231–240 of 279 posts
I hate this trend. Give me back menus and toolbars. I avoid using VS Code for this reason.
That is an interesting perspective. May I ask you what is you professional use of a computer and if it is programming - what kind of programming? I’m asking because I’m curious if environment drives habits/preferences.
Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”. Someone who's not a programer, but has learned lots of smart and efficient ways to getting their computer work done over the years. Shortcuts (keyboard or otherwise), click-hold-cmd-tab-drop or similar patterns, tags/labels for deep file organization, etc. It seems like there's now a much wider gap between the smartphone tap-only user and…
Is it just possible that the workflow of a power user has changed now while still retaining the core value of finding smart and efficient ways to get work done? Some examples that come to mind: The productivity industry is huge. Pop into the YouTube rabbit hole of people demonstrating how to use tools to be more productive, and you’ll stumble into a community that is bending every tool to basically serve their person…
Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”. Someone who's not a programer, but has learned lots of smart and efficient ways to getting their computer work done over the years. Shortcuts (keyboard or otherwise), click-hold-cmd-tab-drop or similar patterns, tags/labels for deep file organization, etc. It seems like there's now a much wider gap between the smartphone tap-only user and…
They might all hate the tool, but are able to navigate between entering and editing copy, editing layouts and running orders, searching wires then adapting it into stories etc. with great speed with shortcuts, saved workflows and yes, awkward cludges like always-open text files of boolean searches they frequently re-use.
The minute they need to leave their tool to do a peripheral task though, all of those gains are lost. The new web-based video subtitling tool might be better than their old workflow and something they use several times a week but there's an instant assumption that it's a mouse-only task, even if the tool is a11y-aware enough to not be. Lots of "oh is it ready? Ok now I...think I click this bit" because things like communicating status and progress aren't consistent or ubiquitous. It just doesn't have the efficiencies of their ugly old thing.
On the one hand they could learn how they could automate their browser to actually integrate these tools with their workflows better, but nothing about the browser environment seems to give the impression to this class of user that it can be used in this way.
I don't know if that's just about tools that each have their own look and feel, or that the browser metaphor is too overloaded (because that feels like a very 2003-era concern :p)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correction: Event logs should be transaction logs instead and you must be able to travel through it reverting and re-applying actions. It should be branch-able and allow you to jump between those branches.
I can do that with Emacs. What other tools make it easy to branch in history?
Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”. Someone who's not a programer, but has learned lots of smart and efficient ways to getting their computer work done over the years. Shortcuts (keyboard or otherwise), click-hold-cmd-tab-drop or similar patterns, tags/labels for deep file organization, etc. It seems like there's now a much wider gap between the smartphone tap-only user and…
Killed by design. Companies that build products or services hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. Software is now designed to be hard to manipulate outside of the expected workflows unless you are willing to pay for a software engineer or three (either internally or via aforementioned PS) to figure out.
Never ascribe to malice... Having sat on the product side before with some of my clients, I can describe it from their point of view. Power users typically consume a disproportionate share of support engineering and development engineering hours per account compared to their normal user calls from an accounting perspective. The holistic, value-adding way to approach this is to work more closely with the individual power users to find out what they are doing in detail for each of their industries, find commonalities, and push product capabilities in those directions.
The reflexive accounting response is invariably "make the power users stop using support services so much". Engineering then gets asked, "how do we stop these kinds of questions?", and the holistic response is shut down because "that costs too much, I want another option". You can see where this is leading...the features power users leverage get sunset, and finance/accounting is happy when they become responsible for a KPI improvement.
...while ignoring that any of them would give their eye teeth for the kind of profit lock-in Excel delivers, and under their KPI regime, Excel power users would have been stillborn.
Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incentive structuring.
BTW, I usually clarify with leadership what they envision in these situations in a behind-closed-doors meeting that doesn't challenge them. Most of them honestly do not want Excel-like lock-in via power users. They feel it is too fraught a road and that they can achieve lock-in in other ways. Fair enough, and my due diligence advising them is discharged (I might not agree, but there comes a time to help the organization put all its wood behind a single arrow).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an infrequent Mac user, how is this stuff discoverable? The OS seems willfully obfuscated to cater for some notional lowest common denominator user. Whenever I find myself using someone else's Mac, they never know any keyboard shortcuts or keyboard-plus-mouse-button context menus. It's bewildering and wildly frustrating. I find myself asking "surely this isn't how you always do this, there must be a better way?" b…
I’d guess that most people don’t use keyboard shortcuts at all, and only very few use anything besides copy, paste, and maybe save. People are shocked when I “command+l, c, t, v, enter” to duplicate the current tab.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the relationship you are suggesting between tooltips and feeling that you can try things without damaging the system.
Either you have a tooltip explaining the function or you have to test it to understand what it does. But to test something you want to know it doesn't cause problems. I feel like this is some fundamental UX dimension here. Cost and risk of learning. How much time do I have to use to learn all the commands or find the right command and if I have to try it what is the risk of breaking something? Just as relevant in cli…
Emacs always has an embryonic version of that with M-x, but with a simple autocomplete. That’s is, until Helm arrived in 2011: it made everything that is a list something to be dynamically filtered (commands, shortcuts, buffers, files, etc). IntelliJ has a command palette too (Ctrl-Shift-a), but it’s horribly slow and has many items with the same name doing different things (try looking for “settings” for example). B…
Is Helm an emacs thing I should look into if I want autocomplete? Trying to stay pretty vanilla but I'm already wishing for that feature.
For code, company mode is probably what you want. For the minibuffer, Ido (or fido if you want super-vanilla) plus which-key will get you far.
Here's what I have in my init.el:
;;(fido-mode 1)
(ido-mode 1)
(setq ido-enable-flex-matching t)
(setq ido-everywhere t) ; Also work with C-x C-f
(use-package which-key
:ensure t
:delight
:init (which-key-mode))
Anyone notices pressing Cmd-F / Ctrl-F on this linked article pops up a website launcher in that page? It's so neat and I want that in my Quicksilver / Alfred!
Something I've been noticing lately is the disappearance of the “power user”. Someone who's not a programer, but has learned lots of smart and efficient ways to getting their computer work done over the years. Shortcuts (keyboard or otherwise), click-hold-cmd-tab-drop or similar patterns, tags/labels for deep file organization, etc. It seems like there's now a much wider gap between the smartphone tap-only user and…