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How to Design Software Good

haiku-os.org

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Re: How to Design Software Good

#61

Post by timClicks »

lemming wrote: post #56
nayuki wrote: post #48

I saw a quick flash of unstyled content (in Firefox) where all the text was jammed into one paragraph with no breaks. And then the page rendered normally. So I glanced at the source code, and it surprised me to see that it was not a typical HTML document, but instead an XML document with a stylesheet. It is very rare to see a non-HTML page on the web, whether it is the XHTML serialization of HTML, or fully custom XML…

I agree this is very unusual. It's also somewhat annoying, for example I can't just send this to my Kindle to read it, and I can imagine other tools failing on this as well.

Which is more the fault of the Kindle than the authors. It's Docbook, a standard that was invented for the purpose of writing books.

Re: How to Design Software Good

#62

Post by war1025 »

bo1024 wrote: post #55

I want to mention the classic book "The Design of Everyday Things" which shares a lot of points with this post, though not about software at all.

I read this book a few years ago and was really disappointed by the content. Apparently the version I read was the "revised and expanded edition", so maybe it just got worse with the update...

Re: How to Design Software Good

#63

Post by mattnewport »

waddlesplash wrote: post #25
rlanday wrote: post #8

> Haiku is an operating system which is known for its speed and being easy for anyone to use. That's a fairly bold claim. Haiku is an OS that basically no one uses for any purpose. Why should I take any sort of design advice from them?

Being "known for its speed and ease of use" and "very low user base" are ... not mutually exclusive in the slightest, so I fail to see how your comment has relevance? By your logic, since macOS has ~1/10 the install base of Windows, clearly this means that "very few" people use it and we should not take Apple's advice on anything design-related.

Haiku, unlike Mac OS, is barely known at all, even among highly technical and knowledgeable computer users. I'm a long term computer enthusiast and regular hacker news reader for many years and I'm just barely aware that something called Haiku exists (I'd forgotten until reading this article then vaguely remembered hearing about it before) and I certainly don't know it for its speed and ease of use.

I'm old enough and enough of a computer enthusiast to remember when BeOS came onto the scene. Even most computer enthusiasts today probably haven't heard of it and of those who have I imagine only a subset have heard of Haiku.

Now maybe Haiku really is great, fast and easy to use but I think it's a stretch to claim it's "known for" those traits when (perhaps undeservedly) I think it's more accurate to say to a first approximation it's not known at all.

In this regard it's nothing like Mac OS which while much less popular than Window, even my parents have heard of.

Re: How to Design Software Good

#64

Post by GuiA »

anonytrary wrote: post #60
GuiA wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to keep a tally; in 2018, any document that exclusively uses masculine pronouns for genderless subjects reads as outdated. When writing on technical topics, the chief concern is to be clear, accurate, and straightforward. Anything that might distract your reader is undesirable. By referring to “the user” as “he”, you’re already distracting roughly 50% of your potential readership (if you’re writing the docume…

> By referring to “the user” as “he”, you’re already distracting roughly 50% of your potential readership (if you’re writing the documentation for a Do It Yourself Vasectomy Kit, perhaps you get a pass). Do you have any research/data to back this up? I'm a male and I am not distracted when people use "she" (or "he" for that matter). I have never heard anyone in person complain about not being able to focus on an arti…

There is a user, they are using the system, and that’s about as much as we know about them.

Re: How to Design Software Good

#65

Post by profalseidol »

lemming wrote: post #56
nayuki wrote: post #48

I saw a quick flash of unstyled content (in Firefox) where all the text was jammed into one paragraph with no breaks. And then the page rendered normally. So I glanced at the source code, and it surprised me to see that it was not a typical HTML document, but instead an XML document with a stylesheet. It is very rare to see a non-HTML page on the web, whether it is the XHTML serialization of HTML, or fully custom XML…

I agree this is very unusual. It's also somewhat annoying, for example I can't just send this to my Kindle to read it, and I can imagine other tools failing on this as well.

Kindle will probably take it away from you anyway.

Re: How to Design Software Good

#66

Post by vidarh »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #42
qwerty456127 wrote: post #21

> depend only on the formats installed by default in the system. Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. I was amazed to see somebody has actually went implementing this idea (as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku) > As an aside, MP3 is a format which requ…

> Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. The Amiga got something like that with Workbench 2.0, actually: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Datatypes_Library This is also very cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AREXX > ARexx can easily communicate with third-party software that impleme…

I'm not sure datatypes was before 3.0?

But as a great demonstration of why this is fantastic: Amiga software written in the early 1990's [1] can open e.g. WebP files without modification, despite the format being released only in 2010.

[1] Actually even some older ones - since AmigaOS lets you patch OS functionality quite easily, there's a tool - DTConvert - that patches library calls to intercept attempts to read non-IFF image formats and passes it through datatypes, to let even older programs load files supported by datatypes...

Re: How to Design Software Good

#67

Post by reificator »

bkmartin wrote: post #44
fao_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of feel that you just read the title here. It's not talking about the 'fullest': An example of this would be if a music composition program has an easily-reached maximum song size because the code monkey who wrote it used a 16-bit variable instead of a 32-bit one. *While there are sometimes limitations that cannot be overcome*, the actual code written and the architecture used when it was written should have a…

The most common example I see is the password requirement that it must be between 8 and 16 characters... The 16 character limit is the main issue there... You know it has to do with the wya the data is stored.

It had better not...

Re: How to Design Software Good

#68

Post by cr4zy »

nayuki wrote: post #48

I saw a quick flash of unstyled content (in Firefox) where all the text was jammed into one paragraph with no breaks. And then the page rendered normally. So I glanced at the source code, and it surprised me to see that it was not a typical HTML document, but instead an XML document with a stylesheet. It is very rare to see a non-HTML page on the web, whether it is the XHTML serialization of HTML, or fully custom XML…

Also cannot read with dark reader. My eyes! -.-

Re: How to Design Software Good

#69

Post by robotresearcher »

waddlesplash wrote: post #28
qwerty456127 wrote: post #21

> depend only on the formats installed by default in the system. Funny fact I've actually "invented" this philosophy (drivers for every file format being installed, managed and exposed to applications and scripts by an OS) when I was a child. I was amazed to see somebody has actually went implementing this idea (as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku) > As an aside, MP3 is a format which requ…

> as far as I understand it works approximately this way in Haiku Yep, it is indeed. You can of course write your own translators for custom file formats and install them along with your application; but then anything which already handled whatever representation they produced (e.g. PNG/JPG/etc. images -> BBitmap, Haiku's image buffer class) could then handle those filetypes also. > This is not true, the patent has e…

Some in Germany do. For example the owners of the aforementioned mp3 patent.

https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audi...

Re: How to Design Software Good

#70

Post by chipotle_coyote »

timClicks wrote: post #61
lemming wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is very unusual. It's also somewhat annoying, for example I can't just send this to my Kindle to read it, and I can imagine other tools failing on this as well.

Which is more the fault of the Kindle than the authors. It's Docbook, a standard that was invented for the purpose of writing books.

It's great to use DocBook for writing books! (Actually, I don't think this is true for most books, but you do you.) But I would argue that processors that are designed to take HTML as input are not at fault for failing to process non-HTML documents. (Many, but not all) web browsers can render and style XML like this, but I'd argue that this is -- somewhat ironically given the article's subject -- probably not the best approach to putting DocBook files on the web.
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