allenu

Agreed. I think it's worth posting on it but the right attitude is just treat it as any other outlet to post your product. Don't fret too much about it or spend too much time prepping and trying to game the timing.

When I've posted projects on there, I found so many bots commenting and then later got several emails from people wanting to "help" me with upvoting for a fee, it made me realize how fake it was.

That's true. I used to think I was mentally modeling the input as dragging a joystick on the back of the character's head, but it doesn't quite work if you are looking left and right. Now I wonder if it's a lot more subconscious and the "model" explanation is just a rationalization that feels right.

Maybe it's like how some people feel more natural goofy foot on a skateboard/snowboard than the regular way, regardless of their handedness.

That's an interesting idea. If, for instance, there was a window of time for people interested in a show to come together to discuss the latest episode (assuming the episodes aren't just dropped all at once), then I think it would be an interesting place to visit since everyone is there for the very same reason and there's something of interest that happened recently that would focus the discussion.

I will say I did visit the site months ago and found that just hanging out with random people wasn't that compelling to me. In the early days, it was fun because it was new and there was a lot of energy, but after that, you really do need something to bring you back day to day.

Similarly, in Seattle, a bronze statue was sawed off at the base and stolen about a year ago: https://southseattleemerald.org/news/2024/08/01/healing-hate...

I was viewing on desktop and the blank space all around made it immediately feel like an article that required a scroll to view the content below the fold.

Seeing the timestamps change as I scrolled and seeing a progress "bar" update within the speech balloons during the dialogs made it more obvious I just had to scroll to see the content change.

I do think the progress bar color is low contrast enough that some might not see it and not realize they have to scroll to cause the dialog to update, though.

I remember seeing a blog post about this exact thing using nice little square NFC cards with the album covers on them. For anybody interested: https://hicks.design/journal/moo-card-player

I loved this era of tech. I had a Sony CLIÉ PEG-SJ22 and used it a ton for to-do lists and random notes.

I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Graffiti and how quick it was to use it. Not as fast as typing, but better than hunting and pecking on an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. I didn't like how the stylus felt on the screen when you wrote so I cut a little piece of a post-it note and put on the area where you'd do the Graffiti strokes.

I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I was able to save some web articles onto the device. When I was on a lunch break, I'd read through the articles on that little thing. It truly felt like living in the future.

This is something I've always thought would be useful as well, but after seeing some demos of it in action [1], I'm now not so sure. One of the issues I see is that because of the infinite zooming/scaling, there's no sense of place or spatial awareness that you get with a 2D map, or even a traditional outline. I think it would be easy to get lost if you had too much nesting and a lot of content.

Maybe on a smaller scale, it would be manageable though. I remember seeing some presentations that use Prezi and that has the ability to nest text at different zoom levels, and the transitions between slides worked pretty well and you did still have a sense of place, but the presenters didn't have tons of content all over like in the youtube link. I wish I had a link handy for the Prezi presentation I saw online because some of them were structured like your description about different zoom levels, like a fractal.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GblI7GI0jQ4&t=85s

I kept hearing about Claude Code for a while and never really tried it until a week ago. I used it to prototype some Mac app ideas and I quickly realized how useful it was at getting prototypes up and running very, very quickly, like within minutes. It saves so much time with boilerplate code that I would've had to type out by hand and have done hundreds of times before.

With my experience, I wonder what the author of this blog post has tried to do to complete a task as that might make a difference on why they couldn't get much use out of it. Maybe other posters can chime in on how big of a difference programming language and size of project can make. I did find that it was able to glean how I had architected an app and it was able to give feedback on potential refactors, although I didn't ask it to go that far.

Prior to trying out Claude Code, I had only used ChatGPT and DeepSeek to post general questions on how to use APIs and frameworks and asking for short snippets of code like functions to do text parsing with regexes, so to be honest I was very surprised at what the state of the art could actually do, at least for my projects.

I think that's true with known optical illusions, but there are definitely times where we're fooled by the limitations in our ability to perceive the world and that leads people to argue their potentially false reality.

A lot of times people cannot fathom that what they see is not the same thing as what other people see or that what they see isn't actually reality. Anyone remember "The Dress" from 2015? Or just the phenomenon of pareidolia leading people to think there are backwards messages embedded in songs or faces on Mars.

Absolutely. I only just started using Claude Code on Sunday and I tested it by taking a small project that I was toying with and extending it with lots of features that I had thought about adding but didn't have the time.

Then, I explored a product feature in an existing app of mine that I also had put off because I didn't feel it was worth spending several days exploring the idea. It's something that would've required me to look up tutorials and APIs on how to do some basic things and then write some golang code which I hadn't done in a while. With Claude Code, I was able to get a prototype of the idea from a client app and a golang service working within an hour!

Today I started prototyping yet another app idea I came up with yesterday. I started off doing the core of the prototype in a couple of hours by hand and then figured I'd pull Claude in to add features on top of it. I ended up spending several hours building this idea since I was making so much fantastic progress. It was genuinely addictive.

A few days ago I used it to help me explore how I should refactor a messy architecture I ended up with. I didn't initially consider it would even be useful at all but I was wowed by how it was able to understand the design I came up with and it gave me several starting points for a refactor. I ended up doing the refactor myself just because I really wanted to be sure I understood how it worked in case something went wrong. I suspect in a few weeks, I'll get used to just pairing with Claude on something like that.

As a solo builder myself, I totally agree. You get lost in your head a lot of times since you're the only one who understands the problem set you're working on, the progress you're making, and the challenges that still lie ahead.

The work you do is also not something that's easy to talk about with friends and family who have regular jobs either. I think for a lot of people what you're might be just a fun thing and not a real job, and if you talk about how hard it can be to try to work on something yourself, they might not fully appreciate it since you could just walk away from it all and get a "real job".

Not having coworkers is tough when you just want to chill and hang out for a few minutes before getting back to work, although if you were working remote during the pandemic or are still working remote today, you probably got used to that.

Have you tried co-working spaces? I know you won't necessarily be able to vibe on the work you're doing, but having random conversations with people might make the solo work a bit more bearable.

Going to meetups or events with other entrepreneurs may also help. I've gone to meetups and talked to other people who are doing their own thing (or startups with others) and I can see they have the same experiences, which helps keep me sane.

It indeed looks like a real quote then, but not much of a testimonial. It may as well be rephrased, "Optician Sans is a thing that I acknowledge exists." Nowadays I suppose that's good enough reason to put up the logo of a company on the landing page.

My design process is heavy on prototyping directly in code. I usually start off with sketches in pen and paper and then a quick mockup of the UI directly using Swift code since my apps are for iOS and Mac only.

I don't have any testers on this new version at the moment, but I'm considering having some beta testing once I get closer to release. No videos either, but I'm planning on writing some blog posts going over some of the UI flows and new features in the app to help with promotion. Once I polish the lesson UI a little bit, I'll probably post a video on YouTube of it too.

I'm working on an update to my flashcards app, Fresh Cards. The current version has a lot of limitations, so I've been working on a rewrite that improves all aspects of the app, for nearly a year now.

Most recently, I've been incorporating a lot of improved UX design. The app has always used a playlist metaphor, i.e. your database of flashcards is your library and you can sort them in different ways and then hit Play to start reviewing. Within the review session itself, you go through the cards in the playlist in small batches so that it's less overwhelming, among other reasons. After every batch, the app returns to an overview screen so you can see what you've just reviewed so far in the session.

The challenge has been designing this overview screen so it's clear where you are in the playlist without making it overwhelming. I finally came up with a good design this week, which I was quite happy with: https://mastodon.social/@allenu/114921335089371494

I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement this new UI has made on how the product feels. The old UI only showed you the history of cards you've reviewed in the session and highlighted the most recent batch of cards. This new one shows you the full playlist, but redacts the contents of the playlist ahead, so you immediately get a sense of how much left there is to do, but without being shown what is in the contents of the cards. Interestingly, this has the effect of making you want to see what is in those cards, i.e. to keep reviewing!

I started working in MacBU about 3 years after the article. It was split between the two locations when I joined. (Outlook for Mac and PowerPoint were both in California.) These photos look like Building 115 to me, though I didn't go into this particular lab often. After this, the team moved to Building 31 and later Building 35, if I remember correctly.

One thing that was interesting about MacBU was that it was in a completely separate division from the rest of Office (i.e. Windows Office). That gave the team a really cool outsider vibe and the team had a really nice close-knit culture.

I love the idea, but I wish the sentences were capitalized and the dashes were fixed. I think the spaces between dashed elements need to be removed. Right now, I see things like "cyber- neon" or "bomb- ware".

In a similar vein, there's DeLorean Ipsum, which I often use for fake text when mocking up UI: https://satoristudio.net/delorean-ipsum/

If you're in Seattle, there's also a large statue of the robot from Laputa: Castle in the Sky here. It's standing on the front lawn of a house in the Ballard neighborhood. I had recently seen the movie when I first encountered it, so it was a fun find.

There must be so many tiny little differences like this. I remember when I lived in Toronto for a bit that the way they phrased whether you wanted a fast food order to eat at the restaurant or to take home was a little different from in Alberta. I know in Alberta, they would ask "to stay, or to go?" when ordering, but in Toronto I think it was "for here or to go?" which is how I've heard it phrased in the U.S. as well.

Totally minor difference, but it did feel jarring when I heard it differently from the first time as someone who grew up in Alberta.

I always loved the term "keener" growing up and was disappointed that it wasn't a term of use down here in the States. It's essentially the same thing as a "brown-noser" but a little less graphic.

Yeah, I think you're right. I didn't phrase it quite right.

Arbitrarily scrolling in mid-conversation is rude, but somebody picking up their phone to look something up or read a text message now happens without a big fuss, whereas before, I think people were more likely to apologize for the action. It's acceptable to just pick up your phone now to look up something or check your messages during a conversation in a lull.

On the other hand, I see couples seated together in restaurants just scrolling their phones privately at the same table, so generally it seems like it's more "okay" to disengage to your technology.

The early criticism was overblown, but I think there is a slow, gradual degradation of social values when ubiquitous technology allows people to disengage easily.

I remember being annoyed when a coworker had AirPods on constantly, even when conversing with other people. Obviously we could have a conversation, but it felt like they didn't value it enough to give it their full attention (I don't doubt the music was turned off, though).

In the early days when everyone was starting to get smartphones, there were lots of memes about people staring at their phones constantly and maybe walking into traffic or bumping into people. Constant smartphone use has been normalized now (for better or worse). In the early days, people felt bad when they pulled out their phone to look something up during a conversation, but that behavior is no longer looked down on. It doesn't feel rude if somebody breaks out their phone mid-conversation and starts scrolling for a little bit.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If something takes a bit of work to join, it'll naturally attract only people who are invested in improving the community. I imagine new communities that get popular need cool people to get it started and keep the fire going. Not many people will know about it and it may be small, so there's a nice natural filter where only dedicated members self-select into the community.

Once it grows and offers more value, it becomes more visible and it spreads in awareness, so more people know about it, but then it's just as likely to attract low-quality members who don't really care about maintaining it. It's much easier to take for granted because it's just there and doesn't take effort to keep going, at least to a new member.

I think this is one of the things that I dislike about meetup.com. It's too easy to sign up for something and then not show up. It's a third party service, so you don't ever need to interact with a human being. If someone invited you to an event, it's a bit harder to bail on it, but if you just clicked a button to say you were going to go, it doesn't feel so bad to never show up. I think communities need an effort to maintain and a "member" putting in the work makes them more attached to the community. Showing up regularly is a kind of ritual, and over time, you become a true member of the community.

I see the value of these services, but there's definitely an impersonal and formal nature to them, which takes away some of the humanity of just meeting people IRL and deciding to spend time. However, it feels like there are fewer third spaces people can spend time at without having to spend money where they can just randomly meet new people and see them regularly. Making new friends requires regularly being in the same space with them over time so you can build familiarity. Just meeting someone one time isn't enough for a lot of us to just decide "let's be friends and spend time together". If this service encourages people to hang out regularly, I think it's a step in the right direction.

I'm not a huge table top gamer or anything and have checked out my local shop to play with others. It was definitely fun, but I'll admit that it wasn't for me and I stopped going. If you are into board games, you definitely should check them out though. I just found it required more interest in board games than I was willing to partake in when I really just wanted a third space to hang out.

On the flip side, I was into swing dancing for a few years and I found that was a great place to socialize. Of course, like the board games thing, it's not for everyone. That said, I did find it was a bit easier to just show up there and just socialize. Once you're a regular, you don't necessarily have to be constantly dancing or anything. (I did when I got started, though.) You can just hang out and have a good conversation with another regular, and often there's a bar where you can chill with a drink. It's definitely intimidating to go dancing as a newb, though, so I recommend going some place that offers a weekly class. That's a great way to meet other newbies and go to the dance together.

The keyboard shortcuts should help a lot! If you can nail navigation from the keyboard, it'll go a long way to make the UX feel breezy.

I made a corkboard/index cards app for Mac and iOS called Card Buddy and I spent a lot of time working on the keyboard navigation there and it made a huge difference on the feeling of fluidity. For instance, even while you're editing a card, you can navigate to a neighboring cell and start editing it just through the arrow keys. That makes it super fast to jot down lots of notes right away. I noticed a lot of other apps would require you to move the mouse and double-click to edit somewhere else and even that friction makes those apps feel sluggish.

I've also discovered that breaking down tasks into micro-tasks helps me get going on things. I've found that I get easily overwhelmed if I have a massive list of things to get done, and adding another task to it makes it even worse. However, just nesting tasks into parent tasks and finding the right "child" to place a new task in makes it feel more manageable, and I know that those nested tasks are typically small things that I can accomplish.

I use this system for my projects but I don't rely on any software other than a text editor. I like the app demo shown at the end of the article, but I find custom software never feels fast enough for jotting down tasks in the right place within a hierarchy as compared with a text editor. I just use a markdown file with indented lines to indicate nesting level. Once I complete a task, I put an x within a little box, like "- [x] bug: page layout ..."

It's very satisfying when you have a big task that's a little abstract and overwhelming at the start, but over time gets more and more subtasks as you dig into it, and then those subtasks get closed out one by one, leading you to finally close out the top-level task that started it all. The fact that the text of the subtasks remain also gives a quick indication just how big that task really was. (I don't delete completed tasks, but I do move them somewhere else in the file to keep it organized somewhat.)

My theory is they straightened it out so it looks almost like half of a representation of a house, i.e. Finder helps you find and organize things in your "home".

I don't like it. From the videos, it looks very distracting in motion since the content underneath has a subtle effect. If anything, I want my UI to disappear until I need it, not call attention to itself.

This makes so much sense. The use of place-names for marketing (Sequoia, etc.) was fun, but as a dev, it gets confusing having to look up when the OS came out and which version number it is. I'm sure regular users have the same problem. This makes marketing much simpler too since there's no confusion which the latest OS version is and if you've got it or not.