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Chrome 65 Arrives With Material Design Extensions Page, New Developer Features (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 65 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions in this release include Material Design changes and new developer features. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Chrome 65 comes with a few visual changes. The most obvious is related to Google's Material Design mantra. The extensions page has been completely revamped to follow it. Next up, Chrome 65 replaces the Email Page Location link in Chrome for Mac's File menu with a Share submenu. As you might expect, Mac users can use this submenu to share the URL of a current tab via installed macOS Share Extensions. Speaking of Macs, Chrome 65 is also the last release for OS X 10.9 users. Chrome 66 will require OS X 10.10 or later. Moving on to developer features, Chrome 65 includes the CSS Paint API, which allows developers to programmatically generate an image, and the Server Timing API, which allows web servers to provide performance timing information via HTTP headers.
Material Design is hideous, unintuitive crap. The fact that one of the biggest companies in the world hasn't got a clue on user interface design speaks volumes about the state of modern computing.
I've run into this in every engineering gig I've ever had, and you'd think the bean counters would figure this out by now.
The biggest single reason Apple's market cap is bonkers is because of the iPhone. And the biggest reason the iPhone was such a success was because the phone *was* so easy your grandma could use it. (aside: even my 14 year old can smell the feature creep in iOS since Jobs died). Hence, great UX = bonkers market cap. It's not the *only* reason, but it's the *biggest* reason. iPhone hasn't been the fastest, most feature-rich phone in awhile, and it hasn't mattered one fucking bit.
The problem is: good design is like pornography, you'll know it when you see it. You can't farm it out to engineers, you can't create design documents that people can blindly follow and magically come up with good design. Every time I've implemented a stellar design (using intuition and experience, mostly) my boss wants me to come up with documentation so I can 'teach' the other developers how to do it. Cannot be done.
In my experience, engineering disciplines can be learned by artists: rigor, discipline, logic. They're hard habits to acquire for nonlinear thinkers, but not impossible. Teaching art to someone who thinks like an engineer? Good fucking luck.
That said, material design sucks. It's obvious to anyone with an inkling of art history it was created by a bunch of engineers, and only adopted because of the massive groupthink and FOMO that surrounds web development.