If they want more credit, they should make it an on switch

For even more credit, they should leave all the extra telemetry and other crap out of the download, so it's only a megabyte or so, instead of 150MB, and let people opt-in to downloading that junk.

You're assuming most of that space is taken up by telemetry software. 100MB of that could easily just be the UI toolkit!

What's wrong with using the UI the OS provides?

Not cross platform, difficult to theme or style to Logitech brand guidelines?

Do the users care about that? Or just the management? And mouse drivers aren't typically cross platform anyway, right?

Users: maybe, but probably not many of them.

Management absolutely cares, they have a whole design guidebook why wouldn’t they follow it??

And the drivers likely aren’t cross-platform in the sense of “the windows DLL is just dead code on a Mac”, but the UI of the software can be the same across platforms. The executable is likely a tiny bit of platform-specific launcher code and then cross-platform electron fun.

> they have a whole design guidebook why wouldn’t they follow it??

So the same question applies: yes they have a whole design guidebook but why ? Does the users care ? My opinion would be that most don’t and that those who care are horrified by all those apps with all their own guidelines.

Computers used to be (and I’ll be giving credits to old windows for that) « once you learned the system/ergonomics you only have to adapt to each program’s feature set » and is now « relearn everything on my app and btw it’s not compatible with other apps except our partners ».

I mean as an example, we pretty much had a working standard in how to discover features of a program (the menu bar) and how to give back data to the user (saving and opening files). Just knowing those patterns made you apt to discover most of programs features.

I’m not saying it was perfect or intuitive, but it was not hard and OSes could have improved that.

But we collectively ditched that for, it seems, easier deployment on the web (which is not something Logitech is concerned by, btw) and since there is no UI framework, why not hire UI designers to write UI guidelines ? It’ll make marketing guys happy anyway.

I’m sorry I recognize that I’m a little salty on this topic but I do feel like the industry stole something important to the users, or at least if I’m honest, to me, which is the basic knowledge of how to use a computer.

Oh I want to be clear that I’m not defending the use of the design guide in this context - I think style guides are fine for certain things, but not necessarily desktop apps like these. I get that it’s Electron, and so in theory the same components could be shared to their web experience and to other installers etc but I don’t know if they do that.

I was one of those people who thought XP/ME went too far (im a System 7 Stan tbh, but 98 was solid enough). And then when Office got the ribbon I was so unhappy lol. I don’t like a lot of how MS has embraced trendy UI, outside of windows phone which I actually really liked (and that made sense, it was a system that didn’t have much to go on, and they weren’t living up to any expectations outside of “be different than Apple and be better than Google”. I will def be salty here because MS had a great opportunity with windows phone and just blundered it. For every solid idea they have, it feels like they fumble 10000 other actually decent products).

I personally really appreciate that Apple has largely not changed the fundamentals of their OS in regards to the dock and menu bar - sure the dock is “new” as of OSX but that’s going on what, 20 years old now? At least? And the menu bar has been with us since always. Using native MS apps in 11 and not having a visible File menu drives me bonkers.

> I’m sorry I recognize that I’m a little salty on this topic but I do feel like the industry stole something important to the users, or at least if I’m honest, to me, which is the basic knowledge of how to use a computer.

I feel this. For the company I work for, we have an A11y group that is comprised of representatives from different departments (across engineering, product, marketing, and design) that meets regularly. Our component designs focus on accessibility, discoverability, and usability. If we are going to say “well we want a blue button with a drop shadow” instead of whatever the browser and OS do, fine, I’m going to make sure it’s still USABLE and accessible dammit. /rant

Because why wouldn’t we embed the whole Chromium runtime to show the user a couple of checkboxes?

“It’s cross-platform!” - someone good at selling to the Logitech suits

That would be great if it were cross platform.

I use Solaar because there wasn't a Linux application.

To be honest I would be more inclined to install their driver if it did not include ugly Logitech branding and respected a bit more the OS it runs on. I don’t care about cross platform UI in an application for mouse settings, it’s simply not my problem. It has 1 window, FFS. How hard is it to use native toolkits?

To be fair, most people just absolutely don't care about this stuff as long as it does its job, so it makes sense for them to use a cross-platform toolkit here.

You have to remember that, besides the extra engineering effort, having a separate, native UI for each platform also increases the support burden for dealing with people having issues with the program. Companies the size of Logitech bend over backwards to reduce their support costs, so it shouldn't be surprising that they opted for the path of least resistance here.

iirc they shipped an electron app the last time I used it on Windows. The 150 MB are likely just 30% Chrome, 40% graphics (their UI is fancy and has images of connected components) and, 10% bundled js code.

Last time I looked at Corsair they had a DLL for each device, it added up.

I think it's implicit that a switch has to be on/off. Do you mean opt-in rather than opt-out?

Not parent, but yes.

A switch that must be turned on (opt-in), rather than a switch that must be turned off (opt-out).

That would imply there’s a third, indeterminate state prior to opting one way or another (which is the ideal situation - ask on install with a non defaulted option)

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice’s preoccupation with a hand‐held computer game. “Excuse me”, he said, “may I examine it?”

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. “I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium and Hard”, said the master. “Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human.”

“Pray, great master”, implored the novice, “how does one find this mysterious setting?”

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot.

And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

— The Tao of Programming, Geoffrey James

No, prior to opting the state is off. This is what opt-in means.

Asking on install just gives room to implement a dark pattern and trick people into opting in undesiredly anyway.

Or you can just use Solaar :) and don’t feel bad about it, you already gave Logitech money for the freaking mouse.

A reasonable third, and default, state could be collect diagnostic data locally. The user can choose to send the diagnostic data if they have issues with the device. After all, the term diagnostic data implies that it is being used for troubleshooting.

I think, today, that state is the "Remind me later' button state.

An off switch that will get ignored for some data, re-enabled on some future update anyway, and forgotten about next time you reinstall.