oloolo

Counter question: How many times do you read your downloaded app?

If this is true... (?) I wonder how many are aware of that? I wasn't.

The difference between an interface designer and a user is:

1. The designer knows many opinions (and due to being exposed to an avalanche of user feedback over the years you really see interfaces in a panopticum). But you never get enough. It's like a drug.

2. The user only knows his opinion. Every user opinion is important--to the designer.

Tufte is just an intelligent eloquent user. His interface design competence is as weak as his photography.

Without working in the field you don't get this perspective on interfaces. Tufte has an intelligent riff, but it's always the same professoral top-down "it-has-to-be-so-and-so", and sometimes he's just plain subjectively irrelevant.

Well, in contrast to Tufte, I actually have built a couple of Interfaces...

Tufte's site is s piece of crap, completely ridiculous. Criticizing websites is easy, making websites is hard. You're not an expert in user interface design if you haven't done user interface design.

Thanks. 1. I've been talking about reading typography for a long time and just got curious about what writing typography could be like. 2. Was always jealous of those amazing coding apps. 3. noticed that switching between writing in a small input field in the backend and reading in (a designed) preview mode on the frontend in WordPress improved my writing and just couldn't figure out why. 4. Secretly stalked people who wrote texts on computers at work, in cafés, and when visiting clients (online newspapers). Yeah and then (since I studied Philosophy) there was all this theoretical stuff (Barthes, see below) in the back of my head.

1. Those programs exist because there is a need to get out of the mess that Word is. 2. Programmers do have amazing apps, writers don't. 3. Fullscreen is not the solution to absence of distraction. I can work perfectly distraction free in Firework without going fullscreen. Cross editing is the main sickness of digital writing.

The key is a predefined writing-optimized typography that justifies the absence of formatting (a massive distraction) and a sub-mode that gets rid of all the visual clutter when necessary. Some think that Focus mode is just a gadget. It's not. The noise that is similar to the signal is the most distracting.

And then there is that black thing that puts it at an angle...

You'd be surprised.

Yes. Barthes discerns between texte lisibles (readable) and texte scriptible (writable). Which was one of the inspirations to switch our focus from readablity to writability and create Writer. In Barthes' theory things are a little bit different, though ("readable" and "writable" indicate different kinds of written texts, not text in and post creation).

The article is from 2006, man.

This shocked a lot of flash boys and neck beards back in 2006.

But nowadays...

Luckily, I had a chance to prove it many times.