131–140 of 984 posts
It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?
For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices
Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much... [edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right?…
I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let’s test: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/
EDIT: Yep, still works!
In other words, I'm not using icons to find a single action. I'm using icons to quickly understand the available options to me. Meaning, they're only there to help me compare and contrast options within the same visual context. It's fine for the same action to have different icons in different places. When I'm looking at the "File" menu, I'm not really concerned what the action looks like on the toolbar (let alone a different app).
It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
The detail on the animations is, as usual, top notch, including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.
Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off hadn't worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off a bunch of times before i got it
It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
The detail on the animations is, as usual, top notch, including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.
And yes, I did think "this is terrible, there must be a way to change it", clicking the snowflake icon. The colour changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn't seem to change, so I just clicked back.
Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I didn't realize until seeing your comment.
It's fun. Looks neat. It's an extremely poor idea for a site trying to convey textual information.
I tend to disagree with the author on this. Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means. Where as icons have a lot more built in meaning (but lack specificity). I tend to use them as a _local_ fuzzy filter (unless it's a common, well known icon like share) then read the words to understand exactly w…
It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
I tend to disagree with the author on this. Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means. Where as icons have a lot more built in meaning (but lack specificity). I tend to use them as a _local_ fuzzy filter (unless it's a common, well known icon like share) then read the words to understand exactly w…
And it was clear enough that you would trust the stand-alone save icon to perform the action you expected. Icons were also selectively chosen for common actions.
If icons are considered non-deterministic and non-canonical, then they can't [confidently] be used stand-alone.
Also, I'll meet your data point of 1 with mine. I have an iPhone and find it far easier to pick an app from the list of names than pick an icon. I frequently mix them up (and I only use a dozen routinely)
For someone critical of UI, he has an awful lot of animated bullshit on that site.