jalfresi

Real world appliances dont use checkboxes to power toggle

UI has become the domain of marketing and branding.

Checkboxes also have a fundamental dependency on the label to assist them with their affordance: a label for a checkbox should almost always be in the form of a yes/no question: “are you hungry? [ ]”

The “checked” box is an affirmative, empty is a negative. A checkbox without a label is useless because it has no context.

But I constantly see checkboxs without the question label. Think back to all those control panels and settings windows youve seen where the label for a checkbox is something like “animations [ ]”. Does that mean they are on by default? Does checking the checkbox switch them on or off?

Now compare with this “animations? [ ]” checking the checkbox has now become an answer to a question

Im not sure I agree with this, and its quite a common argument for animations in UIs. The fundamental weakness in this argument is that animations are not interactive. They have a beginning, middle and end. Any attempt to interact with the UI during this sequence would disrupt the animation. This is why animation makes UIs feel slow; clicking the widgets requires a period of time to transition from state A to state B via animation. The irony is that this is used to indicate a transition, to emulate what happens “in the real world sliders dont teleport to the next state”, but this often always misses the fact that I didnt slide the slider to its new state: i clicked a mouse button. That is an immediate state transition. So all animations like the above do is slow the feedback of the state transition in a misguided attempt to emulate a real world slider when i never interacted with the UI in any way that resembles a slider.

I do find it fascinating that we are entering a time now where there are engineers who have _only_ ever used cloud services - and that they can't conceive of a era where _we used to have to do all that stuff ourselves on-prem_.

BTW this isn't a criticism - just an observation - cloud has been around now for that long. Still feels "new" to me :D

"Notes on the Synthesis of Form" is my favorite book of all time. I try to re-read it at least once a year. Thoroughly recommend it.

Its not an admission fee. The website is hosted on a publicly accessible web server. There is no admission fee. The browser I am using serves my purposes; if I wish to strip certain elements from the page, add new ones or reformat the page any way I see fit, I can and am allowed to.

The point Google seem to be making quite clearly, is that the browser does not serve my needs, but the needs of Googles paying customers.

Have to agree with this - context is everything and there are an awful lot of naive comments here who don’t understand that XML-RPC was a breath of fresh air compared to SOAP, especially if like me you were using the LAMP stack and PHP. SOAP was abysmal- I really don’t recal a single project where communication between two systems using SOAP wasn’t without serious issues, incompatibility issues and just plain broken.

Many developers here might not recall serious compatibility issues with Microsoft- the most obvious one I recall was WebDAV ; pretty much strangled at birth by MS terrible broken implementation.

I used to use the PHP XML-RPC implementation you worked on for so many projects, so thanks for that- helped me to integrate so many projects, so cheers!

In HTTP, URLs are opaque identifiers. If you want to isolate semantics from a URL, then use query parameters.

Because the browser market is not a free market; both Apple and Google leverage their existing positions in other markets to promote their browsers.

This does raise a point - do we now have to assume that all those services that provide free hosting/access/service to open source projects will be strip-mining the work of the open source community to sell them back to us all? I almost feel stupid believing it was an altruistic move to contribute back to the shoulders of giants they were already standing on...

Very early in my software development career, i was frustrated and sad that i wasnt able to progress due to a lack of comprehension of how software is structured from smaller sub systems. I didnt have any kind of mentor available to me, and I seriously considered changing careers. I naively assumed that good software was written by naturally talented people, and because I was having problems growing I was obviously not talented and therefore would never get improve (I was young).

Then i stumbled across “Notes on the synthesis of form” from some random internet recommendation.

Not only was this book a complete eye opener, it helped me to understand so much about what I was doing was mostly by accident, and that design should be purposeful.

The most important lesson for my fledgling mind though was that design was a process, and a process that improved with each application. That good software developers arnt “born”, they are self sculpted.

I still have that battered, note riddled, page corners folded copy of “notes” and I take with me on holiday every year to re-read. Its my most favourite book I’ve ever read. It fills me with such inspiration everytime I read it.

I’m very sad to hear of Christophers passing. I never got to thank him.

"you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live"

Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?

I recall having an orange iMac on my desk specifically for testing because IE5.5 on the Mac was the most standards compliant browser on the market. Cant remember the exact year, but it was pre-millenium I think.

I'd be interested in an OpenBSD desktop