straws

Github's https://primer.style/product/getting-started/ does a good job of making a cohesive design language that works just as well for server-rendering Ruby views and "upgrading" parts of the ui to React views when you need more interactivity. That's a constraint that I wish more of the Rails ecosystem design tooling would attempt to solve for.

Comment · 1 year ago

You're not alone. There's been an effort to transparently update the UI to a React implementation over the past year or two, and while I understand the benefits to that approach, they have introduced some flakiness in moving away from a the server-rendered pjax/html-pipeline/simple web components approach that was so cohesive and battle tested over the decade before it.

Comment · 2 years ago

The convention on desktop and mobile is not to have a submission at all. If you click one of these "mercury" buttons, you can always have up-to-date state.

Forms and submissions are mostly a web convention. I too think that's more natural, but there are a lot of existing contexts like settings where the expectation is that making the selection doesn't require an explicit "save" step.

Comment · 2 years ago

I'm not very excited about the product itself, but if you are at all interested in spatial computing, it's worth reading through Apple's design and developer resources:

Designing for visionOS - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Inputs: Eyes - https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Principles of spatial design - https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10072/

Create accessible spatial experiences - https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10034/

While I don't think there will be a mass adoption by people willing to put on goggles throughout the day, it's clear that a lot of Apple's ecosystem is being directed toward environmental and situational computing, and the SDK backs that up. Using gaze detection to focus on more than one device in a room, surfacing certain interactions in specific rooms, and low-lag screen mirroring from devices are all pretty high-cost investments that are likely to find uses in other products. I look forward to what kinds of "continuity" type features this tech introduces.

Comment · 4 years ago

If you have one of the newer magsafe iPhones, you can attach one of these to the wall (front camera) or the back of your monitor (back cameras):

https://www.shopmoment.com/products/wall-mount-for-magsafe/s...

Comment · 5 years ago

33 years, if you go by the patent. Lots more fun facts in Tim Hunkin's excellent Secret Life of Machines:

https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/0301-The_FAX_Machine...

Comment · 6 years ago

For instance, with Diagram Maker, application developers can enhance the experience for end customers by enabling them to intuitively and visually build cloud resources required by cloud services such as Workflow Engines (AWS Step Functions) or Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation) to get the relationships and hierarchies working.

Does this mean that Step Functions and CloudFormation will adopt this library? Both already have similar visualizations.

Comment · 6 years ago

I meant it more as a testament to how far you can get with a Rails app before needing to consider using the power tools :^)

Comment · 6 years ago

I hope to hear more in the future!

Do you envision any extension points to the way engines are implemented that could better enforce boundaries? In our engines, there was nothing that referenced another engine's resources, leaving the main application to handle route mapping and ActiveRecord associations between app models and engine's models.

I feel like the use-case for engines has long been around supporting framework like functionality (Devise, Spree, etc), but I wonder if there are changes to be made that better support modularization for large apps.

Comment · 6 years ago

A number of years ago, I worked on a team (~20 engineers in total) that successfully carved off two relatively independent portions of a large Rails app using engines. I'm happy to see that Shopify is also using that strategy.

I'm curious to know more what sorts of challenges they have around managing dependencies across engines — I think what we were doing was fairly vanilla Rails, and we didn't have the opportunity to run into those sorts of issues.

Comment · 6 years ago

Webpack-based projects are heavy. A Rails app comes with a Webpack-based Javascript scaffold out-of-the-box.

I wonder if something like Rollup or NCC could be used to create a single-file Javascript dependency in the general case that is only used for vanilla Webpacker builds, and relying on the individual packages could be something left for when you need to customize the Webpacker build.

Judging by some of the Hey developments, it's possible we could see a much more lightweight JS integration in Rails in the future:

https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/1272608117604397063

Comment · 7 years ago

It is worth considering why a government would not have such a law.