Just read Nunz’s blog on cloud services and while it doesn’t directly relate to anything in my world, some parts of it definitely struck a chord. Especially the bits about upgrades. This is a particular pet peeve of mine and I have ranted about it before.

I rarely leave anything the way it comes out of the box. Often, I run into programmer assumptions that irritate me or don’t do what I think they should and I end up customising or hacking a lot of the software I use. These are generally minor modifications. I no longer possess the know-how to make big changes but I am pretty good at improvising workarounds.

More often than not, this means something will break when an update comes along. Even if it doesn’t, my overall experience with updates is that they often remove functionality I like and depend on (Nunz’s point), or just change things in ways that make life harder for me. Updates are supposed to be improvements, and sometimes they are. Much of the time, though, they don’t make my life better. Usually they just cause problems that I then have to try to find new solutions for. How is this supposed to make things better?

In general I don’t like updates and I try to avoid them. If I have something that works perfectly satisfactorily for me, why would I possibly want to ‘improve’ it? I have no need or desire for the latest and greatest. If something really is dramatically better, this knowledge soon filters down through sites like Geekzone and I will give it a try to see what it does for me. This has always worked well for me.

So what updates have I rejected recently? Well, the latest Windows 7 updates turned my machine into a BSOD graveyard, so I got rid of them and everything works fine again. Fortunately I had past experience to draw on. Pity the poor user who doesn’t have that advantage.

I just received a forced Shield upgrade from Nvidia. This changed the Home page layout, which wasn’t a bad thing for me, but it also rammed the truly terrible latest Android version of YouTube down my throat, with no option (any more) to roll it back. With the previous version I was able to replace the YouTube mess with the older version 1.3.11, which was still acceptable. Now I cannot. Fortunately the one that comes as a Kodi add-on is infinitely better for my purposes so I have made a shortcut to that instead and disabled the awful Shield one (it can’t be removed altogether).

Another ‘improvement’? Without a word of warning or explanation Nvidia decided to dump the screen recorder. I am not the only one who didn’t appreciate this. For something that costs as much as the Shield does, they sure don’t seem to give a crap about their customers. I use the Shield because the hardware is better. But the software and the thinking behind it is just arrogant sniffing dismissiveness. My workaround here is not to use their interface at all. I have the device set to load Kodi on start-up and I do everything from there with Kodi favourites and a great add-on called Simple Favourites, as well as some other apps. I have also learned my lesson and disabled the upgrade function.

While I was thinking about all this and reading Nunz’s blog, I realised what it is that actually annoys me so much. It is not the endless pointless ‘improvements’. It is not the forced upgrades. It is the simple lack of flexibility. Things now come pre-installed with no or only very limited options to change them. Like the interface design itself, these options are restricted by the imagination of the programmers who create them. Simple, obvious things, like the ability to just f-ing turn something off. You can change recommendations to suit different tastes but you can’t just say no thanks. Quiet, uncluttered, blank screen areas seem to be beyond the comprehension of today’s programmers, though I do at least give the Shield credit for that. Unlike the previous version, this one does allow you to clear most of the clutter, though they don’t make it easy. Youtube is another matter. You can’t just turn something off any more. If you get rid of one thing the screen immediately fills with some other rubbish. Just try picking out your actual subscriptions from all the irrelevant crap. Is this some kind of millennial defect?

That is all I want. I can live with the upgrades and updates if I have to, but give me the flexibility to adjust things the way I want them, not the way Google thinks I should have them, and for godsake let me just turn things off if that is what I prefer. How hard can it be?