I've been "sanding" my personal website ( https://dustinbrett.com ) for nearly 4 years now, and it feels like it could go on forever. Luckily I enjoy working on it.
This is so fun. I love it. Well done!
Sanding UI
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Re: Sanding UI
#72I've been "sanding" my personal website ( https://dustinbrett.com ) for nearly 4 years now, and it feels like it could go on forever. Luckily I enjoy working on it.
This is so fun to explore. You've done some great work on this! It's inspiring. A lot of fun to think about how you've implemented everything.
Re: Sanding UI
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never understood the claim that Apple's UIs are better than others'. That wasn't true while Jobs was around, and it isn't true now. Apple Photos, for example, loses keystrokes every time I create a new album. That's been true for years. And Time Machine randomly drops files from backups. Linux isn't perfect, but my daily experience using it has been far superior for years.
Well the Time Machine comparison doesn't really belong in a laundry list, it's basically Apple's greatest unmitigated disaster ever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28355058
Time Machine's "Floating Time Tunnel" user interface for browsing backups and restoring files is such a useless pretentious piece of shit. I DO NOT CARE for it taking over the entire screen with its idiotic animation, that prevents me from browsing current Finder folders at the same time or DOING ANYTHING ELSE like looking at a list of files I want to retrieve on the same screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSwy_thSXow
It even sadistically blacks out every other connected display, and disables Alt-Tab, as if it was so fucking important that it had to lock you out of the rest of your system while you use it.
You can't just quickly Alt-Tab to flip back to another app to check something before deciding which file to restore and then Alt-Tab back to where you were. No, that would be too easy, and you'd miss out on all that great full screen animation. It not only takes a long time to start up and play its opening animations, but when you cancel it, it SLOWLY animates and cross fades back to the starting place, so you LOSE the time and location context that you laboriously browsed to, and then you have to take even more time and effort to get back to where you just were.
It was designed by a bunch of newly graduated Trump University graphics designers on cocaine, with absolutely NO knowledge or care in the world about usability or ergonomics or usefulness, who only wanted to have something flashy and shiny to buff up their portfolios and blog about, and now we're all STUCK with it, at our peril.
Crucial system utilities should not be designed to look and operate like video games, and turn a powerful mutitasking Unix operating system interface into a single tasking Playstation game interface. ESPECIALLY not backup utilities. There is absolutely no reason it needs to take over the entire screen and lock out all other programs, and have such a ridiculously gimmicky and useless user interface.
Whatever the fuck is wrong with Apple has been very very wrong since the inception of Time Machine and is STILL very wrong. How can you "Think Different" if you're not bothering to think at all?
Time Machine isn't just Apple Maps Bad...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E
It's QuickTime 4.0 Player Bad.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
The most damning praise comes from Wired Magazine, 06.08.2007. Fuck Core Animation and the "Delicious Generation":
https://www.wired.com/2007/06/core-anim/
>Core Animation will allow programmers to give their applications flashy, animated interfaces. Some developers think Core Animation is so important, it will usher in the biggest changes to computer interfaces since the original Mac shipped three decades ago.
>"The revolution coming with Core Animation is akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984," says Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library. "We're going to see a whole new world of user-interface metaphors with Core Animation."
>Shipley predicts that Core Animation will kick-start a new era of interface experimentation, and may lead to an entirely new visual language for designing desktop interfaces. The traditional desktop may become a multilayered three-dimensional environment where windows flip around or zoom in and out. Double-clicks and keystrokes could give way to mouse gestures and other forms of complex user input.
>The Core Animation "revolution" is already starting to happen. Apple's iPhone at the end of the month will see people using their fingers to flip through media libraries, and pinching their fingers together to resize photos.
>The "Delicious generation" is a breed of young developers who embrace interface experimentation and brash marketing. The term "Delicious generation" was meant as an insult, but they wear it as a badge of honor.
>Image: Adam BettsShipley's initial release of Delicious Library, with its glossy, highly refined interface, gave birth to a new breed of developers dubbed the "Delicious generation." For these Mac developers, interface experimentation is one of the big appeals of programming.
[...]
>Apple has been ignoring its own HIG for some time in applications like QuickTime, and is abandoning them completely in upcoming Leopard applications like Time Machine.
>Functionality-wise, Time Machine is a banal program -- a content-version-control system that makes periodic, automated backups of a computer's hard drive.
>But Apple's take on the age-old task of incremental backups features a 3-D visual browser that allows users to move forward and backward through time using a virtual "time tunnel" reminiscent of a Doctor Who title sequence. It's completely unlike any interface currently used in Mac OS X.
[...]
>While it seems logical to speculate that interfaces like those of Time Machine and Spaces will lead to the end of the familiar "window" framework for desktop applications altogether, many Mac developers predict that the most basic elements of the current user interface forms won't disappear entirely.
Re: Sanding UI
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe it boils down to what we teach as “finished”. Is a feature finished when the code works? When the pull request is merged? Or when a feature works well ? I also believe there’s a lack of care. The difference between a craftsman and anyone else is care .
The lack of care from the product managers filters down through engineering. Product managers only care if a feature is shipped, not it it is polished. More shit shipping means more personal gain.
but then why not keep going down the line, and say that the customers also doesnt care?
Re: Sanding UI
#75I like this idea of sanding your UI...
Just recently have done quite naturally the same thing... Expand the clickable surface area of a region
Re: Sanding UI
#76I like this idea of sanding your UI... Just recently have done quite naturally the same thing... Expand the clickable surface area of a region
That should be a metric... % clickable. Could look at app, page, component levels
Re: Sanding UI
#77Is so important have people with that spark to see and fix those little UX issues, a good analogy used on UX design is papercuts for the user, not critical but it degrades user satisfaction. To the author I will add that that radio button is not following the convension of a dot for the selected state instead of a check. Users may think at first sight that multiple/no selection is possible.
One I've experienced on GitHub and Jira is dragging to select text on a dialog, if you release outside the dialog the mouse up event dismisses the pop up which is probably a side effect of being able to click outside the dialog to dismiss it.
Re: Sanding UI
#78On Safari (iPad), type something in the search bar. If you accidentally click outside of your keyboard it will deselect the bar and delete everything you typed. On Spotify the three little dots to do some action to a song have too small of a hitbox. Press even the slightest bit under the button and it will start playing the song. You'd never click there to play the song. When you consider the scale of these apps, the…
I believe that the iPad behavior you describe is intentional. I’m not sure I’m right here, and there are tradeoffs. I get frustrated with it too. But I think Apple is going for clarity, lack of ambiguity. If your text remained in place but the control were not focused, what would that control then indicate? In Safari now it _always_ indicates (a) the current page, or (b) your current typing. To do otherwise would be…
I don't know if it's a Windows/Mac thing, click/touch thing, or Apple vs others thing. I do notice that on Chrome/Firefox/Edge on Windows, when you click away from address bar after modifying the URL, it does not revert the value. Actually same on Android.
Re: Sanding UI
#79The goto tactic for this specific ` ` problem is: Foo
Bootstrap moved from in 4.0 to + in 5.0 for radios/checkboxes [1]. I was curious about why but my guess is that it adds some simplicity for theming when repositioning/padding either the label or input.
Re: Sanding UI
#80I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there?
You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ.
Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes.
Compare this to big box stores like “Home Depot”, “Lowe’s”. I can spend 10-15 minutes just trying to find the right size of screw, board, or whatever using their bloated sites. On mobile it’s even worse.