! @SpectateSwamp really is a visionary genius!
(No, I don't know why I am saying this, other than the juxtaposition of "Web 4.0" and "Desktop".)
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@izzion said in Web 4.0 the desktop!!!:
@Lorne-Kates
Citrix! Bringing you Enterprise-grade shit since 1999!If I look back on my early days in business, and if I am brutally honest, I think a good portion of my success was that I was smart enough to be able to work with Citrix products but still too dumb to realize just how shit they are.
Sadly, I am still paying for that ignorance and we are still supporting XenDesktop installs.
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Looks like there's some script or event which triggers after the webview has navigated somewhere, and which causes the WinForm to resize the embedded IE component. Shoddy, but the devs and QA people probably never caught it because they test on localhost and probably only see the spinner for a split second.
Now, about the dialog itself..
WHAT THE FUCK. Who designed that? Why do nearly all of those inputs look like they are disabled, or just labels? Why is the alignment fucked up everywhere? Why do the "Audio", "Co-organizers" and "Password" buttons look that crappy, are they supposed to represent tabs or something? If they do, why don't they look like a proper tab interface?
