alexfringes

You can also just type two "-" minuses on iOS. So "--" will auto-convert to "—".

How can I get in touch?

Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at Apple (@jasonyuandesign). A lot of the comments currently seem to miss this and are focusing on immediate feasibility, “successful” design, or ability to deploy irl. That is not the point here. Things like this are both creative exposition, as well as corner stones for conversations for the rest of the community.

Was also about to reply with the Superlight recommendation. Cannot stand the lag of bluetooth mice and was working my way through various mice over the years, usually trying at least 5-10 alts per year. Have not bought another mouse since the Superlight. Other Logitech mice (gaming and otherwise) eventually failed in one way or another. Not only is the Superlight a superior experience — it performs just as well today as it did 1.5 years ago when I got it. Wish the dongle and charging port were USB-C and that the Logitech SW wasn't the hot garbage that it is (I eventually settled on using a spare machine to update its config bc I won't have that SW on my daily) but from the perspective of the actual mouse itself, it's amazing.

As a user of this app and long-time admirer of the developer behind it (co-creator of the fantastic Paper drawing app for iPad), maybe it would help the conversation if I illustrate my daily encounter with this UI.

I’ve been trying to limit the days on which I eat unhealthy foods to Fridays and Saturdays (yay, it’s Friday!). I’m good at sticking to plans like that without help from an app, but when I gave “Habits” a quick spin, I admired its mission to provide a playful, game-like alternative in the sea of habit tracking apps.

Once a day (except Fri & Sat) it sends me a notification. Tapping it launches the app straight to that “checkbox”. While the description in the post may make it seem like this is too long of an interaction, I promise you that it really isn’t, and that the haptics and animation are indeed a satisfying experience. So satisfying in fact that I stuck with the app even though I’m certain I’d follow through on my challenge without it.

(That certainty, btw, comes from how I personally have set up habits like this for over a decade, with help from a mental trick somewhat adjacent to a mind palace/loci[1] to track and reward follow-through. I bring this up because I have often thought that it might be possible to bring the power of these rewarding mental models to a broader audience via an app. And to some extent that’s what Habit accomplishes via its unique approach. The haptics and emotional resonance of the “checkbox” are a little Pavlovian mental & sensory reward for completing one’s goal. And they lead the user to a playful/gamified representation of their progress through their habit, in the form of a small, abstract 3D scene that gradually builds as you continue sticking to your goal. If I’m in a rush, I ignore that scene. But I always enjoy tapping the notification and checking off the day’s accomplishment.)

As a designer, I could maybe quibble over details of the interaction or visual style (which is customizable btw via a season of themes — another unique component) but as a a user I’m simply excited to have this app as part of my routine, thankful that someone is daring a different approach to app design, and curious to see if there will be more apps that might introduce a wider audience to the mental hacks I’ve found useful for a long time.

If you’ve read this far, I’d encourage you to check out some of the other posts on Andy.works, incl. a great retrospective on Paper’s creation[2], as well as background on the developer’s philosophy behind the “Not Boring” suite of apps[3]. Lastly, here’s the App Store link if you want to give the interaction a try (I promise I have no affiliation): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/not-boring-habits/id1593891243

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci [2] https://www.andy.works/words/paper-at-10 [3] https://www.andy.works/words/here-we-go

Sorry, was assuming SpaceX had quantum slipstream already. But it appears I was mistaken. In the case of a slipstream drive, integrity for entry and exit of the slipstream would be paramount. But if they’re still using warp, then your comment of course is accurate.

Impulse, by the way, is covered by the press release [1] and, I agree, would need to be a priority no matter which FTL drive is used to get the satellites to their final destination.

[1] > The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm”

I think the press release is lacking in detail. For example, they completely fail to disclose whether recovery was attempted by rerouting power from life support to the structural integrity field.

Presumably the cars driving on the intersecting lane of travel could very well be in the aforementioned higher energy state when an accident during a rolling stop occurs.

Tesla will perform an over-the-air software update that disables the "rolling stop" functionality, NHTSA said.

I was perplexed by the wording as well. Apparently software updates can be labeled recalls now? Did someone inform Microsoft, maybe this would help Windows 11 adoption.

Xcode saves keybindings in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/KeyBindings I have neither experienced arbitrary resets across updates, nor have I had issues moving my custom .idekeybindings from that folder to new clean installs and finding my shortcuts intact. Maybe the update issue occurs when using the default bindings set and a change of functionality intersects with your customizations? Might be helpful to create an alternate set and go from there. Then, when updates roll in, it should be easy to track down new conflicts in Xcode's preferences via the Conflicts filter. Not sure what else might be causing it, sorry, but thought I'd point you to the folder anyway.

I've used all gens and recently tried G3 for the first time. I instantly noticed that the bass was significantly better than the Pros. It's been a while since I've listened to G1/G2 but from memory I would easily place G3 above all of them in terms of bass. It wasn't enough to persuade me to get some because I love the noise cancellation on the Pros and would rather wait for their update. But I was tempted, in part due to the bass.

Interestingly, this approach seems to be gaining more traction in Germany specifically. One of the larger newspapers, Die Zeit, applies it for the free tier of its website. There’s a big annoying modal when you go to zeit.de if you want to see that approach in practice. Hilariously the choice I make in that modal never seems to stick. Maybe there’s a separate GDPR-compliant toggle somewhere to allow them to track that I want to be tracked ha!

Once, I accidentally grew a bed of salt crystals in a plastic tumbler left on a windowsill. Sadly I can't find the photos but they were closer to rectangular and clearer than the "bad" examples mentioned in this post. Diameters reached ~500mm on the large ones. Was I vastly luckier than I realized at the time, or is it all a bit easier to get right if you're not aiming for completely freestanding crystals (vs. a bed)?

I'm not a fan of the style, but I don't see how its defining visual characteristics are significantly more geared toward the political correctness safe route that you seem to be portraying it as. At least not when compared with illustration styles that employ a similar degree of abstraction.

In the the 8 years that Adobe employed a similar style, starting in the mid 90s, it clearly managed to do so without even an inkling of diversity: http://splashscreens.sourceforge.net/acrobat.php Depending on the year you look at, the 90s version is less abstract than the current examples we're discussing here, but some years are actually more abstract. The lack of diversity is fairly clear to me regardless of that variation.

Of course, whenever we analyze abstract visuals, biases come into play. So maybe this read above is rooted in my own bias (either in favor of being able to make a point here, or in regards to how I believe a 90s corporation would portray "the business user"), but I think that's a stretch in most of these examples.

When this first started popping up, it reminded me heavily of Adobe Acrobat's product packaging and launch screen from the 90s / 00s: http://splashscreens.sourceforge.net/acrobat.php

I had viscerally negative reactions to those as a child. Nothing ever foreshadowed "this is not going to be fun" quite like those shirts & ties. Nor was it clear why one would need to juggle the world to open a text document. (Maybe it was all just a premonition about the malware that is CC.)

You might find it helpful to turn on System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > [x] Reduce motion. I go through phases of preferring the fades it applies instead of certain animations, although it still doesn't get it to "instant". For terminal, iTerm offers better choices for you to determine the balance between perf and display settings, incl a GPU renderer.

Replaced a 10 core, 64 GB RAM iMac Pro with a maxed-out M1 MacBook Air and very happy with that choice. Kept the iMac for Windows and "just in case" the Air doesn't work out. But it's just sitting in a closet now. It isn't just whether or not the speed tests look certain ways, you're right. It's also the fact that the Air is just a really great laptop. It's so good at being a laptop that, after years of compromising via a dual machine setup, the Air has allowed me to return to all the great things laptops used to represent, while providing comparable-to-desktop speed in the same machine. It can easily balance in all sorts of couch potato positions, functions as my main input to a larger screen, and can sit on my lap without burning me or giving me "build anxiety" like other laptops, where I'd dread the fan noise and heat of building. I'm not looking forward to having to decide to even have a desktop again because of however much faster the Apple Silicon desktops will be. Because having this much power in the same setup that I can take everywhere is really enticing and differs from past laptop offerings in the aforementioned improvements (and others like battery life or even the maybe somewhat silly option to run the Dyson iPhone app to control my office fan). PS: I think you might be thinking of the Mac Pro re the accelerator card, no?

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You realize the app recommended is the Guardian’s and uses updating notifications to present in a predictable manner and context? This seems like an improvement in user experience over keeping this in a tab along all the other tabs and having to meander past your regular distractions, many of which might present results in a less restrained manner than what is being advocated for here. It seems like you saw the word app, made a throwaway, and ranted about the word app.

I say to you: “mind throwing this battery in the recycling on your way out, I care about its harmful materials not seeping into the environment” and you say “yes” but then decide “this battery could still power my nephew’s toy car for a bit”.

But then your nephew throws it in the regular trash eventually.

You’ve broken your promise to me. If you’re also the world’s most valuable public company you’ve made that promise to your shareholders and used it to increase your brand perception. It seems reasonable that you’d like to make sure you keep it, no?

How exactly does a bug in a background process, which then executes within the same thermal performance limits as any other demanding task, present a safety issue? Product quality? Sure. Safety? How?

This might be the one reason that makes the F2P Sim City worth mentioning, in which where I’ve found it much more challenging to achieve aesthetics while growing at a reasonable pace. Having grown up with the original Sim City series, I naturally have a dislike for the F2P version, but in the context of your post I appreciated the irony of F2P enforcing a certain realism as a side effect of, well, a realistic economic factor. Ok, now somebody take this and work in a proposal for a blockchain hybrid of the two.

Fascinating. I didn’t know that comments like that were a common dynamic. That sounds like framework holy war nonsense. Sorry to hear that such problems come with working on cool stuff like this. To me React always evokes the simplicity of the sample docs, which make it seem very inviting (just haven’t found a project to throw it at yet), so I didn’t have that frame of reference going into it. Not frustrated, just felt “if this guy Dan was a friend and had asked me to read this over, one of my notes might be for the intro to be less restrictive”. So I was surprised that people were calling the original commenter an idiot for suggesting such a sentiment, albeit from a different perspective.

Anyways, thank you for writing the article, it’s really an enjoyable read after a day of wrestling a closed source framework and wishing I could understand how that particular architecture was reasoned about.

This makes sense to me as a motivation for the disclaimer, thanks for that perspective.

I did feel that the yellow warning sign was a bit much. There was also a line about it not being for designers. As somebody with both design and engineering backgrounds, I felt less enthusiastic right away — mostly because I dislike buckets being enforced. It encourages people to put themselves into one over the long run, which in turn has a tendency to stunt their progress. It’s also odd when any educational resource (higher ed in the US being a great example) introduces itself by trying to be inaccessible. It feels counter to the professed goal of the institution / article.

Anyways, I guess I felt the comment above is a valid thing to discuss if it could improve other people’s efforts to write similar pieces.

As an aside: ironically, the article is fascinating from a design perspective. Just not the particular bucket of design the author was thinking of when he wrote that line.

Fantastic read! Not to diminish the original contribution here, but I got curious and started looking for similar projects on the native (in my case iOS / Metal) side that aren't part of the usual suspects like game engines.

These two are kind of fun to play with: https://github.com/andreipitis/FluidDynamicsMetal https://github.com/hagmas/MobileFluidSimulation

Both based on this approach, detailed here by Nvidia: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/books/HTML/gpugems/gpug...

The technique this is based on doesn't create those satisfying tension effects but is more similar to paint flowing on a surface of water, so from a tangibility perspective I'd still love to find something closer to this post's work that runs natively.

Spent some time (slightly) re-abstracting a bunch of code yesterday. I started that particular project trying to follow some of the anti-abstraction gospel that came up on HN in the past months. Expecting new people to join the effort sometime in the future, it seemed to make sense. But certain things just ended up being spread out too broadly over time. I worried a newcomer would miss some related thing that I purposefully left unrelated.

Having read this thread, I really hope that this kind of (comparatively shallow) architectural problem is something AI can help with sooner rather than later. Or at least the onboarding process to a new codebase could be tackled by some smarter tools / better IDEs. Seems like there’d be some real value in that.

Given that the Chase link asks for your Social Security Number, this page could be a good test of those Google phishing lessons from a post earlier today.

More constructively, though, I wouldn’t mind a service that does this for me in perpetuity. Has anyone heard of something along those lines?

In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that’s frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum.

So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even.

Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work.

Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.

It does seem like it is absent from Beta 3. In Beta 1, I had added it to Control Center but at some point in time since then (Beta 2/3) it was removed, it seems. Not exactly a promising sign.

Edit: it seems that the feature only appears when AirPods are in proximity. Seeing it in Beta 3 now that I’ve gone home and am close to the AirPods.

If one wanted to build a barebones SU replacement, what would be a good approach to get an index of random pages these days? (Or is there an underreported replacement out there somewhere?)