the reason these things work is because they use a datacenter in your city. Thats why low latency. You'd have to have doctor in the same locality, which is not what I think you are thinking.
You're being a bad customer. This isn't how it works. When it breaks, you take it to the Apple Store and pay your dues. Apple will not succeed if people like you try to game the system.
This is true. I hint to it in the terms, but I didn't want to break character too much. Basically, I take precautions for both, but it's a one-man side-project, so caveat emptor. Also, images are obviously public (though unlisted), so it's not meant for sensitive data storage.
- Signal is a lot less "polished" - FB has spent tons more resources on making a slick streamlined easy to use interface. Even though signal looks similar its missing all the little things.
- there is no easy to use backup. Whatsapp can backup to google drive or icloud and restore it on another phone. Signal you have to figure out how to deal with and transfer your backup file[1]. This isn't easy for regular folks, Signal needs to be able to connect to cloud storage (preferably of your choice).
- Whatsapp deals with and displays media better/faster
- calling works better. last time I checked whatsapp has easy group video and audio calls, Signal had neither.
There is actually lots more. I prefer the idea of using Signal over whatsapp, but I found it not close enough yet. Especially for non-techy ppl.
Personally, I don't want backups. I don't want to worry whether some joke I made 10 years ago would look bad in a future data dump. If messages could self destruct after three years that would be lovely
I personally will never user a personal messaging app without long term backups. In twenty years there I will have many fond memories of my past conversations. I see it (almost) no different from keeping old letters.
It feels much worse to use than both Telegram or WhatsApp, both on Android and on OSX. I had installed it on iOS and Android and uninstalled within 10 minutes of trying to use it. That is how bad my user experience was.
My main complain is that whenever I start the desktop client after few days, it takes forever to load the old messages. I'm not sure, but I think it tries to download all messages and attachments before showing the UI, which can be potentially made faster by first trying to get the messages from person I'm trying to talk to and downloading attachments after text messages (Not sure about implication to security protocol here).
I had issues with lag and dropped packets when I was calling from Europe to South America with Signal about 6 months ago. I was really cheering for Signal (still am) and had suggested we try it, but it failed quite quickly. We moved the call back to WhatsApp within a minute or two, and had no problems whatsoever.
So at least in my mind WhatsApp is still much more reliable.
As someone who designed a UI graphics stack almost from scratch, making a non-laggy UI has to be done from day 1, working with the EE's all the way up to the top most software stack.
It is hard, and any misteps along the way can doom everything. A single bus without enough bandwidth, not reserving enough CPU time for UI code, to not ensuring end to end performance of the touch system, any mistake and the UI will be sub-par.
The UX also needs to be informed by the hardware capabilities. Even simple things like whitespace around elements being scrolled can reduce HW load.
Honestly the animations don't look too bad, their touch layer however, it looks rather questionable. Doing touch right is a difficult task, it has taken modern smartphone platforms years to get latency down to where it is just barely visible. Now days early gesture recognition involves some amount of ML training that will a touch gesture recognizer that runs on the device, the recognizer is customized per model of touch panel/sensors. (Alternatively, one piece chips that do all of this for you exist, popping out already recognized gestures, they may or may not give better results, I haven't poked around in this space for a few years.)
On top of that, the touch panel needs to be running at a high enough refresh rate, and the entire UI needs to prioritize touch events over almost everything else! Audio Output > Video Playback > Touch Events == UI Updates > Rest of the world
Last system I worked on, touch events could be delivered to the UI up until the moment painting started, painting was capped at ~20ms (IIRC), running at 30fps.
The worst edge case saw 2 frames of latency before the UI responded. Average was around 1 frame of latency.
The other thing I'd have recommended they do for a v1 product is v-sync at 30FPS, and base everything off of that. A smooth 30fps is better than dropping frames at 60fps.
Treat it like a video game, you have a CPU budget in which everything must get done. The rest of the system must be running at a low enough CPU load that the render target can be hit every single frame.
I'm sure the amount of work that went into it must be huge (creating something like that from scratch is indeed a daunting task) but I wonder if this video really does them any service, your average human being is just going to see a crappy and laggy interface that will remind them of bootleg smartphones from 10 years ago.
On the technical side of things I wonder if the lag is due to the lack of hardware acceleration or if it's because of a very unoptimized early build. If it's the former it'll fix itself when they integrate the GPU, if it's the latter then it's slightly more worrying from a code quality perspective.
Beyond that the interface looks like pre-alpha status (most of the widgets look like placeholders, glitches everywhere etc...) and they want to ship that in 6 months? I hope that early PureOS adopters are ready for a very rough launch, this is going to be quite a ride...
This will be the downfall of this device. The kind of work required to provide a UI experience that even remotely resembles that of modern smartphones is a monumental task. It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind: the folks who have the time, interest and ability to do this work are not interested in using the platform.
> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind
Umm, what? Linux desktop is considered by far to be the most efficient and responsive desktop user interfaces there are. We have DEs that run on 10 year old hardware with no delay and even tilling window managers that are as efficient as you could ever get with todays hardware.
Sure they are not average Joe friendly but to attack it's efficiency and responsiveness is preposterous.
If they are smart, they will have their margins adjusted to support a niche device. There are a few people (including myself) that are willing to sacrifice a beautiful UI for all the good things that go along with a user-respecting OS.
Also, they have a lot of time. I have made a few UI's myself back in the DOS days, before they were always readily available. First I would make it work, then I would make it look good.
> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind
Behind what? I've been a daily linux user for the last decade or so, I've always felt the desktop experience was superior to to Windows and Mac. At least Gnome 2/3 has been.
I agree that the device looks like trash. But what's wrong with desktop linux? We have compositors, hardware acceleration from nvidia and AMD, and WMs that are just as good, if not better, than windows. What more could you want?
Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes, working suspend-resume, reliable WiFi, reliable auto mount of USB storage, and easy file sharing over LAN for starters.
None of these things was I able to achieve on my ThinkPad even 3 years ago when I last gave Linux a try.
I mean, I’ve been using ThinkPads for years and have always ran Linux on them, and personally haven’t had any problems with them. ACPI, touchpad, screen, audio buttons, all worked out of the box or were just a few package installs away.I don’t like auto-mounting of drives, but I know it’s pretty easy to setup with hotplug. WiFi drivers are very good at this point, supporting pretty much any WiFi cards in any laptops. File sharing over LAN can easily done with Samba or SSHFS.
Linux has pretty good drivers at this point, and in my experience, often better and more complete than Windows.
Not saying you’re lying or incompetent or anything, but I do think you had a very atypical. Maybe you’re not familiar with Linux? Not trying to put you down, but maybe I find that Linux works Because I’ve been using it for over 15 years at this point.
I'm sure I could have got most of those things working by fiddling with fuse or xorg.conf or some other silliness but I don't count that as "working".
The number of times I've had network manager simply refuse to connect after opening the laptop lid makes me think we're just living in parallel universes.
I don’t use a network manager, and I don’t run a DE, I just have a simple window manager and the command line. Btw, I use Arch Linux which is of much higher quality than Ubuntu or whatever.
> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind
You really can' fault desktop linux at least performance-wise. I have ~3ms input latency in vim on xterm. Good luck beating that on windows, or even a mac.
The reason linux on desktop lags behind is simple - 99% of desktops and laptops come pre-installed with either windows or macos.
Personally, I couldn't care less about animation. Remember when Windows used to only show a frame when you were dragging a window around or resizing it? That was fine.
The lag in that video is about the same as my cheap Moto G phone. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I just want a phone that I can trust isn't spying on me 24x7.
I agree; I think this thread and a couple similar threads (basically repeating the same objection) are vastly overrated. Not spying + hardware and software under user control is far more important than whatever someone considers lagging video or anything that animates, particularly for a device people insist on calling "phones". I might prefer no animated GUI.
