Irrelevant, if that doesn't lead to product innovation. Historically, it hasn't.
98 karma · joined January 26, 2017
They also have excellent meditation for naps, where you can set how long you want to nap before they wake you up.
A quick Google suggests it does in fact work as intended https://i.redd.it/jrn155a2gf4z.png
Last-mile delivery is one of the fastest growing industries and is quickly becoming a default part of everyday life - and yet is still running on outdated software that fails at delivering an acceptable user experience. Missed deliveries, unhelpfully vague time windows, packages that get lost or stolen, no communication between recipients and drivers,...
We're fixing this by creating better tools for everyone involved: drivers, courier companies, and recipients. By getting everyone on the same platform we create the transparency and communication needed to remove all this waste in the industry, and unlock last-mile delivery that's fast, reliable, affordable, and user friendly.
We're fully remote since day 1, not VC-funded, run a small and efficient team (just ~20 employees) and have profitably grown to 15M ARR over the last 4 years.
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Plenty of professional tools (Photoshop, Final Cut, Figma) have monochrome icons without it being a usability issue. These are all content creation tools, including Blender. The UI and content should not be fighting for attention. It's clear which of those two should primarily be on display.
I think it's entirely possible that Blender just has poor icons - but it seems demonstrably false that monochrome icons are inherently inaccessible.
My best guess is that Blenders real issue is a lack of structure and clear grouping. Providing the icons are in a logical place, it's easy enough to find the correct one, without them needing to be visually distinct on literally every dimension. But if there's no logic to the placement and the icon you're looking for could be one of thirty, then I agree that's an usability issue - just not that the icons are at fault.
Try viewing the demo (https://read.cv/andy) on desktop at 125% zoom. Pretty much perfect.
Companies like Uber and Ebay have turned off all their adspend and saw little to no change in their acquisition metrics. You can argue that they were just doing it wrong. But the point is that, if even they are doing it wrong - and getting nothing in return for the millions they're spending on ads - then it's very likely most others are in the same situation.
You are right that this doesn't mean _all_ advertising is useless, there are absolutely profitable usecases. But the larger points still stands: most money being spend on advertising right now is likely not returning anything.
We now have some strong precedents being set. I believe this will cause more major companies to run the ultimate experiment: turn off all ads and see what happens. It's too early to tell, but it's not impossible we'll see adspend drop significantly across the industry once everyone finds out they're just burning money.
In case you're considering taking this further: a Figma plugin for this would make it 10x better. Changing the seed color could automatically update the color styles in the file, and would so propagate to every component and element. That would make an incredibly useful tool for experimenting with color schemes.
This has just been solved: https://www.figma.com/blog/behind-the-feature-autosave/
Interesting timing on these articles getting published. Almost at exactly the same time, and almost polar opposites.
This isn't necessarily true. As a counter example, I've seen team leads who claim they need to hire more engineers in order to keep up with workload. In reality, it's a process issue, but why put in the hard work of streamlining company operations, when they can just request more people underneath them. Not only is it less effort, but they also get to say "I grew the team 2x and now manage y people" which in turn increases their compensation.
It's a case of poorly aligned incentives: managers are supposed to do more with less, but their compensation structure rewards the opposite.
I think it's more that (visual) UI Design has the same cyclical property of most other "visual design" like clothing fashion, interior design,... Things look fresh when they're new, after a few years people get bored of the look, and what was once considered modern now looks dated.
Especially for a company like Apple that has built part of its reputation on having the best UI, they can't afford looking behind on the competition. Calling it "change for the sake of change" is partly correct if we were purely talking about products, but it ignores the fact that Apple is as much a marketing company as it is a product company.
Aside from that I think there's also a strong functional argument to be made. iOS and iPad share the same OS, so it makes sense for those to be consistent. As the iPad has matured it's approaching desktop levels of productivity. So now we're in a situation where the iPad is becoming like a Macbook without the keyboard. With so much overlap in functionality, it also makes more sense for those 2 experience to converge rather than diverge. So we're hearing complaints about the "iOSification of the macbook" but they are ignoring the missing link; iOS = iPadOS = macOS
In reality, police brutality is nothing new. Politicians should have made changes to keep police accountable years ago, but have consistently failed to do so. Now we've reached a tipping point where the public at large demands change, which needs to come from politicians, and the protests are the manifestation of this.
Does a Tweet from a CEO immediately fix the issue? Of course not. But that's like saying any individual is not going to make a difference when protesting, so they shouldn't bother. Obviously this will only lead to complacency, which will only cause the problem get worse. Democracy, in this case, means as much public pressure as possible so that politicians can no longer ignore the issue without fear of being voted out of office.
Every single bit of additional pressure helps the cause, and whether or not it's also good PR is irrelevant.
Support by major companies, while admittedly less effective, is another signal that helps. Claiming that it's useless is false and claiming it's cheap is ignorant - the OP clearly demonstrates that a good deed never goes unpunished.
There's plenty of laws that your average person agrees with because they want everyone else to follow them: pay your taxes, follow the speed limit, don't be loud after 10 PM, and clean up your dogs poop. But at the same time, they have no problem making exceptions for themselves.
So whether or not any individual follows a certain rule is not indicative of their support of the rule, and a lot of people breaking a certain rule doesn't make it nondemocratic.
I've been lucky to have moved a few times and discovered some great local radio stations along the way. They still make up the larger part of new music I discover. But I agree, mainstream stations are very unlikely to do this for you, and there's currently no good way to discover good radio stations.
The claim that changes like these take 12 months to learn and $11.0000 to implement, is incompetent at best or dishonest at worst.
I'm sceptical of this for 2 reasons
1. It assumes cause and effect are linear, which I doubt. People are put off because the games look bad. Making a game that looks better, but still bad, doesn't solve this issue. In order for Jeff to be able to properly evaluate the ROI of making his games look not-bad, he would need to have made a not-bad looking game. This is arguably not the case.
2. It's clear from the article that Jeff doesn't really understand what makes a game looks good. As a result, if he's spending extra resources on making the game look better, they're likely not well spent. The money would need to go into foundational efforts like consistent color palettes to make it visually pleasing, consistent lighting so everything feels like it's part of the same world, proper shading so everything looks grounded, making sure everything looks to scale, balancing out the level of detail between pieces to make sure the right things stand out, etc etc. In the article, he stated that he thinks good art = AAA level, so I'm guessing Jeff just paid artists to add more details to faces and monsters - which really isn't going to solve anything.
> the goal when running a small business is not to take over the world. The goal is to not fail. Expending scarce resources on bets with a ROI ratio under one is not a good way to avoid failure.
I can completely respect this decision. He's trying to run a certain kind of business and that imposes a certain set of constraints.
The irony though is that Jeff is the one who's not respecting those constraints.
It's entirely possible to spend little on art and still have a good looking game. Just pick a simple art style that can be executed fast. Alternatively, if you want to have a good looking game in your personally preferred style - that also happens to be more expensive to produce - that's also entirely possible. It will just cost you more.
Both options are fine.
But Jeff is spending little on art and at the same time asking artists to make highly detailed artworks. There's just no chance of that working out well. The poor results are not imposed by his business constraints, but rather from his failing to respect them.
>his audience values that particular kind of game way more than it does art
Isn't that ridiculously self-selecting? If he's always been making ugly games, then it follows that his current customer base will be limited to people who don't care as much about visuals. This will always be true, regardless of what genre games you're making.
It absolutely does not mean that he wouldn't expand his audience by making good-looking games. In fact, if what he said is true and most of his current customers don't care about looks, it's more likely an indicator that the subpar visuals are indeed costing him customers.
I honestly have a hard time grasping that this even passes as an argument. It's like someone who sells shit sandwiches saying their customers don't mind the shit taste.
Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle.
What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected from various websites.
People are pointing out that his otherwise amazing games are being held back by their subpar graphics. Unfortunately, instead of taking the criticism fairly, he sets up a strawman to deflect any blame, claiming that anyone who doesn't like the execution just dislikes the style.
There's multiple points in the article where this shows, for example this one:
>The key problem here is that, when most people say, "Your art looks bad," what they mean is, "I want art that is good." They mean, "I want AAA-quality art."
Big jumps there Jeff.
He shows his lack of knowledge about making good art when he says he can't afford the extra man power to solve the issue. No one here would claim that, to fix bad code, you have to hire more programmers. Art works in the same way. The problems are foundational and don't require more employees or more hours to get right - just a better approach.
The argument that this is not possible with freelancers is silly. He gives the example of a freelancer creating a super niche style that no other artist can replicate. No one is asking him to create award-winning art. People are simply asking for games that are not-ugly. There's plenty of artstyles that fit all his requirements, while still being not-ugly and reproducible by other artists.
I don't doubt that it's hard to find good artists when you never took the time to study what makes good art.
The truth seems to be that after his 25 years of game development Jeff still doesn't know how to make good looking games. He has every right to do as he wants - just as anyone else is free to comment on the look of games. But this article is nothing more than one big list of poor justifications, which is why it's getting a lot of flak.