dylan-m

The thing on the stand is goofy, partly because it's like a large Apple Watch. Especially goofy when it's pictured with a hand, and it isn't actually all that big. But their wall mounted design looks interesting, kind of for the same reason? Aesthetically it immediately makes me think of a wall clock, which tells me exactly where it belongs. I kind of feel like they should lead with that one. (Although maybe they should be honest that it obviously needs a power cable).

Pedantry time: Fitts' Law is a law in the same sense as Newton's Law. Fitts' Law is an established model for understanding how humans interact with objects. If you're jumping on a trampoline, you aren't breaking the law of gravity, but you're certainly using it to some effect.

Similarly, if you decide that your button positioned at the edge of the screen actually shouldn't be an infinitely long click target, you aren't breaking Fitts' Law. You might be doing it with Fitts' Law in mind, or not, but Paul Fitts' ghost isn't waiting in the shadows to prosecute small buttons. Some actions should be difficult!

With that said, they definitely screwed up here, but I don't like when we're like "but Fitts' Law" and act like that proves our point on its own. If they wanted, they could "Fitts' Law" right back at you.

I feel like Disney+ really cemented the decline here. I enjoyed watching Reservation Dogs, which I think I had pirated originally because it was one of those smaller shows with awkward distribution rights. I genuinely wanted to just go and buy the second and third seasons up front when they were airing. It's fine if it's unreasonably priced and it takes a day or two for the episodes to be available, I needed to absolve my guilt for pirating it. So I tried iTunes, which has basically everything if you bring cash, right? Used to, anyway. Not anymore. The only way to watch this show is if you subscribe to Disney+. I don't know why they make this hard, and I don't care either. Episodes were available immediately on TPB. I felt bad, but Disney made me do it. To be fair, Netflix does the same thing, but they don't have their fingers in so many places.

If it’s important to you that an application doesn’t need to cooperate, then that’s something Snap has an answer for. I don’t remember the name of it or if it got past the proposal stage, but it’s like “if an app opens a file, intercept the syscall and show a dialog.” I think it’s a disgusting solution to a non-problem (it was demoed with Firefox which has dutifully cooperated with our shit for decades). But it’s interesting :)

> When it asks me to open a file, or a directory, it should invoke a system dialog that cannot be faked, and when I pick a file/directory for it, that directory or file should be bind-mounted into its mount namespace without giving it extra information about other files beside it, or indeed what's the full path of the file. When recording a screen, I should be able to pick which regions and which applications it should be able to see, and the system should make it think it's all there is.

You've described exactly what flatpak is doing? I'm curious what gaps you see with its approach in particular.

My favourite thing about Django is the versioned documentation. Land on a page - any page - and you can trivially read the docs on that subject all the way back to 1.8. That's ten years old. And it works, because Django knows how to patiently deprecate APIs and migrate things. They built one docs site, and it still works. It didn't bitrot. The URLs haven't changed. They didn't restructure everything and force people to rewrite their entire projects or be judged quietly. Every single time I end up working with a framework where docs are littered across a handful of different websites for different versions and types of docs or whatever, I think of Django and I wonder why people have such terrible taste.

Alas, that tends to be the majority of my experience with Django. Using it for one-off personal projects and quietly wishing for the current new shiny JavaScript thing to go away. It still feels like home, but most of my time is somewhere else.

I'm okay with modal dialogs working that way as long as people get the message: dialogs are supposed to be ephemeral. If closing the dialog loses important state, or you need information from something under the dialog in order to use the dialog, what you have shouldn't be a modal dialog. And you can tell, because in most UI frameworks that widget is just begging to be closed. Unfortunately, a lot of teams don't get the message.

This is why it's often safer to "jaywalk". If you're in the middle of a block, you only have to look two ways. Even if you screw up, a driver going at a reasonable speed is more likely to see you anyway because you're directly in front of them. I'm not exactly advocating for crossing in the middle of a street in North America since it's depends a lot on the situation, but there's a reason why people sometimes just do it intuitively, and it's unfortunate our infrastructure doesn't know how to address it.

America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There's a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.

A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags.

> This was really neat, traditionally you have to access those by right-clicking some whitespace in the list/grid view, but in the list view there is only a narrow band of empty space to right-click, usually you accidentally click a file. So this was a genuine innovation in UI design. Unfortunately they since removed it again.

Wait, no? It hasn’t. I’m looking at a fresh build from the main branch right now. The menu doesn’t have Paste in it in this version, which might be what you’re referring to, but I don’t think it was ever there. (Alas, copy and paste UIs are sad). But otherwise it is very much there. And arguably better because the other big menu has moved somewhere else :) If you’re finding it’s completely gone, um, what distro are you using so I can quietly judge them?

> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.

In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.

It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.

This is one of my favourite things about Fedora Silverblue and rpm-ostree. If I run `rpm-ostree status`, I get a list of all the packages I’ve installed or removed compared to the base image. Makes it really easy to keep track of what’s different in my system compared to the current default.