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nye2k

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Animation, UX, Games for kids and learning at scale.

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Laws of UX 3 months ago

This one pops up a lot - I love the design and poster aspect. I am always amazed how many of these 'Laws' trace back to Nielsen Norman Group data and research over the years. Many UX trends are even named after them! Jakobs law... Norman Door. UX professionals are being greatly influenced by this focused observer set. Maybe just my opinion, but modern UX and HCI theory is being held back day by day due to a set of gentle rules. Specifically, 'Rules' from exposed patterns across user experiences in Broadcast and other non-interactive media.

Zed 1.0 3 months ago

I want to like and use Zed, but in my mind there was some odd commerce, or 3rd party share decision that was made which had me avoid it for security reasons. Like... Zed was endorsed as the only editor for something... can anyone remember or elaborate? I cannot!

I worked for a decade in what I would consider the highest level of our kids' privacy ever designed, at PBS KIDS. This was coming off a startup that attempted to do the same for grownups, but failed because of dirty money.

Every security attempt becomes a facade or veil in time, unless it's nothing. Capture nothing, keep nothing, say nothing. Kids are smart AF and will outlearn you faster than you can think. Don't even try to capture PII ever. Watch the waves and follow their flow, make things for them to learn from but be extremely careful how you let the grownups in, and do it in pairs, never alone.

I love this absolute example of old systems interfering with new systems, rewriting old systems.

My old man started his tech work on hot rods, then mechanical typewriters, calculators, eventually continuing into mainframe electronics and nearly followed all the transitions up to today’s AI.

The number of times I’ve scratched my head at a problem and he had a clear understanding of where the logic broke… based on a historical decision that could not physically be undone.

I have been developing a game with this process, specifically for portability, reach and distribution across multiple game engines and platforms.

I find CUX to be very intuitive for prototyping. But my game is Language and HCI at heart, logic that allows the development process to go smoothly. It is certainly not for everyone or every project.

I want to add in, as I used a ton of JS back when for a GUI that would build prepress ready PDFs and ship em direct to giant xerox printers for a company called Copy General - the early days of on demand printing.

The pdf format was awesome broad shift for the early digital printers and has been a nice standard for a long time.

Adobe uses Acrobat as leverage in this game. Reader is the public’s only peephole and they have famously kept the features lean.

The problem to solve is that these clubs exist already with low membership. Join a local Masonic lodge, or other local social org if you want to meet men you will learn from.

Boy Scouts, DeMolay and other boys youth orgs got their start in the 1910’s, joined by young men without fathers who were lonely due to their life situations. Many just need someone to take their hand and show them how to break the ice.

We’ve been using Lottie for years now for certain PBS KIDS brand animations and it has multiple benefits over other formats. As with any runtime rendering in a 2D plane, it takes performance hits at scale. Lottie implements into all our pipelines and workflows nicely; game, app, video. We run them as idle bg animations on the home layer across many platforms - and then deliver static experience for devices that don’t support them, like Roku.

After Effects is a beast, and with this workflow a single person can animate a loop that we can then export the Lottie/Bodymovin json, Mov for Broadcast & YouTube, and simplify into an SVG for low end users.

Not to mention it has all been a great stop gap after Flash.

Now we use Rive too, and can import those json animations into new workflows. I have personally worked with several core folks in this animation space including Hernan, Mat Groves of Pixi, Matt Karl of CloudKid, all whom tackled these late Flash transitions, with plugins, new export formats and math.

I have learned that all of these efforts have their place, and they all have their own FORMATS which are often incompatible with each other because of the way major softwares organize animation over a timeline.

Choose your battles, pick the right tool for the project.

The explore/exploit tradeoff immediately seems like a natural connection to some synaptic pruning and forking research that has been popping up around neurodiverse brain patterns.

Is the individual following a typical known neural path to find the berries because they have already learned it to be successful?

Or are they instead connecting new neural pathways along the way and following atypical unanswered thought threads in an attempt to find a new and better option... for some motivated reason?

Seems more useful to study over a longer term, across many similar tasks.

I could not find the remote to my TV this morning and attempted to use my iPhone instead. By the time I arrived at the correct UI my 3 yr old had already found a PS4 controller and was able to control the TV and navigate to where he wanted to go... I only needed to notch up the volume.

Assistive devices are necessary for a large audience, as they allow users to leverage their strengths. Just as my 3yr old beat my phone speed with a game controller, users will be able to type faster than me with this keyboard.

It is nice to have a single device that tries to do it all, but interacting with flat UI buttons in a 2D plane of light and glass is limited to a very small set of sensory inputs and therefore cumbersome for anyone to use. There is physically no way around this HCI problem without adding additional hardware. Thanks for working to bridge the gap!

I remember my excitement when CSS3 became reality in modern browsers. I was following this project closely, which attempted to use recreate Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style in CSS. That project made it clear just how far we were from a legible, printable web.

http://webtypography.net/

This was my immediate thought also - as I embrace my ADHD as success, not failure. After 10 years of web design/dev work I found myself spending more time in SQL than design and left to study classical animation. At 20 years I have managed to cobble together a useful, successful, maybe even desirable wildcard career in edu kids media, collecting accolades along the way that I couldn't care less about.

I like to think of my ADHD as the superpower of subconscious thought. When I wrangle the focus, things percolate quickly and I will create very interesting work at an incredibly high production value. This happens both alone and with a team and I believe it to be related to a wide and varied skillset--master of none.

Success happens so frequently that I have been able to learn some conditions to gain focus so results are fairly repeatable. My work gets a lot of eyeballs, folks see this value and will put me on new projects or simply come to me for validation of their ideas.

Still, I'm not the easiest person for neuro-typicals to work around, and after 20 years that is unlikely to change much. I keep my job because I'm always needed - I can always do the thing that needs to be done, or help a team to deliver. It helps that I'm also kind, and fun to be around. But, as projects mature I am eventually phased out for a larger team of stable redundancy and I have to cope with losing the thing that I built and love.

My joy comes with learning something very new and very challenging, casting light on the unknown by diving head-first before others think. My career is successful because I am skilled and able to take on the risks that others are afraid to spend the time or resources on. I am somehow already prepared, interested, and on staff.

I am a core Brackets user and have been since day 1, as a designer/animator that frequently needs to write code. I suspect that I'll continue to use it without support as it is, or possibly shift back to Sublime.

I have always preferred Brackets as a simple visual editor that I can add/write small extensions as needed, without complicating the UI or process flow.

I've tried many IDEs, used dreamweaver and BBEdit for years, tried to embrace VIM and EMACs, and found that even VSCode is more than I need.

Maybe something like codeshare.io is the future of my market, taking hints from Figma?

There will be more horror stories like this as Teslas are not maintainable by their owners, making them throw away vehicles. Last I read, Tesla service manuals are only provided as a subscription service to the public... and only in Massachusetts as the state has "right-to-repair" legislature forcing it.

Disney has used live action as a tool from early on, you can see this plain as day in Snow White's dancing scenes from 1937 because the movement feel awkward. And this is from animators with classical training who knew where the line needed to land on every frame.

Rotoscoping, tracing back each frame, is more what you will find in A-Ha's Take On Me music video, or Ralph Bakshi's film Fire and Ice. It is limited with poor line quality, and used primarily because the labor is cheap.

The greatest takeaway here is that, by using live action as reference for both character posing and timing, you're able to shortcut visual appeal.

Read The Illusion of Life, Animators Survival Kit and the Preston Blair book if you're serious about including animation in a project -- or befriend an animator. Animators don't let other animators rotoscope.

Compared to what?

I'd argue that the Flash security argument is just a regurgitation of headlines people are reading. Every prolific web technology has a large number of CVE's.

You absolutely cannot easily reproduce a proper Flash experience in JavaScript, or Canvas.

This is a problem we've been working on for years building animated experiences for kids, and the js "equivalent" is heavy on assets and extremely limits what the artist and developer can produce in the same amount of time.

Why?

If a site chooses to have a flash experience, why inhibit that? Google is bullying an already narrowed market.

There are experience that Flash simply handles better, and HTML5 cannot emulate. Animated experiences are at the top of that list.

The correct user experience would be seamless for both the user and the content producer. This UX is essentially warning the user that they are entering unwanted territory, and using fear to narrow the flash market.

For personal use, the simpler and smaller the grinder, the better. True coffee enthusiasts will know the freshness of the bean because the roast date is on the bag. They will frequently alternate between different roast, when one bag is down to the last few grams, or a fresh bag has just rested. They will think about this when they are lying in bed in the morning, which makes a hopper a useless tool.

Make something consistent, easy to clean, easy to service, or solve an already known issue in the process. Displace the air around the beans with an inert gas to seal in freshness. Simplify the process and waste of dialing in the correct grind based not only on the brewing method, but also on how brittle the bean is and the oils present.

I wouldn't add features to a grinder just because it can be connected to the internet, there's a manual effort involved in coffee that might not need to be replaced.

This is practical, however I strongly disagree with this semantically. The term should always be accompanied with 'artificial' or another name should be invented as they are vastly different fields. Search Neural Network, I assure you that you will no longer find biological information; it is littering.