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If you're a button, you have one job

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Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#151

Post by wodenokoto »

altern8 wrote: post #149

Hair dryers normally have 2 controls, one to adjust how much air it blows, and another one to adjust how hot the jet is. When they're off, they don't blow any air so it would make sense to me to decide that the button to turn them on is the one that controls how much air it blows. It goes from 0 to 1 to turn on, so you just learned that that button changes how much air comes out of it. But no, most of them do the opp…

I imagine it’s similar to why a fan starts at max. Eg: 0->3->2->1

Something technical made it easier to implement.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#152

Post by boomlinde »

inigyou wrote: post #121
mrob wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency is cumulative, so avoidable latency is never acceptable. Maybe the hardware will change. Maybe somebody will run your software in an emulator. That 5ms could be enough to push the total latency into the "annoying" level. And even with no additional latency, 5ms is perceptible in some cases anyway. Microsoft Research has a video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

Do you really think the people who programmed your microwave should have taken into consideration that someone might write a microwave emulator in the future? Dealing with that is not their job, it is the job of the emulator creators.

Their job probably isn't to invent weird, stupid ways to account for button bounce, either.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#153

Post by hypfer »

benj111 wrote: post #133
hypfer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes in a vacuum. No on the Internet. Especially not on the sea-lion infested HR-world Internet, in which trolling has evolved to exploit good faith directly. ___ In fact, "being overly hostile" is exactly how you probe to see whether your suspicions are correct. Sea lioning exploits the gap between what would be a real human thing to do and what still passes as what a real human would do. So to get useful data, you n…

> (This should not be understood as "just be overly hostile" because simply being a dick doesn't provide any data at all.) If you're a dick for a reason, you're still being a dick. (Your word not mine) And I don't see how your approach makes discourse any better. To me the parents question was reasonable. Skeuomorphism was designed for people that may never have seen a computer before. Do we need to still be clicking…

> But you haven't really delved into that.

Dude, are you also playing that script or what?

Of course you do not engage on the level the possibly malicious party wants you to engage, because if you do that, you play their game by their rules.

Have you even tried engaging with what I just said? (inb4 "but you didn't do either!!111")

God, this fucking platform. Whatever man. Go have fun being dragged (or dragging others) into never-ending bad-faith arguments.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#154

Post by aliher1911 »

altern8 wrote: post #149

Hair dryers normally have 2 controls, one to adjust how much air it blows, and another one to adjust how hot the jet is. When they're off, they don't blow any air so it would make sense to me to decide that the button to turn them on is the one that controls how much air it blows. It goes from 0 to 1 to turn on, so you just learned that that button changes how much air comes out of it. But no, most of them do the opp…

Possibly a consumer air dryer problem, something-something safety. Check professional ones like Parlux, the one I checked has 2 dials: airflow and temperature. Turns on by air dial. They are also conveniently under the thumb so you can adjust without looking.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#156

Post by amelius »

embedding-shape wrote: post #53
mproud wrote: post #35

How about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register? I am still reminded of a keynote where Steve Jobs was demoing how much faster PDF documents would display on the newer macOS. So he had engineers put a button in for him to click that would scroll through the PDF on the screen, and he accidentally clicked it more than once. Steve wondered aloud if it would scroll all th…

I'm no longer the Apple/Mac/Jobs fan-boy I once was in my earlier days, but I do miss the Apple presentations that felt like they were run by a human being wanting to show off cool stuff. I couldn't even finish the last Apple presentations as it all feels so stiff, inhuman and run by suits, they all seem like robots scared of diverging from the holy script who will get fired if they display emotions and humanity. Off…

Apple keeps solving the same old problems. Why are we still talking about how well their buttons behave?

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#157

Post by chrismorgan »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #100
bloak wrote: post #50

I used to have a device with a physical button which, when you pressed it, would beep and add 30 seconds to the time. However, sometimes it would beep and not add 30 seconds, and sometimes it would add 30 seconds without beeping, so you always had to squint at the dim display to discover whether it had worked or not. I thought this must be a peculiarly bad design ... but since then I have lost count of the number of…

I notice this pretty consistently with elevators: If you press the button for a short amount of time, it visibly lights up while pressed but doesn't actually register the button-press.

I have long presumed that sort of thing to be deliberate, avoiding activation on accidental bump.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#158

Post by PaulHoule »

I’m thinking a lot about how older applications are often better than new for reasons like this.

Sometimes I log into my big Windows machine at home with RDP from out of the house to post photos to my socials, like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

and with a folder with a few hundred images in it is is awkward to use the official file chooser dialog because it is based on modern UI toolkits and practices which are wasteful and slow over the net. It is much easier to use XnView MP because it is based on an old widget set which isn’t flashy.

Similarly I find myself impressed with the old Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator because, sprawling as they are, they come out of an old time when they were expected to work on machines with a fraction (1/2000 of the RAM!) of the capacity of modern machines and there is just less junk. Adobe recently took the “(legacy)” label off “Save to Web” because that ancient feature alone goes a long way to justifying the creative cloud subscription.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#159

Post by chrismorgan »

mproud wrote: post #35

How about when users accidentally click too much, or they believe the first click didn’t register? I am still reminded of a keynote where Steve Jobs was demoing how much faster PDF documents would display on the newer macOS. So he had engineers put a button in for him to click that would scroll through the PDF on the screen, and he accidentally clicked it more than once. Steve wondered aloud if it would scroll all th…

That was a common problem in JS-based menu opening and closing, long ago: they were treated as animations and queued. This was sometimes quite ludicrous.

Nowadays, you use transitions instead, which are not queued. But I still very occasionally see things that use queued animations.

Re: If you're a button, you have one job

#160

Post by inigyou »

mrkeen wrote: post #145
bloak wrote: post #50

I used to have a device with a physical button which, when you pressed it, would beep and add 30 seconds to the time. However, sometimes it would beep and not add 30 seconds, and sometimes it would add 30 seconds without beeping, so you always had to squint at the dim display to discover whether it had worked or not. I thought this must be a peculiarly bad design ... but since then I have lost count of the number of…

I call it the "doing two things" problem. Your write imperative code, which issues two commands, both of which can fail independently. There are plenty of ways to pretend to 'deal with it'. Firstly it will just pass all tests, so most devs can stop thinking about it right away. A dev might think you can just catch and log the exception. Doesn't fix it. You could run the code in prod for a while, see if it goes wrong.…

Why can the two things even fail at all?
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