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My lunch with a disability access campaigner was an eye-opener. Even booking was a problem.

Good marketers know that Distinctive Brand Assets are important to building a strong brand identity. Great marketers know that non-Distinctive Brand Assets matter just as much.

What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website?

"A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel." -- Alistair Cockburn

Do people understand the impressions they make on others or do their anxieties lead them to assume the worst? Across nearly 10 years of research and tens of thousands of observations, the authors have come to this answer: people underestimate how much others like them, and this bias has important implications for how people work together.

There are real issues to be addressed: companies do need more diversity of perspective and underrepresented groups do need more opportunities. But organisations must rethink their methods by drawing more on social science and less on social activism. No amount of social idealism will rewire millions of years of neural evolution.

For reasons, I tried to evaluate the distributed Matrix chat and their clients. That did not work out very well.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

Rather than deciding how to respond to ultimata and threats, sellers can instead use two key moves to improve their fortunes: Analyze the set-up and shape the process.

Modern UI teams are designing components first; Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow. As we learn to craft systems rather than pages, we must invest effort into shaping these often missed states of design and create with a component lifecycle that can support everyone.

Old but gold

“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…

Let's assume that SGE is a wild success and that Google gambles its entire ad revenue business on replacing search results with direct question answering. This means that your search engine traffic drops to zero tomorrow. What do you do?

Liberalism’s great strength is that it is adaptable. The abolitionist and feminist movements broke apart the idea that some people counted more than others. Socialist arguments about fairness and human dignity helped create the welfare state. Libertarian arguments about liberty and efficiency led to freer markets and a limit on state power. Liberalism can adapt to national conservatism, too. Right now, it is falling behind.

In 1971, Knight and his (Blue Ribbon Sports, Inc., later Nike) co-founder needed a logo for a new line of running shoes they were getting ready to introduce. They asked Davidson to design a stripe (industry term for a shoe logo) that "had something to do with movement".

This is a slightly problematic article, but worth noting: so few people write about the complexity of UI in a useful way. Organisations too often treat visual design as being as good as done, missing all the nuance behind great UI.

Build and test against WCAG consistently

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.