Find yourself someone who will value your goose

I for one find this exhausting and distracting. I have a thing I want to do, I open the software I need for it with my task in mind, and I am immediately derailed by something else. "What's new." "Did you know about this feature?" "Take the tour." "New update since yesterday's update." "Check out these exciting new templates." "Try asking our new AI assistant a question!" "Sign into your account." ...Fuck what was I gonna do? Goddammit.

Software used to be more like that. Open a word processor and start typing. It never does anything else unless you tell it to. It doesn't offer to write for you. It doesn't fix your typos unless you ask. It's reliable and constant, and your brain doesn't need to give it much thought.

Modern software is a battle of wills against some experience designer somewhere. They have made assumptions about what you want to do (or what the business wants you to do), and you cannot appeal these decisions.

I don't see enough discussion of the cognitive load this adds. Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's because this stuff has been around for 30+ years and nobody remembers how it used to be.

Software is a tool, and it's sometimes helpful to analogize to a physical hand tool. A hammer does nothing until you use it. It doesn't guide you through popular hammering flows. It doesn't advertize Hammer Pro. It doesn't require updates before use. It sits passively in your toolbox until you need it.

I started using PCs in the mid 90s, so much of my aesthetic is informed by apps of the era. Very passive and unopinionated. They were tools that waited for your instructions and did as they were told.

Microsoft was probably the company responsible for the first apps I encountered that broke this, imposing someone else’s vision of what my experience should be, reconfiguring my computer without asking, popping up unwanted tips, making me go through guided flows with limited options.

What I want from software:
- only do things I ask it to do
- not do things I didn’t ask it to do
- the same inputs should always produce the same outputs
- do not artificially prevent me from using the software how I want (though confirmations before destructive actions are welcome)
- use the design language of the host OS and keep visual flourishes minimal
- give me rich configuration options to customize my experience if needed and reasonable defaults that work for most users

I can't help but be offended by the zeal with which engineers now document things in .md files for the sake of AI bots when it was never a priority for helping their fellow humans

The past several years have been good treatment for my imposter syndrome.

I always thought everybody else had it figured out, that they were “real” adults, like with some kind of accreditation, a certificate awarded at a ceremony after an arduous training process, and I got in through an oversight that will be corrected.

But it’s never been clearer how incompetence seems to be the norm. Weirdly, I think everyone failing to wear a mask properly in a pandemic was when that first really hit me.

Online stores should have a button to filter out all one-star and five-star reviews as they're both worthless

I rail a lot against bad software UI and UX. There are so many bad examples for learning what not to do.

But I’d like to learn more about what *to* do. Not how to get a user to do what you/the company wants, but help them do what *they* want to do. It feels like a lost art.

What books, websites, thought leaders, etc do you recommend checking out?

#UI #UX #Design #HumanFactors #Software #Programming

Oh man, I knew Gleba was gonna be rough, and I was completely right. I don't like time pressure in games like this!!

#Factorio

I always prefer a chronological, untampered, unabridged social media feed

BUT

I follow some folks who post/boost like a hundred times a day. I don’t want to mute them. I don’t want to filter out all their boosts because they help me discover folks. But it’s A LOT.

Don’t know what the ideal solution would be. Some kind of “more of this bullshit…” rollup when there’s too much from one user? Or maybe we could use AI to decide which toots to show. We could call it “the algorithm.” Yeah!

#Ivory seems to have a bug with the trending feed where it will refresh randomly and replace whatever you were in the middle of reading with new content.

On the plus side, it’s a good prompt to stop scrolling and go be productive.

If the orcs were elves corrupted and twisted by Morgoth, does that mean orcs go to the same Halls of Mandos in Valinor the elves do when they die?

#Tolkien #LordOfTheRings #LotR

A MacBook Air is "enough" to run Xcode the way that little spare tire in your trunk is "enough" to drive on

#Xcode #Programming #Development

He’s taking a picture of me, isn’t he?

He’s taking a picture of me

#CatsOfMastodon #Caturday

Wait, @ivory, I can’t view more than one page of trending toots now? This is really going to shorten my bathroom trips. 😞

#Spotify subscription canceled. They were gonna up the price by a dollar. That's not why I canceled, but it was a reminder to.

• Had been using it less recently
• They don't compensate artists fairly
• Algorithms bury good music
• I feel streaming services make the music listening experience less special

I wrote a #Python script to save all my curated playlists to a CSV file. I may attempt to buy some of the songs later. (I can post the script if any nerds are interested.)

To my eye, I see all these downward curves, and they lend a sad, droopy, limp feeling to the logo. "Aww, I don't feel like being a logo today. I'm saaad."

Typography is based on handwriting and many of the traits of its design carry over from the mechanics of writing. And in Latin cursive scripts you write in a counter-clockwise direction. Think of how you write a cursive O (if you can remember back that far to school). Top, left, bottom, right, and then a little counter-clockwise loopy.

4/

Crafting in video games? #poll #VideoGames