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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

#71

Post by antihero »

hypfer wrote: post #46

People often forget that animations serve purely a supportive role and do not exist for the purpose of having animations. They are there to mask loading times and ease from one state into the other. That's why we have them. This knowledge eventually got lost (figuratively speaking) and now we have code that needs to wait on the animation to finish. Another amazing example of cargo culting.

They aren’t purely for that, they also contribute to how an application feels to use in a creative manner.

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

#72

Post by atoav »

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…

Bad programming. People who have experience with embedded programming knows that reading out a button usually means denouncing. At the speed a microcontroller can read out a button it will change it's state multiple times per press because of contact bounce. Meaning when a user presses a button the program sees off, on, off, off, on, on, off, on, on, on, on, on, on, etc.

Now if you just naively read out the current state of the button and do something with it elsewhere in the program looping may be off or on randomly.

It is not hard to imagine if there is some other logic (or e.g. a rate limit) on the 30 seconds and on the beep that these would see different slices in time of the button. Congrats you built a button-debounce based RNG.

Physical buttons can be surprisingly complex if you don't rely on someone else's driver. The correct solution is to debounce the button, that can be done either in hardware (too expensive, so rarely done) or in softeare, by e.g. averaging the last 50 reads and wait till the majority is either off or on.

This should be common knowledge for embedded programmers, but every noe and then you will see someone who has never heard of it.

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

#73

Post by hypfer »

antihero wrote: post #71
hypfer wrote: post #46

People often forget that animations serve purely a supportive role and do not exist for the purpose of having animations. They are there to mask loading times and ease from one state into the other. That's why we have them. This knowledge eventually got lost (figuratively speaking) and now we have code that needs to wait on the animation to finish. Another amazing example of cargo culting.

They aren’t purely for that, they also contribute to how an application feels to use in a creative manner.

I don't want my image editor to feel like something in a creative manner though.

I want it to rotate an image by 90° when I tap the button that does that.

See, this is exactly my point when I say that animations are no end in themselves. They serve a supporting role to better get the actual job done.

The actual job is not "feel" it is "do". For vibes, there are movies, Art, and AI hallucinations.

Of course, "feel" can greatly enhance the "do", but only if it takes the back seat, which is exactly what I just said.

__

The age-old debate "form follows function" vs "form over function", essentially.

One of them is correct tho, because in the real non-ZIRP world, correctness is defined as "achieves a tangible goal".

Which is not to say that stuff optimizing for other goals would be "incorrect" or "worthless", but it exists in a different category from "software". More like "software-adjacent Art".

The distinction being made based on "what is the primary goal we want to achieve here"

____

Related:

Also caused by ZIRP but differently, we have that problem that software trying to invoke feelings usually does so because it wants to sell you something or has any other style of goal that might not be aligned with yours.

So that adds yet another layer.

Pure utility cannot scam people into stuff they actually didn't want to do.

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

#74

Post by CTDOCodebases »

It's Android stop expecting it to make sense. You have to learn some intricacy of some tool so you can forget it and have to learn it again three months later.

iOS is no better. Sure everything is intuitive but it's going to get a redesign so next year you are going to have to learn everything from scratch or a feature you use often will just break.

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

#76

Post by atoav »

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…

Button ≠ Button. People like to believe they should all be the same, but they really should not be.

On physical keyboards we already have three different kinds: normal buttons, modifier keys (shift, etc) and toggle keys (caps lock).

High stakes rare actions can require special button designs. E.g. on a black magic cinema camera the button that formats the memory card needs to be held for three second while it visually counts down. This gives a small delay during which the user can decide: "Fuck this is the wrong memory card!" and cancle.

The downside is that some imaginary power user that uses the camera only to format a stack of SSDs will get burdened. You have to decide which is more common and make a decision.

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

#77

Post by darkwater »

hypfer wrote: post #56
selestify wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was that? What causes such fads? Why did everyone go along with it?

Speaking entirely out of my ass here: FOMO for sure is one of the driving factors. "We cannot risk looking outdated". So weak management, probably. But also talent availability I suppose. If there's a new trend, the pool of people you can hire include many that are in on that trend. UI frameworks too, probably. The modern thing™ does the modern thing™ and you do want to be on the modern thing, because you fear that o…

If UIs today still looked exactly the same as Windows 2.0 or System 7 or CDE people will be bored to death. Aesthetics come and go and come back, it's part of how humanity worked for a few centuries already.

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

#78

Post by odyssey7 »

Are there times when, during a call, pressing an iPhone’s screen-on/off button will end the call, but other times when it will just turn the screen off?

I still do not know the pattern, but I have on occasion inadvertently ended a call by using that button prior to placing my iPhone in my pocket.

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

#79

Post by benj111 »

hypfer wrote: post #66
xigoi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m being serious. I find skeuomorphic UIs to be too visually overwhelming compared to flat UIs.

That is a valid opinion to hold, however, the question of "what is wrong with X? Y is outdated and over" is a) a different statement from "I prefer X" and b) pretty low effort, trivially to Google (or ask AI) and generally a bit on the ignorant side A better reply would not just have said what it said but contained actual wonder about the topic. Like this, it's just indistinguishable from engagement bait.

I think you're being overly hostile.

The parents question seems reasonable to my non designy mind.

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

#80

Post by k4rli »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #74

It's Android stop expecting it to make sense. You have to learn some intricacy of some tool so you can forget it and have to learn it again three months later. iOS is no better. Sure everything is intuitive but it's going to get a redesign so next year you are going to have to learn everything from scratch or a feature you use often will just break.

Using AOSP-based Android roms, I haven't noticed any big changes in years. In current "android 16" and my old "android 10" device one couldn't really tell a difference. Very simple UX, no bloatware apps, no hidden drawers coming out from sides.

I've tried the vendor ones by Samsung, OnePlus etc with fresh devices and this Android experience really is awful.

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