Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is absolutely stunning (and safe, away from the closed area). It's like being on a different planet. If you haven't been to the Big Island and the park, you should add it to your bucket list.
There's actually a very good reason to implement a delay in switching submenus.
Recent versions of Apple's human interface guidelines don't make any mention of it, because those decisions are baked into the toolkit and not under control of application designers, but the earlier editions of Apple's guidelines went into some detail about why and how pop-up submenus were delayed.
1995 edition of Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines:
>pp. 79: Hierarchical menus are menus that include a menu item from which a
submenu descends. You can offer additional menu item choices without
taking up more space in the menu bar by including a submenu in a main
menu. When the user drags the pointer through a menu and rests it on a
hierarchical menu item, a submenu appears after a brief delay. To indicate
that a submenu exists, use a triangle facing right, as shown in Figure 4-36.
The original 1987 version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines can be checked out from the Internet Archive, and should be required reading for serious user interface designers, the same way that serious art students should contemplate the Mona Lisa, and serious music students should listen to Mozart. Even though it's quite dated, it's a piece of classic historic literature that explicitly explains the important details of the design and the rationale behind the it, in a way that modern UI guidelines just gloss over because so much is taken for granted and not under the control of the intended audience (macOS app designers using off-the-shelf menus -vs- people rolling their own menus in HTML, who do need to know about those issues):
>pp. 87: The delay values enable submenus to function smoothly, without jarring distractions to the user. The submenu delay is the length of time before a submenu appears as the user drags the pointer through a hierarical menu item. It prevents flashing caused by rapid appearance-disappearance of submenus. The drag delay allows the user to drag diagonally from the submenu title into the submenu, briefly crossing parent of the main menu, without the submenu disappearing (which would ordinarily happen when the pointer was dragged into another menu item). This is illustrated in Figure 3-42.
>I run into this problem all the time on the Web. Web site designers forget to incorporate a menu show delay, resulting in frustration when trying to navigate around them. For example, let's look at the navigation bar on the home page of The Discovery Channel. Hover over TV Shows, and the menu appears. Suppose you want to go to Koppel on Discovery, but instead of moving the mouse straight downward, the way you hold your arm on the desk moves the mouse in an arc that happens to swing to the right before it arcs downward. You touch TV Schedules and your navigation is screwed up. You have to start over and make sure to move the mouse exactly straight down.
You can even solve the problem with CSS and without JavaScript, by using ":hover":
>This is a fairly old UX concept that I haven't heard talked about in a while, but is still relevant in the case of multi-level dropdown menus. A fine-grained pointer like a mouse sometimes has to travel through pretty narrow corridors to accurately get where it needs to in a dropdown menu. It's easy to screw up (have the mouse pointer leave the path) and be penalized by having it close up on you. Perhaps we can make that less frustrating.
It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company.
What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind.
Edit: Thank you @jonny_eh for the clarification. I can't imagine it feels awesome being a leftover but at least you vested out. "Take the money and leave" is still a bit raw when the founders and researchers are now getting the initial payout + generous Google RSU's.
This issue doesn't get enough attention; apart from the obvious implications on bad UX, I find myself losing interest in a project after realising its broken in so many subtle and non-subtle ways due to the underlying tech. I, like many others, got into programming due to the joy of creating something beautiful and attempting to follow (influencer led) JS trends nearly killed my interest in this field at a time.
Only gripe I have with the tool is that once you've gotten a country right a few times it zooms in too far. I still had no clue where Eritrea was after getting it right like four times. Just got lucky.
But now that the map only shows me three possible countries I can trivially remember which one it was. Ask me again tomorrow while only showing me the full map and I might guess it's in South America.
I have great news for you. The article is also perfectly structured, which means it shows flawlessly on reader mode.
Reader mode is a standard feature on all major browsers on both desktop and mobile. Given you're so vocal about how articles should work by just "displaying the words", I'd suggest that you acquaintance yourself with the one feature that does exactly that.
Thanks to reader mode, you get to concentrate on the message. And we get to keep our joy.
I’ve been a frontend mobile developer for the past 8+ years and have recently worked in tech lead and architecture roles. I’ve shipped and worked on production apps which have thousands of users per day and have helped organisations (corporate and startups) get shipshape. I’m looking for anything that’ll allow me to be exposed to different tech stacks and expand my skillset or I'm looking for anyone that needs a generalist or needs a hand with things. I'm really scrappy :D
I’d need to use DBeaver Pro for the work I do - but they don’t offer perpetual licensing - which is a deal-killer for me (EDIT: I originally incorrectly claimed they didn’t support offline-installs, but apparently they do - but only for installs with a 12-month built-in timebomb: https://dbeaver.com/license-types/ )
It says “No monthly subscription” which really just means “Annual subscription” instead: https://dbeaver.com/edition/
It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth $500/yr - I’d actually be happy to pay $1000 or more - but I absolutely need a pain+hassle-free UX that I can drag around air-gapped networks - and install on a legacy Windows 2003 VM running an ancient build of Sybase and then forget about it for 3-5 years, but be able to RDP-in and know that my DB tooling is still going to be there, unchanged, reliable and dependable.
…whereas subscription desktop software with deeply integrated online accounts and activation and mandatory updates every few weeks (and the occasional account system outage, which ruins everything (looking at you, GitKraken) really really does not work well in those kinds (…my kinds) of environment.
——-
SaaS as a business-model for online services is fine; great, even; and I’m not even opposed to it for desktop software provided that it delivers more value and overall UX quality compared to how-we-did-things-before - but SaaS companies don’t have a solution to the problem of ultra-long-life’d, ultra-dependable, server/system administration tooling.
Can you imagine if Bash or Zsh - or phpMyAdmin - or systemd had to phone-home for a new OAuth access-token every month?
By the time people have accrued medical debt, the thing that was going to change their lives in relation to that debt - the procedure itself - has already occurred. And like others in here are saying, many are just willing to tell hospitals "You can't squeeze blood from a stone" in relation to paying off the debt, so paying it just removes some debt they didn't intend on paying anyways.
Where the problem comes from is that people put off procedures that are necessary because they are afraid of the debt. Those people never get the debt that has to be paid off to begin with, so they wouldn't be a focus of the study. That being said, they're at the very least more miserable because they're not going to the doctor to get treated. They could also be less productive, develop more expensive conditions, or die.
I once visited a sword shop, and only noticed the signs tiled every metre horizontally and vertically across the walls saying "do not touch" when the person I was with told me about them as my fingers hovered mere centimetres from one of the wall-mounted blades.
I also didn't notice the moonwalking gorilla in the famous video clip despite being aware in advance that there would be one.
Why does this seem like such a hard problem to solve for everyone that isn’t Apple, when Apple seemingly solved the Trackpad over a decade ago?
Is this it? An unknown ROI?
>the highly uncertain ROI for trying to align touchpad acceleration has prevented us from proposing a system change to the default Linux settings.
I can only speak for myself, but I gave up using trackpads on anything that isn’t a MacBook many years ago. Very occasionally I’ll try them and have always been disappointed. This prevents me from buying any laptop that isn’t a Mac and prevents me from running any OS that isn’t macOS on a laptop. I can’t be the only person who prioritizes the quality and feel of input devices when choosing a system. If this can make or break sales and adoption, it seems like the ROI would be pretty good. Even if we are just talking about Java app, if I’m using an obviously Java app that feels like a clunky Java app, I’ll usually find an alternative app that doesn’t feel horrible to use.
I’m glad progress is being made, but I struggle to understand why it’s still a problem at all when it’s been so good for so long with Apple. They even sell Bluetooth trackpads for desktops it’s so good.
I vaguely remember a study, long ago, about which professors and assistants did the best work.
They found a correlation between where in the hallway your office was and the quality of your output: when more people were walking by, the quality went up.
The assumption was that output of work was comparable or even slightly higher for the loners, but the relevance and creativity was higher for the more walked by people. Other people pull you back to reality and let unrelated things pop up in your mind
I can't find the study and don't condone management pushing their workforce against trying to get work done. Even so, I do find the result of that study plausible.
I judge boring by how many external dependencies a website depends on, this is not boring. Boring is a server with Postgres (or SQLite). Maybe two servers, in which case you'd need a load balancer (another dependency).
> I write code and run the dev servers (Django runserver & webpack dev server) by using PyCharm. Yea, I know, it’s boring. After all, it’s not Visual Studio Code or Atom or whatever cool IDEs.
He seems a little fixated on calling everything he does "boring", even when uh... using an IDE?
I'm particularly interested to see what Apple does to evolve the OS. Better window management, different kinds of interactions, there's a lot of potential.
But for now it seems the hardware itself isn't quite there yet. Everything from the fit (light seals, straps) to the battery to the displays and lenses could be better.
I just listened to the latest ATP, and even grumpy old man John Siracusa was blown away by the VR experience. I'm sitting out this one, but I'm pretty excited for the second or third gen.
Your comments are straight up factually misrepresenting what happened. There were plenty of news reports early this year that DoJ was preparing to file suit against the merger. I guarantee they were in close contact with Adobe's lawyers, and the normal process here is that Adobe's lawyers/execs come back and say "hold up, let's see if we can make a deal" - that's essentially what happens in the vast majority of lawsuits.
Adobe (and Figma) knew full well this deal wasn't a slam dunk from the beginning.
Quick thought regarding date pickers, specifically:
> Is the look/feel/controls consistent across browsers? (No.) Can we style them to get there? (Also no.)
Assuming you design this website for users. Each users may use a different browser, but they probably use this same browser for all websites they visit. Hence IMO its more important that date pickers are consistent across all websites on 1 browser, then across 1 website on all browsers. (Its of course a different story if you need custom functionality.)
Whether or not it counts as PTSD, I remember it being a stressful time, causing worry that has persisted through to the present. There were the films, of course; When the Wind Blows and The Day After are films I watched (the former was also available as a graphic novel IIRC). I'm not sure about Threads, but I definitely saw The War Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game). The scene with firemen trying to put out a firestorm and being suffocated has stuck in my head.
The Protect and Survive booklet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive) was around to instruct families in how to construct temporary makeshift shelters against nuclear blast. I recall such planning, including watching a film explaining how long the various Protect and Survive shelters might last at different distances from a blast ("The occupants of this shelter will be fine, for 6 seconds until the blast wave hits..." etc. etc).
Military training at school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Cadet_Force) also involved, from time to time, lectures from liaison officers who would remind us of the odds against us in terms of land forces, and how long we might hold out before things went nuclear (should the Warsaw Pact have attacked NATO).
Given that lengthy lists are unachievable, they need to be slimmed down to a manageable and realistic size.
I was reading Ted Turner’s biography yesterday and this advice by his father stood out to me:
[Turner’s father] was having a really tough time reevaluating things and coming up with a plan for the rest of his life. He then told me something I've never forgotten. He said, "Son, you be sure to set your goals so high that you can't possibly accomplish them in one lifetime. That way you'll always have something ahead of you. I made the mistake of setting my goals too low and now I'm having a hard time coming up with new ones.”
His father ended up dying early and right in the midst of trying to sell his company out of fear, which the son Ted Turner wanted to run.
I think his father was basically right in that you shouldn’t set limits on your goals, as you just might achieve them all and not know what to do with yourself. Getting stuck in a local maximum is a very real risk for most people.
It’s better to adopt a mindset that accepts the fact that you won’t quite get everything you want, but what you do get will be vastly more than if you had just settled and “sacrificed for”, to use the author’s term. It’s more of a process-oriented outlook than a goal-achievement one.
It's Apple. Expect that. Their USB-C already has been designed to be DIFFERENT than others even thoigh defeating the EU directive intention. Unless EU rewrite a more stringent USB-C requirement, we will get that new USB-C feature "for first time in computing" by Apple for iphone 15 ultra.
Bluesky feels like a beta. It's missing: DMs, private accounts, gif/video embeds, and any sort of advanced notification controls. They don't have a trust and safety team, and they're using the invite system to slow down their growth because they can't keep up with demand. It's fun at its current small scale, but they aren't ready to be a Twitter replacement yet.
I don’t want to be nosey but given that it sounds like you feel like it’s a paradigm shifting device, and you’ve actually worked on and with the device, I’d be interested to read about your motivations for moving on from Apple/the project when you did if you ever feel like writing about it.
So many questions I’d love to ask you about this, but again, none of my business. Just wanted to let you know I’d upvote that blog post to the moon should you ever decide to write it.
