I pumped gas at a brand new Shell station over the weekend. The controls for the pump was one GIANT touchscreen (I’m talking probably 12 inches wide by 36 inches tall). It was fucking PAINFUL to use. Every touch took 2-3 seconds for the action to happen. Da fuck is wrong with a regular pump and regular buttons that just work!?
Because then they don’t have a display the size of a living room TV to shove ads in your face
And to sell to the station owner when their proprietary hardware breaks. Oh what am i saying, they’re all service contacts these days. So more expensive service conrtacts and the ability to shut them down for non-payment
It should be illegal to connect a touch screen to a computer that runs like a potato. Even computers in the 80s could respond to keystrokes and mouse clicks in real time.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn’t as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
This sucks because I don’t get better hardware just to make up for worse software (not that it even does; a lot of browser-based apps are painfully slow), and some of these devs end up working on weaker platforms that don’t make up for their shitty programming. They might not ever touch the platform it is actually supposed to run on and instead work on a dev machine that is powerful enough to make it look good. It’s possible that neither them nor anyone hiring/managing them realizes that they aren’t the kind of programmer they want.
Though it’s also possible that the programmers are fine and have told their managers that the CPUs just aren’t powerful enough for what they want them to do but some assholes are only looking at the bottom line and have low standards for these kind of things in their own life (my TV is slow, so it’s no big deal that our car interface is slow).
Worst thing is it’s probably less than a $50 difference in cost to switch to something that could handle it fine, assuming it’s not programmed in JavaScript and HTML or slow because it’s backend is on the cloud or some shit like that, which also wouldn’t surprise me.
It seems to be a very popular mindset in software development that efficiency isn’t as important because of how fast hardware has gotten.
How’s this for irony: I was hired at my current job as part of a team whose whole mission is to address performance problems in a large desktop app…that’s written entirely in Typescript!
We used to have a rule in computer system design that if an event would take more than 4 seconds we had to show a “waiting” icon like the hourglass.
Now though, people are sensitive to half a second between tap/click and something happening. Incidentally there’s no reason for a fuel pump control to be slow, even running on a potato. The engineer who designed it wasn’t given time to make it efficient
In Canada it really sucks having to take your gloves off half the year. I hope this gets taken into account when touchscreens on gas pumps are considered.
What do you need a touchscreen for? You just take an appropriate pump (E95, Diesel), fill the fuel and pay at the register.
