Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting.
When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps.
VS code also falls into this category by the way, albeit less severe.
For notion specifically, the total lack of keyboard navigation within a page (PgUp/PgDown, Space, Shift+Space, nothing works!) as well as the fact that wherever I click I will make immediate changes to the document (even if I just want to deselect some text or so) just makes the editing hugely frustrating, slow, and anxiety-inducing.
Seriously, if one day I wake up and write my boss that I'm outta here, notion and slack (and asana...) are way up there on the list of reasons.
I'm sure you have some efficiency built into your life that makes you more fragile.
(I don't use vim/emacs etc.) But you're saying that running water is a not a good idea because what if you have to go and get water from the well every day when the water stops running. You'd be so annoyed...
> Slack & notion make me close my eyes while typing, just because the delay between key press and pixels lighting up is so long that I get confused. It's like speaking with a 400ms or so echo of yourself being played back. Hugely distracting.
That reminds me of this blogpost [1]. It's definitely possible to optimize the input latency of rich text editors in the browser: they just have to be close to the metal of the 'contenteditable' browser api.
Oh this makes so much sense now, thanks for sharing. I only recently had to look into react for the first time (not a web dev at all) and was shocked by the depth of call trees and render processes for even simple tasks.
No wonder these things are so unusable. But I guess slack know who they're targeting? People who won't notice the latency because when the pixels show up they're still busy finding the next key to press, or trying to find the right button for the text formatting... /s
I feel all of this is why email is dead. It's not because Slack or anything killed email. It's because Gmail (and other web clients) killed email. They made it dreadfully slow to do anything in. Go download Thunderbird. I haven't used it in 10 years, so it could be worse today. But I remember it being a joy to use. Or the Agent usenet/email reader.
It’s funny that I recently started using the Mac desktop mail app and outlook app and they are so quick compared to gmail (or outlook.com).
I had forgotten how nice it was to quickly go through email and remember how quick gmail was when it launched. A colleague said “it’s just five seconds to open and load an email, that’s not a lot of time.” But that adds up.
That’s an extreme amount of time… GMail and Outlook are both horribly slow and I can’t understand how anyone wants to use them. Outlook even manages to be slow with their desktop app. Not as slow as either web app, but still a noticeable delay.
how do you open an email in 500ms even locally on your desktop? do you use spotlight or something to find and open it? asking since even when i am in thunderbird, it takes me way longer than 500ms to open an email
More than 500ms to open an email? One that's already stored locally?!
If that is the case, I advise you check what's taking so long, I get nothing like it with my thunderbird setup.
Given, I disable html formatting where I can, that might make a difference. But even on my 2009 i5 desktop with hdd storage it doesn't take that long to load the actual email.
It takes me longer than 500ms to find that email.
if we are talking about browsing a list of emails already on the screen and i can simply use a shortcut to go to the next email, that is instant in thunderbird/gmail.com
/fastmail.com. that just isn't my use case most of the time.
opening an email is always longer than 500ms, rendering it isn't in any system i use. hence i am not sure what we are talking here. if we are talking opening, then the 3seconds initial bootup of gmail isn't worth talking about imo.
the bottleneck for me at least is always finding the email and thunderbird is by far the worst unfortunately.
Email started "dying" long before GMail even was a thing. AOL and ICQ startet it, Twitter and Facebook continued it and now it ends with Whatsapp, Slack and Discord. And I doubt that Whatsapp/Facebook/Discord are significant faster than Gmail or Slack, so this can't be the reason.
E-Mail is just a transport-protocol, poor in ability compared do other solutions and rather complicated, especially when it should be made safe.
Whenever I read a comment that says "email is dead" I feel it is my responsibility to point out that ~it doesn't have to be this way~
The email standard(s) are great. Powerful, decentralized, and damn near universal. It's just that we live in a world where a Duopoly has taken over most of what we consider to be email.
If this comment resonated with you, I am working on something you might be interested in. Feel free to DM me for details.
When writing longer things on either, I find myself firing up vim to copy paste afterwards, just because it's impossible to get into any kind of flow in these apps.
VS code also falls into this category by the way, albeit less severe.
For notion specifically, the total lack of keyboard navigation within a page (PgUp/PgDown, Space, Shift+Space, nothing works!) as well as the fact that wherever I click I will make immediate changes to the document (even if I just want to deselect some text or so) just makes the editing hugely frustrating, slow, and anxiety-inducing.
Seriously, if one day I wake up and write my boss that I'm outta here, notion and slack (and asana...) are way up there on the list of reasons.