My point was that "good" is good only in connection to an ecosystem of tech, values, practices and the people judging what is "good". I personally do not think any group of users "drags the field down".
885 karma · joined April 25, 2015
However, how companies earn money changed. In the 80s and 90s computers were marketed at professionals working in offices. Software was sold shrink-wrapped on disks. It was very costly to change software later (send disks?), you better tested it really, really carefully. The promise was often to make experts more efficient at their tasks: Software was customizable, had macro recorders and had a familiar interface of buttons, menus and docking sub-windows. Computers were used with keyboards and (finally!) mouse: Two very efficient input devices. People (including me) are nostalgic for that time, and that makes memory very selective: We probably remember the best software created by large companies with great teams. We also remember software created for specifically for professionals working with computers, many HN readers will be that people. And, last but not least, there were a lot of terrible UIs too, that we gladly forgot and for every fondly remembered non-standard, fun UI (bryce?) there are sooooo many terrible ones.
A lot of what irks people can be explained with shifts in how software got made, for which audience and for which devices: Having many small teams working independently makes a coherent vision for a product more difficult (but has other advantages), user customization became less important since products were more targeted to non-experts and it also can mess with your automated testing; moving to the web as main way to deliver software meant that some types of interactions (drag and drop, using large amounts of data directly) were harder to create than others; on the web, advertisement and subscription models became popular, leading to very different ways to advertise software in contrast to the former "buy the bi-yearly upgrade in a big box" and the web was more OS independent so the old one-system, one UI-standard did not match anymore.
So, a lot of what "got worse" can be explained by changes in the ecosystem that software-creation and software-use happens in and by the position of people that assume it "got worse".
There are many things that I find worse now than in the 90s but this perspective can help to see if software got worse just for people similar to me and it can also help to find ways to make sustainable changes that fit the ecosystem that exists today.
The idea to use text more actively in user interfaces is not new, there were/are these ideas, for example:
- Gentner/Nielsen: The Anti-Mac Interface, 1996 ( https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ )
- Raskin’s ideas as in "The Human Interface", 2000 and the Canon Cat, 1987: ( https://www.reproof.app/blog/on-designing-a-more-humane-comp... )
- Wirth’s Oberon Operating System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)#User...
It does a lot of things beyond that, and some people use it as general purpose tool but given that this is not part of the core purpose, it is not surprising that the mileage varies when it comes to text editing or color correction etc. (Still happy if they manage to improve their text tool!)
If the code is well written, is should be no problem and actually be easier because there are no framework you need to keep in pace with.
> DPaint.js doesn't need building.
Was not included in the quote above but it is equally rare!
Some high level infos or ideas on the "small web" or "web 0" can be found on:
– https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
– https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/
Books I found helpful:
- Ship it (Richardson, Gwaltney)
- Clean Code (Martin)
Aside of that:
- I experimented a bit with DDD, but that feels massively oversized (though some of the concepts are useful)
- I found Pythons opinionatedness and documentation very helpful in contrast to Javascript, where it is hard to find "a good way" to do things (You see, I like dynamic languages…)
"...a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit Clinic, and the Stanford d.school."
– Adam Curtis’ documentaries convering similar topics have been mentioned here alread, but not…
– …Fred Turner’s "From Cyberculture to Counterculture", als discussing politics and ideas about the future in tech-culture. If you do not want to read the book (which is excellently written imho), you might enjoy his shorter articles like Don’t be evil [1] and Burning Man at Google [2]
– The article has already been discussed several times here (not surprising) [3]
[1] https://logicmag.io/justice/fred-turner-dont-be-evil/
[2] https://fredturner2022.sites.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiy...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Indeed. The references are full of works to studies from the Design Studies journal, in-situ work studies, works of philosophy etc.
Graeber makes interesting points and also criticizes views that most people in tech will at least be familiar with by now, like Dawkins and Harari.
There is an interview on the company’s sustainability and strategy with its founder at https://opensource.com/article/21/9/open-source-design