As per my other comment, Swiss trains (especially SBB) are not as pleasant as they get credit for. I get a lot that "you know, in other countries it's much worse", and it reminds me of software hosting, where it was normal in the past to be offline occasionally. Then Google et al. came and showed that much more reliability is possible with good engineering. I think there would be a lot of room for improvement.
I disagree. Swiss trains are a delight. They even have trains going up mountains (although some of those cost extra). Public transit in Switzerland was extremely reliable when I was there, and also according to official statistics.
Unlike other commenters, I agree that there are some (arguably significant) things to complain about. The first one is price - tickets are quite expensive. I frequently travel Zurich HB -> Lugano. This is 200km and costs a whopping 120+ CHF round trip. Zurich -> Geneva, Zurich Bern are similarly expensive. However, it's a bit hard to fault them as Switzerland is an expensive country and perhaps the high prices keep the service good.
What I am less able to excuse them for is capacity issues, especially on weekend and Friday trains on popular routes in the Summer. That Zurich Lugano train is packed to the gills most weekends during the summer such that it's standing room only for most of the 2 hour ride. They need to add more trains or at least more cars.
Reliability is not something to complain about. The trains are punctual, that's for sure.
Eh? Just checked in SBB Mobile, Zurich<->Lugano is 68 CHF roundtrip (with Halb-Tax, of course, but if you live in Switzerland, it doesn't make sense to not have it unless you have a GA travelcard) with 2nd class.
I'm a heavy public transport user in Switzerland, and even though it's almost a meme how reliable the trains are, reality is different. Yes, they operate in a way that make the stats look good (x% on time), but they take tradeoff to get there. E.g. they won't await connections if another train is a few minutes late. So you might have to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, or even longer if you're unlucky. And there's the occasional big incident, where you get stuck for several hours. I missed flights that way, even though planning in 3 hours of buffer. There is zero compensation in such cases as long as they bring you to your destination on the same day. Plus, several trains are regularly way too crowded.
They changed the policy maybe 5-years ago about a train waiting for a late train to come in because they found that it added additional delays to the entire system. I prefer the new way.
In my experience, they do sometimes still wait (at least that was the case for a few trips with delays last summer).
(And tbf I'm ok waiting 30min, with Taktfahrplan how much you wait is usually max 1h and often much shorter, my experience in other countries is often hours of delays in case of trouble)
Banks have stupid rules probably made by people who don't understand the matter. A relative recently got victim to phishing and gave away some of his banking details (fake e-banking login screen on a website). After locking the account, the bank said it would only unlock it after the phone got wiped, which obviously doesn't add anything in this situation.
Another pet peeve is that they prevent screenshots simply because they can, and it feels safer. I know, 3rd-party apps which can do screenshots etc., but this is fighting the threat the wrong way. And yes, it's partially the fault of the platform, which could just allow user-initiated screenshots. Or at least make it configurable.
I've done it before on a personal project and I was pretty obsessed with user experience. For example, I changed the way buttons work (because they were natively links with Cordova, which trigger upon tap, not "finger lift", like native buttons). Also, implemented some gestures to e.g. switch between pages (tab-style navigation). While not really in line with system UI (wasn't my goal), I think usability is quite decent.
That's still a bit risky as Arizona might just change its time zone definition on a whim. I'm an engineer on one of the big calendaring applications, and it's mind-boggling how often stuff like this happens world-wide, sometimes short-notice (a few weeks in advance). It regularly gives us headaches.
Agreed, watching the rate of changes to timezone databases will rapidly disabuse you of the notion of any constant. It's rare that a day goes by without an update to some definition somewhere, which is astounding.
A few years back I looked around what options exist for building a cross-plattform app. It should support mobile platforms (at least Android and iOS) as well as the web, properly.
The problem with cross-platform frameworks is that they either focus on a good mobile experience, and web becomes an afterthought, or vice versa, meaning mobile basically embeds a browser. Flutter is one of former; back then the web variant was in alpha and basically just a canvas that couldn't even adjust aspect ratio. Since web had priority for our project (accessability, reactive scaling, etc.), this was a no-go.
We ended up going with Ionic (which is basically Cordova with some components on top). The web experience is tweakable to a low level, and the mobile experience is acceptably good, even if not perfect. And we get to cover 3 platforms with the effort of building for ~1.2 apps (there is some platform-specific work involved still).
I'm not even sure if cross-platform is at all solvable in a perfect way, since the UI patterns between mobile and web are just too different.
Well, to have a perfect-ish solution, you'd have to build a framework with UI elements that map to native elements on each platform. Behavior and styling (e.g. positioning of elements) would need to be consistent, so you'd probably have to reduce functionality to the least common denominator for each possible dimension, or take the burden of implementing compatibility for A on platforms B and C. Web has a legacy of document-based components, while mobile is generally more interactive. There are overlaps nowadays, but staying within those boundaries would be a serious restriction.
On top of all that, you'd need a runtime that works on all platforms and is able to interact with native controls. I think React Native does something like that, but back then when I checked they did not have official web platform support (which is somewhat ironic, but I suspect technical difficulties too).
Years ago I built the same kind of app for Windows Phone 8. I can't find any reference online anymore, though I still have the git repo.
It was motivated by my girlfriend stating that it's hard to understand one's size in the various systems that are in parallel use, at least in parts of Europe. Worst part is that some systems have weird overlaps where not only they use the same "alphabet", but also the homonymous sizes partially cover the same range, but don't match exactly. Therefore it's impossible to exactly convert between sizes, and they should be derived from raw measurements.
Meta: This website has one of the worst and most ridiculous cookie opt-out mechanisms. You are expected to read through a wall of text and follow complex instructions to manually opt-out of each vendor.
Sometimes I have a song stuck in my head when I wake up in the morning, so I started tracking it. There's no text, just a music video occasionally. Not sure if it's interesting to anyone else though. https://morningtunes.music.blog/
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