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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

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Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#121

Post by KirinDave »

ethbro wrote: post #101
KirinDave wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because IRC is an outdated protocol with inferior features to Slack and very few good open source options for connecting. For example: * DCC is still unreliable. * There is no audio connection option, which is quite popular in 2018. * Channel history management is ad hoc * Authentication is done in band, in plain text. * "secured" channels rely on this bad authentication, and if they don't (perhaps electing…

> ... I cannot actually find good details on who runs any given IRC network. I have no idea what I'm dealing with or how they're using my data. I have no legal recourse if I do discover bad behavior... Ah, the good old days of the Internet. You make me so nostalgic.

Back when I was a kid this sounded romantic. Now I just know it means that folks spy on me for fun.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#122

Post by mbreese »

bichiliad wrote: post #77

I think this article points out some very valid problems (I relate a lot with Slack's loading, OSX spaces taking too long to switch between, etc), but the conclusions may be a little misguided. To address specific examples first: 1. Slack is slow to start, and, as others have pointed out, uses animations to remind the user that it's working and not just frozen. The fix here is to improve the application's performance…

I think another example of this would be using something like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Switching between tools can be accomplished by clicking an icon, a drop down, or some other GUI element. However, once you get to a certain level of skill, it becomes faster to just use the keyboard shortcuts.

For a novice, it's more forgiving. But for the expert, it's possible to be very efficient.

It's also possible to go too far the other way too. Not to date myself too much, but an old example of too much "expert" levels was back in the DOS days with Word Perfect. Keyboard shortcuts were the only way to do things (like formatting). So you either learned the magic codes (with three extra/meta operations per code) or you kept a cheat sheet on the keyboard itself. That was a learning curve to get to 'power-user' status.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#123

Post by laumars »

kovek wrote: post #105
aphextron wrote: post #68

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I…

I remember on Hipchat you could edit your last message by sending a message using this (sed?) syntax: s/flock/duck/ . I remember hearing someone saying that was the worst design they've seen in their life. I almost agree. I do agree that text interfaces are better. I really wish that more products were exposed through a purely textual interface. I think hipchat could have solved the issue with a text interfaces bette…

Skype supports the regex s/search/replace/ notation as well. Which threw me off guard one evening.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#126

Post by chocolatebunny »

cortesoft wrote: post #118
aphextron wrote: post #68

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I…

In a lot of ways, chatops is even better than a CLI. It basically can turn a channel into a shared terminal, with history, search, and the ability to comment

Reminds me of a former coworker's Emacs workflow. He organized his work in orgmode. He used emacs for email, jabber, and irc. He would copy paste new tasks between email and orgmode, and he could copy paste the code snippets he was working on to irc if he needed help.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#127

Post by jwr »

fingerlocks wrote: post #112
jwr wrote: post #6

Yes! I am so glad somebody called out the UI animations! The one in 1Password bugs me every time, I don't use Spaces because it takes too long for the animations to play out. There are more examples. Every time a programmer adds an animation, a settings option should also be added to "disable animations". Advanced users will love you for it!

I'm confused. By Spaces animation, are we talking about the horizontal sliding transition? On my machine (High Sierra) the transition time between Spaces is dependent on the finger gesture swipe velocity. I'm not really sure I would even call this an animation- the Spaces x-offset is being adjusted as I move my fingers along the track pad in the same way as scrolling up/down in a browser behaves. There's literally no…

Compared to i3wm on Linux, it takes ages. I can could probably switch workspaces three or more times (using the keyboard) during the time that a single Spaces animation takes to complete.

Also, I am on High Sierra too, and there is at least a half-second lag between when the gesture ends and when the animation is complete. Taken together with the time it takes to initiate the gesture, I'd say we're around 0.75s.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#128

Post by chocolatebunny »

buchanae wrote: post #107
aphextron wrote: post #68

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I…

I remember being giddy about the potential of Ubiquity to bring the CLI to a wider audience, and bring more power to existing CLI users. Too bad it never played out. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity

That kind of stuff comes up every so often. I heard rumors in the early 2000s about Microsoft implementing a version of Office that was more commandline oriented (this was when people were getting sick of their "smart" menubar, before the ribbon interface).

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#129

Post by masswerk »

juancampa wrote: post #109
masswerk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P.S.: If you're looking for inspiration by a movie, have a look at the status screens and their update process in 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which were grossly overlooked for other effects in this movie and didn't have much of a real life impact. (I guess, for the era they came from, the clarity and economy, these are just in line with the article.)

Relevant: https://ilikeinterfaces.com/

Interestingly, while the site (which is great BTW – thanks for the link!) features all kind of minor UIs in 2001, the major status screens, which can bee seen in various places and scenes, are not covered in any way. (Again!)

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#130

Post by fermienrico »

I totally agree with this article and if the author is reading this comment, please do one about touch based interfaces. I am sick and tired of touch interfaces in Cars, home appliances and laptop screens. I want a billion knobs and switches. About the only place they make sense is an hand held phone.

Every designer needs to read this article. I am just so angry at what is being taught in graphic design schools and the sheer incompetence that graduates from UX/UI courses.

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