Credit to Metro. A tree blew over the line mid-afternoon, suspending the train line, and I was worried it would affect my commute. But they managed to clear it before peak time, and I experienced a smooth ride home. Very impressive recovery. 👍
It’s amusing to imagine how far Apple’s bizarre, corporate-esque copywriting goes. Would one be able to go into Caffè Macs in Apple Park, pick up a packed sandwich, and see printed on the label:
With this sandwich, our focus is to maximise sustenance and nourishment so we can drive continued living in our employees.
We’ve also introduced a new ecosystem of ingredients to compliment this unique sandwich. Thanks to the incredible availability of nuts and other allergens, we’re able to create a new awareness that this sandwich may contain some of these.
😼
I’ve seen a few strange things in parks, but this disco ball is probably one of the strangest.
Liked this post by Robin Rendle.
Folks will spend so much time adding fancy illustrations and making sure the icons aren’t blurry but when it comes to words and actions in interfaces they seem to gloss right over them.
It’s a well known trope in UI design that the user generally doesn’t read things. So I can forgive those who feel that words in UIs are not as important as icons. But I do occasionally wonder if the pendulum has swung too far. More than once I’ve encountered a UI with icons, without any description, that I didn’t understand, and it had an effect of my ability to use it.
Every word in a UI needs to act like a hammer, with each successive word the interface should become clearer, more easily understood. If you put a word like Explore in an interface it might make sense but now add another navigation item like Discover beneath it and now both words make no sense. The UI has collapsed into meaninglessness and folks are forced to click and think and furrow their brows to understand the difference between the two.
I didn’t even consider the case where words could interact with each other this way, like elements in a chemical reaction. But seeing it described like this, it makes total sense.
The cynic in me worries that the folks who made this interface don’t want me to read the popup or modal or alert or web page or list of settings or whatever and they really just want me to click a button. The words are designed to be longwinded and confusing. They just want the click.
I think it’s easy to read this as the UI design being intentionally obscure, just to herd the user through specific interaction flows that benefit the company. I’m sure there’s a bit of that. But I also think that some designers are simply trying to help the user trying to achieve what they want out of their software. It may be that they just haven’t got the right words to explain it, being someone who’s working on the software every workday. And I don’t know how this could be improved. Adding more words for the user to not read doesn’t seem to be the solution. Maybe more user testing? Some way to better understand how the user thinks the software works.
Anyway, very interesting post.
Sitting in the gazebo waiting for the cafe to open. The pigeons’ keeping me company.
Finished reading: Silverthorn by Raymond E. Feist 📚
I’m a little disappointed at the state of home desks that are available. Many I saw today were quite small, leading me to wonder whether they’re being designed more for appearance, rather than for something to get work done. There were a few that look good, but they weren’t easy to find.
Devlog: Trying OpenAI Codex to Produce Freelens Logo Creator
Using OpenAI Codex to make a logo generator tool to allow customisation for different clusters in Freelens.
When it comes to furnature shopping, it’s not a matter of wanting something. It’s a matter of the pain of not having something eventually outweighing the pain associated with going furnature shopping. 😀
Why do I prefer Markdown over WYSIWYG? Because if the WYSIWYG editor is buggy, you are shot out of luck trying to format your email/document/whatever the way you want. Looking at you, Mail.app for MacOS 15, which seems to have the buggiest bullets/numbering implementation I’ve ever used.
This week’s earworm’s an interesting one. It’s Intro, on the album Recomposed, by Carl Craig & Moritz Von Oswald. Finding a legitimate copy is tricky: I’ve only found this version of questionable provenance on YouTube Music. It’s also on Music for Programming, which is where I discovered it. 🎵
Got greeted this morning with the lovely smell of freshly cut grass in the park, mixed with a slight dampness from a little rainfall. Lovely.
Under the heading Don’t be shy:
Tell everyone you see. Be a nuisance.
I find the hardest part of blogging is telling people I have a blog. 🙂
For anyone else using Vivaldi who wants Kagi as their default search engine, yet has had issues using Kagi’s Chrome extension to achieve this, try these instructions instead. It’s a manual process, but after doing it myself, it a process that seems to work better.
Driving Kubernetes config all day, a skill which I don’t really have nor have much interest in learning. I can find myself around a Kubernetes cluster — the app Freelens is great for that — and I’ve made some progress in getting a Helm chart deployed via Flux. But, it’s not doing much to keep me awake, or focus on the task at hand.
🔗 Manuel Moreale: On em dashes
What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance.
My feelings exactly. To stop using em dashes because of AI chatbots seems ludicrous to me.
Aren’t the “remember me” checkboxes on login forms a bit unnecessary? I’m almost always using my own computers so of course I want the website to remember me. Granted, this is not the case when I’m using a shared machine, but maybe a “this is not my computer” checkbox would be more useful there.
I kind of wish I cared about the Apple event. I mean, I’m glad others do, and there was one time in the past where I did, at least vicariously (I don’t have an iPhone). But recently? 🤷 Might be that it’s a maturing product category, and that any advancements are incremental at best. Or maybe it’s just age, and being around long enough to have seen it all before. In either case, it’s getting harder to be excited about something that you yourself don’t use.
Apparently it takes Spotify to raise their price by $2.00 for me to cancel my subscription. I guess it acts like a good reminder of how much I was paying a month for a service I barely used. YouTube Music will be my secondary music service now (Alto is, and always will be, primary).
Ending the day on a win. Managed to diagnose and resolve a slow PostgreSQL query by creating an index, and also managed to configure Istio to allow communication between two Kubernetes cluster. These are super esoteric, and I’m not expecting anyone to care. Still, it’s good to leave work on a high.