Links from 2024

Online platforms allowed me to cultivate a freer version of myself. Then the digital world began to close off.

The success of the GUI was driven, in large part, by the fact that our entire lives—and the lives of all our ancestors—have prepared us with many of the skills necessary to work with interfaces where we see things and then use our hands to manipulate them.

About a year ago, I worked with a start-up that makes AI characters in video games. I found it rewarding and fascinating because of the hallucinations: I could see how new patterns emerged from the soup of inputs being fed to it. The same thing that I consider to be a feature is a bug in most applications.

Why did the best-selling computer manufacturer, Commodore, go bust?

It's everything that touches on your experience with the product.

I’d generally agree there. I really hope the gap between these two apps closes a bit more. I’d love for Raycast to be faster, and for its paid plans to be more affordable long-term. Conversely, I’d love for Alfred to have a better product experience around adding new workflows and customizing them.

This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.

Is Apple now locked in a habit of porting their ecosystem from screen to screen to screen? And, as a result, tethered to too many constraints, requirements, and paradigms about what an app is and we should interact with it? Were they burned by skeuomorphic design and no longer want to push the user interface in non-conventional ways?

Has an interesting comparison with Meta's Ray Ban glasses: "The only user interface is your voice and a single hardware button."

Urgh.

None of the available AI devices overcomes all three challenges. Those that look pretty, like the r1, the Pin or Meta’s Ray-Bans, seem to be peripherals more akin to AirPods than the iPhone. Independently useful ones like the Vision Pro or the Quest are dorkier than Google Glass, and much clunkier.

BlackHole is a modern macOS virtual audio loopback driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

An open-source alternative to Audio Hijack

Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations.

When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality.

A headset, a spatial productivity platform, and a personal entertainment device.

✨ A new poem every minute of every day. Powered by ChatGPT.

Crucially, none of the React alternatives solve this, indeed, they mostly just make it worse by trying to "helpfully" mutate state right away. But here's the annoying truth: you cannot skip learning to reason about well-ordered orchestration. It will just bite you in the ass, guaranteed.

Fun rant on current state of React and advanced UI.

Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone. Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases.

The 3D-printed printing press. Designed to make printmaking accessible.

We specialise in all aspects of accessibility, from working with your websites and apps to giving your teams the skills they need to make accessibility part of everything they do.

Many luminaries.

Nicholas Saunders was a counterculture pioneer with an endless stream of quixotic schemes and a yearning to spread knowledge – but his true legacy is a total remaking of the way Britain eats.

Headings are the backbone of the content of a page. A visitor should be able to scan or navigate a webpage using headings to get a good impression of its content.

A collection of design principles from elsewhere, gathered into one place.

There have been some great answers to this question. However, I would like to extend them and provide some context from the new official YAML v1.2.2 specification (released October 1st 2021) which is the "true source" to all things considering YAML.

How to exclude elements from being shown in Google Search results

A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.

Discomfort is also a prerequisite of doing something new. When you're solving a problem in a different way, it won't be immediately understood by others and you'll get a lot more head shakes than nods of agreement. To get through that, you need to be ok with being uncomfortable. The bigger the change, the longer you'll be uncomfortable.

A common response to someone like me getting pernickety about an issue like the University Challenge is “it’s not that deep”. But here’s the thing: yes it is. It really is. This is our history, it’s our culture – whatever your class, race and tastes, subcultures as deeply ingrained as jungle and drum & bass form part of the fabric of Britain, part of how we relate to one another and see ourselves, part of how the world sees us.

We’ve spent the past 10 years building Sapling, a scalable, user-friendly source control system, and today we’re open-sourcing the Sapling client. You can now try its various features using Sapling’s built-in Git support to clone any of your existing repositories. This is the first step in a longer process of making the entire Sapling system available to the world.

Oh My ZSH encourages users (in the final section of .zshrc file) to put personal configurations like alias and themes into the directory set as the $ZSH_CUSTOM.

A showcase of what is possible with Progressive Web Apps today.

I have often been asked to distill the vast corpus of user interface design into a few key principles. While I was reluctant to do this, it turned out to be a good exercise to write “Golden Rules,” that are applicable in most interactive systems. These principles, derived from experience and refined over three decades, require validation and tuning for specific design domains.

This is wonderful.

These tools can’t create anything new. They spin together the most basic aesthetics of digital art into a slurry that feels immediately dated upon creation. Which is why, less than two years after DALL-E 2 launched to the public, ushering in a new age of AI, the content these tools produce has quickly gone from shiny new toy to visual shorthand for e-waste. They are basically a high-tech version of a Bitmoji.

Measuring the use of the product isn’t bad. However, it does not measure the UX of the product. The UX is the user experience, and these metrics have nothing experiential in them.

A brilliant reference for an Astro blog + digital garden.

When you try building web components the same way you build React components, it’s easy to get frustrated and give up because web components don’t work like React components — I know I gave up a few times.

The grain of a React component is not the grain of a web component. Their design prioritize different functionality and forms of use. If you try to use one like the other, you’ll fight the direction of their natural grain.

Maybe this time all the exciting calendar start-ups won't go all "our incredible journey" and disappear.