241–250 of 279 posts
On Windows, you could press ALT to navigate the menu bar: each menu item would have a letter underlined to tell you how to select it, and when you picked a letter the menu would expand and each new item would have an underlined item etc. So you quickly discover and commit to muscle memory that ALT + F + S would select File then Save. This worked for dialog pop-up options as well so you didn't have to click. You can't…
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How do you indicate to users that they can right-click on a computer mouse? You don't; they just know it. If they don't, their friends and family will teach them.
It's pretty undesirable to hide functionality behind invisible gestures or menus specifically because users do not "just know it".
I could have sworn I saw a dropdown command/search dialog designed by Jeff Raskin as part of The Humane Interface, and demonstrated in PyTHE a Python imeplementation of it. Can't find any evidence of it, but I can find a 2003 Guido van Rossum review of Jeff Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" in which Raskin mentions LEAP(r) a design for adding search-backwards and search-forwards keys below the spacebar to save peo…
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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.
> ...hate power users because they limit the ability to sell customizations or pro service engagements. 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 per…
The article paints command palettes as a return to terminal inputs. However there are two massive differences. Firstly, the use of fuzzy search and natural language makes the commands discoverable. Secondly, there is a feedback mechanism that shows what the command will do before it's run. Together, these massively lower the learning curve.
Is love to see a command palette terminal fusion. Thought about this many times.
See here for some usages: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/Related-projects
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I don’t want to assume ages, so: there was a time way before the app store where installing an app on a mac was as easy as clicking download and extracting the “file” (it was actually a folder, just like current mac apps). Trying it out only needed a double-clicking on the resulting icon. No install script, no pkg files, no hidden prefs, nothing. Want to uninstall it? Drag it to trash. It was only when Apple started…
That’s still how I install 95% of Mac apps? (.dmg) I don’t think the Mac App Store is even that popular. Rarely is an app exclusively there, though times might be changing. About 5% of things come as .pkg installers but usually in a situation where it makes sense. Default macOS will still check for Apple’s seal of approval on software, but this is done by developers signing their distributed app.
Some apps, like Wireguard, can't even be installed outside of the App Store, because Apple won't sign the entitlements they need to run outside of it.
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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?
This is one thing it does very well, it beats emacs hands down in history visualization (at least without undo-tree, I've never tried it).
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I feel like from a design and architecture point of view, building an application with the command line as a first class citizen will ensure that the application is well designed.
Have you ever run `rm -f important_doc.txt` instead of intended `rm -f important_doc copy.txt`? It doesn't matter if it is GUI or terminal interface, software must be _humane_, forgive mistakes and provide a way out. As much as love Unix coreutils and have them in may fingertips, those are the least humane programs I have ever used. Surprisingly, git seems quite humane, even when you screw things up it gives you a lo…
The problem is that filesystems don't get enough love. There are plenty of more fundamental problems that aren't going anywhere, so do not expect this to change.
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I think there's a strong correlation. We did gain a lot in security and simplicity with the App Store model. Lots of people that would never install apps on Windows or Macs, due to fear and ignorance, do so regularly on their smartphones. Moreover, they upgrade their OSs and pay with credit cards, etc. On the other hand, those same people had folders on their desktops and managed files reasonably well. And now that e…
I don’t want to assume ages, so: there was a time way before the app store where installing an app on a mac was as easy as clicking download and extracting the “file” (it was actually a folder, just like current mac apps). Trying it out only needed a double-clicking on the resulting icon. No install script, no pkg files, no hidden prefs, nothing. Want to uninstall it? Drag it to trash. It was only when Apple started…
Where do you get the app from? Is it safe?
App Stores solve all this issues while, unfortunately, making some really useful apps almost impossible to exist.
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Is love to see a command palette terminal fusion. Thought about this many times.
https://warp.dev is trying!
Currently, we're currently building a feature called "Tasks Not Commands".that allows users to interact with the terminal via a task instead of an obtuse command or series of commands. See the mock here [1]. For example, be able to type "undo last git commit" instead of needing to memorize `git reset --hard SOFT`. We envision users being able to create and share their own custom tasks as well. What do you think? Join our discord to stay updated. [2]
[1] https://assets-global.website-files.com/60352b1db5736ada4741... [2] https://www.warp.dev/discord
