jalfresi

Real world appliances dont use checkboxes to power toggle

UI has become the domain of marketing and branding.

Checkboxes also have a fundamental dependency on the label to assist them with their affordance: a label for a checkbox should almost always be in the form of a yes/no question: “are you hungry? [ ]”

The “checked” box is an affirmative, empty is a negative. A checkbox without a label is useless because it has no context.

But I constantly see checkboxs without the question label. Think back to all those control panels and settings windows youve seen where the label for a checkbox is something like “animations [ ]”. Does that mean they are on by default? Does checking the checkbox switch them on or off?

Now compare with this “animations? [ ]” checking the checkbox has now become an answer to a question

Im not sure I agree with this, and its quite a common argument for animations in UIs. The fundamental weakness in this argument is that animations are not interactive. They have a beginning, middle and end. Any attempt to interact with the UI during this sequence would disrupt the animation. This is why animation makes UIs feel slow; clicking the widgets requires a period of time to transition from state A to state B via animation. The irony is that this is used to indicate a transition, to emulate what happens “in the real world sliders dont teleport to the next state”, but this often always misses the fact that I didnt slide the slider to its new state: i clicked a mouse button. That is an immediate state transition. So all animations like the above do is slow the feedback of the state transition in a misguided attempt to emulate a real world slider when i never interacted with the UI in any way that resembles a slider.

I do find it fascinating that we are entering a time now where there are engineers who have _only_ ever used cloud services - and that they can't conceive of a era where _we used to have to do all that stuff ourselves on-prem_.

BTW this isn't a criticism - just an observation - cloud has been around now for that long. Still feels "new" to me :D

"Notes on the Synthesis of Form" is my favorite book of all time. I try to re-read it at least once a year. Thoroughly recommend it.

Its not an admission fee. The website is hosted on a publicly accessible web server. There is no admission fee. The browser I am using serves my purposes; if I wish to strip certain elements from the page, add new ones or reformat the page any way I see fit, I can and am allowed to.

The point Google seem to be making quite clearly, is that the browser does not serve my needs, but the needs of Googles paying customers.

Have to agree with this - context is everything and there are an awful lot of naive comments here who don’t understand that XML-RPC was a breath of fresh air compared to SOAP, especially if like me you were using the LAMP stack and PHP. SOAP was abysmal- I really don’t recal a single project where communication between two systems using SOAP wasn’t without serious issues, incompatibility issues and just plain broken.

Many developers here might not recall serious compatibility issues with Microsoft- the most obvious one I recall was WebDAV ; pretty much strangled at birth by MS terrible broken implementation.

I used to use the PHP XML-RPC implementation you worked on for so many projects, so thanks for that- helped me to integrate so many projects, so cheers!

In HTTP, URLs are opaque identifiers. If you want to isolate semantics from a URL, then use query parameters.

Because the browser market is not a free market; both Apple and Google leverage their existing positions in other markets to promote their browsers.

This does raise a point - do we now have to assume that all those services that provide free hosting/access/service to open source projects will be strip-mining the work of the open source community to sell them back to us all? I almost feel stupid believing it was an altruistic move to contribute back to the shoulders of giants they were already standing on...

Very early in my software development career, i was frustrated and sad that i wasnt able to progress due to a lack of comprehension of how software is structured from smaller sub systems. I didnt have any kind of mentor available to me, and I seriously considered changing careers. I naively assumed that good software was written by naturally talented people, and because I was having problems growing I was obviously not talented and therefore would never get improve (I was young).

Then i stumbled across “Notes on the synthesis of form” from some random internet recommendation.

Not only was this book a complete eye opener, it helped me to understand so much about what I was doing was mostly by accident, and that design should be purposeful.

The most important lesson for my fledgling mind though was that design was a process, and a process that improved with each application. That good software developers arnt “born”, they are self sculpted.

I still have that battered, note riddled, page corners folded copy of “notes” and I take with me on holiday every year to re-read. Its my most favourite book I’ve ever read. It fills me with such inspiration everytime I read it.

I’m very sad to hear of Christophers passing. I never got to thank him.

"you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live"

Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?

I recall having an orange iMac on my desk specifically for testing because IE5.5 on the Mac was the most standards compliant browser on the market. Cant remember the exact year, but it was pre-millenium I think.

I'd be interested in an OpenBSD desktop

I blame NAT

- shared nothing architecture - single threaded code execution context - copy files deploy

I was a PHP developer for over 15 years and those three concepts do more to lower the barrier to entry than any other language I’ve come across, and are constantly underestimated in their power to enable developers to concentrate on the business logic of their program.

I thought it was Slashdot that had the X-Bender header?

Is this closed or open source? I couldn’t find a public repo anywhere in the links

"The problem with the web isn't the amount of control it affords developers, it's that getting people to create interesting content for your medium requires business models that only work if the users of your medium are in some way restricted or tracked"

I think you have this backwards - I recall the web consisting of intresting content before adtech arrived. In my experience, Adtech has a damaging effect on interesting content, instead generating content that only appeases algorithms. Finding the quality content has become a lot harder.

YMMV.

Maybe because historically the developer industry has shown that some bad actors can ruin it for everyone? That maybe the App store review process is to benefit ME, as an Apple customer? I WANT a curated App store, simply because I? CANT trust any random app downloaded onto my phone. I pay Apple for that service.

Apple App Store customers are NOT blind sheeple afraid of freedom; I am NOT interested in having a phone that can run any and all software! The industry has proven it cant be trusted, so I pay Apple to gatekeep that for me.

If you still dont get that, I dont know what to tell you...

As an Apple customer the review system is working very well for me. No malicious apps have got through the process and onto my phone yet.

In that sense, its worth it to me.

What nonsense. As an Apple customer, the App store is the number one reason I use them - I dont want malware or scummy developers on my phone and I am happy with Apple charging a fee to developers in this manner.

It's not like anyone going to switch phones because your app is not on there. Your app is just one of many other apps I use on my phone.

Developers are very much looking at this the wrong way - the 30% fee is the price developers must pay to access Apples customers.

X-Bender came from slashdot.org didn't it? I recall it being present in the early 2000s.

Is there an on-prem/AWS AMI version?

This is interesting... not heard of this. Any pointers/links to more info on this?

I think you are making an extremely valid point; i often see the same “think of the children” argument made when discussing advertising and the web. Likewise, no one is saying websites shouldn’t have an income.

I disagree - I think the importance of the distinction is that familiar interfaces work better than new, novel interfaces that supposedly tap into some deeper human psycology.

for example, using the scrollbars in the browser chrome provided by the operating system are better than hiding them and implemnting some custom "intuitive" scrolling mechanism.

In my opinion, the use of the work "intuitive" in UI design is a misnomer, when the designer actually means "subjective to me the designer"

Oh absolutely! This is great news!

Just means i can start planning my upgrade before ive even built the first version lol

I hear you, just bought 4 rpi 3 b+ for a k8s cluster last week and this drops today. Urgh.