151–160 of 250 posts
The latest in a long line of articles where "Raymond Chen" is my first thought before even opening it, just based on the title Great read
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Tab key is both a control character moving the cursor to the next input and also an input representing the tab character as you see in a text editor. Now that im thinking about it I’m convinced capslock would have been superior next field key and alt+capslock to be used for toggling capslock. But it’s not obvious to me capslock [e: must be] seen by the OS. It could be changed on the keyboards themselves.
It definitely is visible, OS login screens usually warn you if caps lock is on when typing password
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> I would guess that using the tab key in this way was part of a patent they were pursuing and Microsoft's use would show this to be 'obvious' and thus not patentable. Something that's bothered me about user-facing patents: Let's assume that the idea of using a keyboard key to move between input fields in a software form is not obvious, and in fact is a brilliant stroke of genius the likes of which the world is not l…
> “a brilliant stroke of genius the likes of which the world is not likely to see again. If that one guy hadn't been born, we would have gone thousands of years with no method” But that’s not the criteria for granting a patent. It doesn’t have to be a stroke of genius. It can be something that many people could invent at the particular moment of the filing (as evidenced by many cases of near-simultaneous patent filin…
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"To be fair, Microsoft & Bill Gates are bad at quality user experience." In some ways. Gates deserves never-ending enmity for plaguing us with backslashes in paths. But in others, Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. "Would of?"
> Microsoft advanced the state of UI and UX more than anyone else in the '90s. There is no universe where that is true.
Win95's UI was so incredibly influential that stuff introduced by it are still around to this day.
IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wore suits to work but the culture was changing so the interns put in a request to be allowed casual Fridays. Bear in mind that they were locked in a back room somewhere without any c…
In the late 90s I moved from one country to another. As a part of a job hunt I applied to the local IBM office, because I had some OS/2 mileage. Then promptly got three offers from other places, accepted one and completely forgot about the IBM application. Not 8 (eight) months later I got a call from their HR saying they'd like to interview me next Thursday. And then they got completely flabergasted when I said I was…
The only company they were on par with was Arthur Andersen, who were offering around £15k for trainee accountant roles, but you know how fast those salaries go up once you’re qualified and start to progress.
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Its whole purpose is to be remapped as CTRL, as god intended.
Why the need for a third CTRL key, when the only backspace key is currently in Siberia?
The thing I find funny here is that MicroSoft in the 80s and early 90s was a scrappy bunch of hackers trying to get something out the door. But over time they've sort of become IBM. Based on the way things have progressed... Microsoft has become IBM. IBM has become CA. Apple has become Microsoft. Oracle has become DEC (if DEC had a few more lawyers.) Amazon has become Oracle.
So who became Xerox? (i.e., brilliant ideas, thrown away at the corporate level)
IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wore suits to work but the culture was changing so the interns put in a request to be allowed casual Fridays. Bear in mind that they were locked in a back room somewhere without any c…
Mr. Show, "Change for a Dollar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyocQT4Vn2g
I'm aware of folklore.org, but I wish there were something equivalent within Apple itself. Sadly, it's not part of Apple's culture.