ctbeiser

I could not have invented it. I was one year old.

It seems pretty clear in the OP that headline is misleading—they do work, just not as well as he would like. I think that a 50% cut in light emission is pretty good—and you can stack that with the other interventions listed, like auto-dark mode and reducing light in your room.

I have a guess as to why this fix was delayed—on the release candidate, you weren't able to resize windows in Stickies. I filed a bug for it. This felt like a last-minute addition—the previous betas didn't have the 'fix.'

Let's think about why: if the width of the handle is based on the radius, and the radius is 0 for a window, there's nowhere for the grab handle to be.

I assume this wasn't the only app with fully square windows, and so the fix actually caused more problems. Respinning a release candidate is expensive, and they were out of time for this one. So the patch gets reverted and the fix gets iterated on for the next release, where they'll presumably figure something clean out that's conditional on exact window shape.

26.4 could be the spring hardware release or it could be the spring services release. I would give it a 2/3 chance of landing in 26.4, and a 1/3 of being moved to 26.5.

The other banks involved all agree that the remaining balances are with Evolve, and that there isn't money that's been moved somewhere else. If there was, Evolve might be willing to say where, which they've been unwilling to do so far–it's very "dog ate my homework."

Given that the depositors still have active DDA agreements with Evolve, even if they sent the money elsewhere, they still have a responsibility to provide it.

The accounts were genuinely FDIC insured. Evolve is a real bank.

But a few months before the bankruptcy, Evolve pushed Synapse to move the money into non-FDIC insured brokerage accounts. As far as I can tell, this was:

- a way to move a hole in the balance sheet from an FDIC insured to an uninsured place

- completely illegal, insofar as the only user consent was a manual opt-out, and some users weren't even sent emails about the change.

Feedbin for sync and for email ingest. A key fact about this is that unlike Feedly and Newsblur, it keeps old content indefinitely. That means that if I don't check feeds for a while, or something is too heavy to read one month, I don't lose it forever.

iOS: Unread, which is just supremely beautiful. I'm amazed that the "double tap to mark read/unread" interaction isn't standard.

Mac: Reeder, which is nice and flexible though not perfect.

iFixit is charging $39 for an iPhone mini battery, or $25 for an iPhone SE battery. Paying $25-30 for half an hour of labor—on a $400-1200 device—every two years sounds… totally fine to me?

I suspect that of all the things burning the world, it's mostly oil and cars. iPhones are unusually useful, but they're not unusually resource intensive.

You might look at Sparkleshare; it's not P2P, but it is open source, self-hosted and encrypted.

This doesn't prove that economics is wrong. It just proves that something like one of every two economists is wrong. This is not a hard problem to figure out the answer to by looking at historic data either. Read both sides closely, and if you're paying enough attention, you'll figure out which one is right pretty fast.

There are also plenty of people who are interested in people of two or more genders that you shouldn't erase. This is the kind of thing where, if you really can't figure out how to make it work with your current design, you seriously need to go back to the drawing board.

The problem with modes is fundamentally that people make mode-errors; they're not sure what mode they're in. If you've got users who aren't looking at the device, then yes, they'll make mode errors, because they have no clue what they're doing. If it's an unambiguous mode, and people understand the ways into and out of the mode, sure, you've got no problem, but those conditions are typically only met by system-level conventions.

I think the point is being missed here, to some degree. This is not necessarily the best way to live. But it's worth considering: what would you do if you weren't tied to a corporation for 8 hours a day in order to feed and house your family? My immediate instinct is not quite "Let's commute for an hour a day and grind out code for some project I don't really care about." Your life may vary, but while he's at an extreme, it sounds like one that's less sucky than that.

If you took statistics in college, you might recall that correlation does not imply causation. There's a hidden third set of factors here; your intelligence, wealth, etc. That people who go to college make more does not mean that college means you make more. The way I see it, those with higher future earning potential more frequently decide to go to college.

"As the deflationary feedback amplifies the desire to hoard, the exchanges will become illiquid."

The rest of it makes perfect sense, but why would we think this, rather than that market forces will drive prices up, and people will sell as a result, fulfilling demand?

I never really understood why people feel the need to keep the UI mostly the same. It may not be as good at the first release, but why do people object to them breaking everything at first? What, was everything perfect already?

I'm not convinced Lion (or Mountain Lion) is getting a 'huge' pushback from users. I heard isolated groanings on launch from people who didn't like adapting to natural scrolling or the new saving paradigm, but that all disappeared within a few weeks. My friends with Windows 8 on non-touch laptops have, after several weeks, continued to have the opinion that the touch-UI (née Metro) is 'stupid,' and they're not huge nerds either.

Why is it that a currency logo now needs a color scheme? Every other major currency in the world is doing fine without a special color. I don't see why Bitcoin is any different.

Dropbox's goal seems to be killing the local filesystem on iOS. Email, being a big part of using an iPhone and the associated file-transfering, is their one big problem; you can't attach things to emails from dropbox, or save them to it from the default app. Here, they get a high-quality email app for their users, and it gives them the opportunity to do things like send attachments as links to dropbox files (great for lock-in), and give users a positive brand experience, to prevent the commoditization of the space.

"As I mentioned, on Monday I will begin... [a] direct attack on my procrastination problem."

Does anyone else see the problem here?

I totally agree with your thoughts on 'finishing' a newspaper. That said, the large number of sections, and having no way to see whether I've seen the new articles in them, leaves me unable to do so.

Perhaps it's my wide range of interests, but with 28 sections in the app, of which over 20 I'll glance through on paper and occasionally read an article from, I can't possibly check all of them every day for interesting articles. Sure, some only update weekly, but am I supposed to just remember off the top of my head which day the science section is, and then only check it then? (Tuesdays.) And then there are all the blogs, which I'd also like to read... get the picture?

I don't have a GOMS analysis for you or anything, but with the time it takes to go to sections, see if there's anything new and interesting, the attention just doesn't feel worth the effort, and I give up after going through the front page and 20 most emailed articles.

Fixed headers are terrible. I once asked a whole room of designers if any of them could think of a single design they liked that used a fixed header, and none could.

It looks beautiful, but, as a daily reader of the Times, there's one thing that's holding me back from signing up: it's designed (like the iPhone app) to show you other content from the same section.

Here's the thing: When was the last time you gave a damn about the section?

I understand caring about Fashion vs the Science Times. But while the number of sections the Times has makes sense in print, on the web, the differences between the Metropolitan, New York, Business Day, International, National... it all seems fairly artificial. Is the war in Afghanistan national, or international news? Does education reform go under politics or education? The answer is, of course, both, but the Times has to choose. Sure, it makes sense to group them on paper, because it's the best way to help you find things that are like what you're reading. But digitally, without the ability to quickly flip through, there's a lot that just gets hidden from the reader.

As someone who spent five hours yesterday laying out a newspaper, I have a lot of respect for the designers at the Times. Here's to hoping they find a better way to move their IA to the web than in hundred-year-old silos.

As a student, I'm just going to say that it's about time somebody did this. Even going to an extremely high-quality school, Salman Khan is just a better at explaining concepts than your teacher. And that's okay.

Just consider this: If students statewide are failing to understand a concept, new videos can be A/B tested in its place, and you put the winner into practice. You actually have the potential to optimize teaching, at high scale, for what helps people learn. That's a huge step forward for everyone involved.

There are certainly issues with this article. As a student, who's been in this setting for the past dozen years, I've got some thoughts on the matter:

1. If you want to measure how much is taught, make sure you're measuring how much is taught. The emphasis on AP scores and ERBs makes for a teaching environment where you're taught not the actual things you need to know, but the particular phrasings that the College Board agrees get you full credit. I'm taking AP Stat, and all of my classmates can parrot off dozens of phrases regarding interpreting distributions, but most of them don't understand a word of it. From there...

2. You need to teach tools that can be used to solve problems, not recipes to solve specific kinds of problems. Otherwise, you're not learning.

3. You absolutely must reward creativity and unorthodox questions. Grading based on adherance to a specific methodology rather than having a reasonable answer (EG, you're being told that atoms are the smallest elements of matter, and you say that Quarks are smaller? You get points off. You ask about that, and are told not to question the Word of Teacher? That's what I'm talking about), and similarly, punishment for students who are too curious are due for the course

4. You need teachers who know what they're talking about. In sixth grade, a science teacher insisted that yes, Dinosaurs did eat humans. This is in a high-income neighborhood, in a solidly blue state. When I called her on it, and she looked it up and found that no, there is a gap of hundreds of millions of years, she closed the lesson by referencing young-earth creationist ideas about layers of soil in Texas.

5. You need to destroy the hierarchy of teachers being superior to students. Hierarchy is good for producing mass laborers who won't question authority, and dropouts. It's not good for helping people learn, or fostering curiosity. Worried about your safety without absolute power? Well, I'd be more worried about your safety when you're playing the role of prison guard. It seems incredible, but at, say, Quaker schools, students call teachers by their first name, they're very friendly with eachother, and the result is vibrant intellectual discourse, not knifings.

6. So you're an administrator/the President/ETC, and you want to measure if students understand material? Ask them. They'll be able to tell you a lot more than sitting in on a class and gauging metrics or Value Added Teaching ever will.

Above all, what amazes me most is that while following this debate for years, not once has anyone ever asked students what they think. If you haven't been a student in one of these schools within the last ten years, your opinions on what the real problems in education aren't valid.

"It should be a natural goal for a school to raise it's test scores as time goes on."

With many of these tests, especially good schools are hitting the ceiling of how well it's possible to do. If you're scoring a 99% every year, how do you improve?

This is true if you've gone to school under the recent testing regime. If you haven't, your opinion as to whether it's an effective method of evaluating teachers is not valid.

Having gone both to schools that don't measure their results using standardized measures, and those that do, with almost identical quality of teachers, the schools beholden to teach to tests end up being able to cover a lot less of substance. This is particularly the case when a school has been teaching to a test previously, and now averages about 95% per student on the tests; since their funding relies on improvements of scores, they've got to spend even more time preparing students in order to do better every year.

I mean no offense here, but this isn't design. This is parroting visual effects.

Having self-taught myself a lot about design, let me give you a few pointers.

The number one rule is that you have to start paying attention to the design of everything. Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" is a good start on developing this, and you really shouldn't miss it. But this applies to everything: when something's nice, figure out why. Notice typefaces, and form a mental library so you can identify them.

It's a bit of an odd path, but I'll also suggest, since you're interested in interactive systems, reading several great Human Interface Guidelines. Apple's OS X ones are my favorite (You might even want to get an older version, because they're a bit more general), but the Nokia Meego ones are worth a look too. Most others are too mediocre to teach you anything though.

Some other books I have to suggest: Bringhurtst's "The Elements of Typographic Style." Definately read some kind of lighter treatment of type first, so you know humanists from geometrics, serifs from sans, high and low contrast, and so forth, but if you want to really get it, this is the book. If you go in knowing that some of what he's saying is opinion, this is the book you need to read.

The Universal Principles of Design: It's really not the best book, and there's some things, like the readability research, that's actually just complete crap, but it's an alright, quick overview of a few dozen concepts. If you understand the concepts in it, skip it, but as a first intro, you could do worse.

The Humane Interface: Other than Raskin's whining about the Canon Cat not being a hit for slightly too long, it's got some interesting concepts that all designers should understand.

Thoughtful Interaction Design: This one's very theoretical, and very heavy reading; it's really about a way to view the design process, and how it proceeds, more than it is about how to design. Don't read it until you've done a few projects.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information: This is a great book on presenting information. Just ignore the ridiculous stuff about minimizing ink, and think of it as minimizing the cognitive load.

For a quick overview of a couple interesting concepts, you might try method.ac, reading the wikipedia pages on Fitt's Law and http://worrydream.com/#!/MagicInk and trolling through http://informationarchitects.net/blog/.

Stay away from ux.stackexchange.com, news.layervault.com, PSDtuts, et. c. It's almost all crap, about tools rather than actual designing. In general (very much in general), if a blog post on design is short, it's crap, 95% of the time.