Making Software
makingsoftware.com
makingsoftware.com
[1] https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-way-things-work-newly-revise...
Too much name dropping of random pieces without offering any insights why they are needed. You learn much more just skimming through a wiki article.
Would this book work or is it a bit too simple? Does anyone have another book to recommend?
I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.
> Dan Hollick.
> Design, technically.
Blogs about using Figma to create things (like this).
Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.
Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.
There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.
So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.
I disagree. I like justified text on the web as well as in print. To me, jagged right hand side of the text column is more disturbing than uneven spaces between words. So, you cannot universally declare that justified text is an accessibility issue.
Your other criticism I agree with.
That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.
Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:
1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.
2) You're too small of a segment to care about.
But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.
I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.
I feel you. I can't have autocomplete on when I'm coding, partly because having video game stuff happening in my field of view while I'm trying to focus throws me off. I'd rather just remember the name.
Then it would still loop for you, but not negatively impact people who are using reduced motion settings in their browser/OS.
And pegs the CPU and drains the battery.
07 How do you make the illustrations?
By hand, in Figma. There's no secret - it's as complicated as it looks.god damn, that's some patient making animation right there
> This book won’t teach you how to actually make software […] It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work. You don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
It's like there was a shift in goals after the author made the title. Maybe explaining the basics was so much fun, that the initial idea got lost... I also don't think knowing how a crt monitor works is instrumental for people who want to make software. The domain is cool, but it doesn't match the content. whatissoftware.com might be better.
when it is explained how pixel, gpu or llm work, I would at least expect some intro to Von-Neumann-Architecture.
the subtitle doesnt say what the reference manual is a reference for. just that software people might like it.
Subject: how the things used every day by people who design and build software work
Not the subject: how to design and build software
>When will it launch?
> I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd love to get it out before the European summer this year. It's a lot of work to illustrate everything so you might need to have some patience.
When your finger gets close to the [touch] screen it causes a disturbance in the *magnetic* field that the electrodes sense.
A material can affect an electric field without affecting a magnetic field: electrically conductive (versus insulator that won't affect a field so much except via dielectric effects).
A material can affect a magnetic field without much affecting an electric field e.g. ferrites are non-conducting.
A finger changes the capacitance between two "plates" and that is what is detected.
Also the attached drawing shows diamonds but I've only ever seen flat wires myself (when looking closely at touch screens you can sometimes see the transparent sense wires). But I'm no specialist and I don't know how correct the drawing is.
Electric and magnetic fields aren't Independent. Again, I asked about disturbances, Maxwells equations make it pretty obvious that changes in one cause changes in the other.
But yeah, we usually talk about capacitance as an "electrical-only" phenomenon. It's quite weird to se it referred as magnetic.
Don't let the haters get to you. Let him cook people.
> Or maybe you’ve wondered why we call it a Gaussian blur?
Nowhere is Carl Friedrich Gauss mentioned, which is unfortunate. This should really link to the Wikipedia entry for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur.
Also, maybe the author meant to say he started thinking about this book since 1990, too.
Either way the copyright year doesn't matter. You can put anything
From inspecting the DOM it's just animated SVGs but I'm guessing these were authored with some other tool.
Initially I thought these were made with Rive but AFAIK their engine runs on <canvas>.
I was very excited to go to (and link/reference) Chapter 2: Fonts and Vectors but it doesn't seem to be done yet?
The progress indicator shows that this is only just begun?
> When your finger gets close to the screen it causes a disturbance in the magnetic field that the electrodes sense.
Sure should be capacitive?
chef's kiss Something so basic and yet, so aesthetically pleasing.
If anyone has done this and made success, I'd really like to know how you did it and if there's any tricks to accomplishing that.