I know UI designers like using either Sketch or Figma — and after signing up to Figma this week, I can see why. But I’m going to give a shout-out to Balsamiq Wireframes (nee Balsamiq Mockups). I’ve found it to be a great tool for demonstrating a proposed layout for a UI without worrying too much about the details. It’s so quick to put together and the hand-drawn motif makes it clear that the drawn UI is just a concept.
I also love how they use text to represent visual content. An example is items in a table-view: instead of using the mouse to draw each row by hand, you configured it by effectively typing out a CSV with some Markdown. Use commas to separate the columns, use [ ] to indicate a column should have checkboxes. Such a great idea.
Do sites that just load their articles with (video) ads, pop-overs, requests for emails, etc. see any improvements in their metrics after doing this (more clicks, longer visit times, more ad revenue)? Or are the just in a cycle of diminishing returns and think that adding more crap will help?
🔗 After 6 long months, an Android phone finally cloned the iPhone 14
The screen-shots of this “mini capsule” are hillarous. The animated waves that appear when the capsule is expanded; the fact that the only thing it can display is the battery level since there’s nothing like Live Actions. The capper is the “90%” on the right side of the capsule, right next to the 90 in the battery indicator. You know, just in case you need reminding that the battery is at 90%. Champions indeed!
Hilarity aside, it’s a little sad seeing these Android OEMs doing everything they can to rip off Apple’s design. And it’s not just those in the long tail of OEMs either. Seeing Samsung half-arse features months after they debut on the iPhone, just to abandon them months later is really cringeworthy (anyone remember “AR Emoji”, their rip-off of Animoji). It’s past time they developed some taste on their own.
Hiding Your Attachment Folder In Obsidian's Outline
A useful little CSS snippet for anyone using Obsidian that wants to hide their attachment folder from their outline.
.nav-folder.mod-root>.nav-folder-children .nav-folder>.nav-folder-title[data-path^="Attachments"],
.nav-folder.mod-root>.nav-folder-children .nav-folder>.nav-folder-title[data-path^="Attachments"] + .nav-folder-children {
display: none;
}
To use:
- Go to the directory
$VAULT/.obsidian/snippetswhere$VAULTis the directory of you vault. If thesnippetsdirectory doesn’t exist, create it. - Copy the CSS snippet into a new CSS file.
- Open you vault settings and go to Appearance.
- Scroll to the bottom to where you see CSS snippets.
- Click the reload button. You should see the CSS file you’ve just created appear in the list. Turn it on to apply it.
This’ll work if you’ve configured Obsidian to store attachments in a folder called “Attachments” located at the root of your vault, like I do. But I suspect the data-path attribute holds the folder’s path so you could use whatever CSS attribute selector you need based on how you’ve configured attachments. For example, [data-path*="/Files"] selector will probably work if you’ve configured attachments to be in folders called “Files” that sits alongside your notes (I haven’t tested this so YMMV).
Working with some GitHub access tokens last night left me wondering why there’s no way to just renew an expired token. Dealing with the secret is not as tedious as dealing with the token permissions. Get that wrong and you’ve wasted several minutes of work.
Completed the release of Dynamo-Browse 0.2.0. Most of the work in the last week was updating the manual, especially the scripting API. Some more updates need to be made for the query expressions as well, but I’ll publish what I have now and update that over time.
It’s 2023 now, and I still hate code reviews.
Seeing Mastodon posts from Jason Snell about his trip to Aotearoa New Zealand prompted me to check when I travelled to Queenstown for a holiday. It was 10 years ago to the day: 7th March 2013. Would love to go back there again some day.
Follow-up from my earlier post about ChatGTP this morning, it turns out I probably should’ve RTFM:
Thanks to @andreab@social.lol for the tip.
Oh, AWS. Once again your brilliant UX design chops shine through in the products you release. I always wondered why copying an API keys from an SSO login session took just one click. It’s great that it now takes two, plus a whole lot more reading of small text. 😒
Remember in Gödel, Escher, Bach when they were saying that a (then) theoretical AI is less like a calculator and more akin to the human mind; and just like the human mind is likely to produce errors in the answers it gives? Well…
For reference, macOS Ventura is the current latest release.
Update: Turn’s out the reason for this is that ChatGTP’s data-set only goes back to Nov 2021. See follow-up post.
I wish more app developers built websites for their apps.
There are many benefits in doing so. It’ll allow others to see what the app does without getting kicked out of the browser and shoved to an app store, or when they’re using a device that can’t even access the app store.
It’ll also give others a nice URL that can be linked to or bookmarked. I’m sure App Store URLs are stable, but I wouldn’t call them “nice”. Not much meaning in a URL like apps.apple.com/us/app/id413897608.
I can appreciate that this is asking a fair bit. And I get it: after making websites for a few open-source projects, I know how painful and time consuming they can be to put together.
But I think there’s still value in having a simple, single page website for an app, especially when it’s gained enough traction that people are writing about it. It doesn’t even need to be a standalone site, a blog post would be just as good. But something more than just a listing on the App Store.
Evidence that I didn’t sleep well last night: for a split second I thought this was actually a note I made. I even remarked as to how neat I made it.
The neatness is what eventually tipped me off. None of my notes look as good.
A lot of track work going on this weekend. I enjoy seeing these trucks that can go both on roads and rails. You don’t want to be waiting for them to transition, though. It’s usually done at level crossings and they don’t rush it.
Here’s a bit of a blast from the past. I managed to get ccedit working again. This was the original level editor for workingset.net/2022/12/2… my Chips Challenge “fan game” I’ve been working on.
I’ve been designing a few levels for it recently, but since moving to a new Mac, the level editor I was using was going to be difficult to port. It’s QT application and the QT bindings were a pain to setup, and I rather not go through that again. I was using a Mac at the time I started working on it, but I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on MacOS. So to hedge my bets, I decided to go with QT as the UI toolkit.
This was 5 years ago and I’m unlikely to go back to Linux, so choosing QT was a bit of a bad decision. I think if I had my time again, I’d go with something like AppKit.
Anyway, the level editor still works but I have to log into a screen share to use it. I’d like to be able to edit levels on the machine I’m using now.
The code for the original level editor was still around but it hasn’t been touched in ages. It’s basically an SDL application — the same graphics library I’m using for the actual game itself — and the SDL v2 bindings I’m using are still maintained, so updating those were quite easy1.
One thing I did have to pull out was the Lua VM2. The editor was using old C Lua bindings. Better Lua VMs written in pure Go are now available, so I didn’t want to keep using these old bindings anymore. In fact, I didn’t want to use Lua at all. Lua was originally used for the level scripts, but I replaced this in favour of another language (which is no longer maintained 😒, but I’m not changing it again).
So far the editor boots up, but that’s about it. I can move the cursor around but I can’t add new tiles or load existing levels. There seems to be some weird things going on with the image name lookup. I originally thought image name were case insensitive, but after looking at the image name lookup logic in the game itself, I’m not so sure.
How much time I’d like to spend on this is still a bit of a question. It all depends whether I’d like to release the game itself in some fashion. There are still questions about whether I’m allowed to, given that the graphics are not my own. Still need to think about that.
But in any case, good to see the old editor again.
To Wordpress Or Not To Wordpress
I’m facing a bit of a dilemma.
I’ve been asked to setup a new website for someone who wants to stand up a new business. In therory this is something that I can do quite easily. I know HTML and CSS. I’ve made a living building backends for web-apps. I do have an undeveloped eye for design, but I like to think I have an idea of the principal of good website usability; and as long as I’m not too ambitious, and aim for a minimal usable site, I can probably put together a simple static website.
The only problem is that this may not work for the person that I’m building a site for. This is someone that has no experience with putting together websites, and if I were to go down the static HTML road, I’d probably be on the hook to make changes going forward.
So the alternative is to use a CRM like Wordpress. That way, once I hand ownership of the site to the client, he could either contract someone else to maintain it going forward or even learn to do it himself.
Only problem with that is that my experience with Wordpress is quite minimal. I can get around the dashboard no problem, but when it comes to designing or customising themes or (sigh) using the Block editor, I’m just as much as a novice as he is. And I’m not sure to what degree I can leverage my HTML and CSS skills to style the site. I may be able to change a few things but I’d have to do so within the confines of the block templating system.
So, what to do?
Maybe the best way forward is to get a sense of how often this person would need the site changed. That’s by far the biggest variable here. I only know what he wants at a very superficial sense at this moment. I don’t believe it’ll need any sort of blog or product catalogue; just a simple landing page with contact details.
In that case, I’m wondering if a static site with just plain HTML and CSS would be enough. That’ll be easy enough to put together. It can probably scale with some basic dynamic aspects as well, maybe powered with a simple backend that can regenerate the site. Maybe something like Carrd could work here as well.
But the danger is that he’ll be locked into using a static site. Any changes would require someone who’s versed in HTML and CSS. Even worse would be a static site with a bit of backend “sprinkled in”. Then he’d be locked into using me. Not sure I like that for his sake or for mine. You read about those developers in The Daily WTF who’ve put together a custom backend for a “simple website” that has grown unwieldily and become a huge mess that someone who inherits it needs to cleanup or take responsibility for. The prospect of being such a developer is not a great one.
Which is why I’m looking at Wordpress, and wondering the pain of learning how to work with it is worth it. I guess it’s offsetting the potential future pain (and embarrassment) of transitioning a static site to a proper CRM later.
So, Leon, which pain is worse?
Ok, I now understand why everyone is going on about the Wordpress block editor. I’ve installed Wordpress this morning to play around with it in preparation of a new project, and wow is there a lerning curve associated with it. Definitely not your dad’s Wordpress instance.
Here’s something I’d never would have imagined: Jaycar does same day delivery. I experienced this once before but I dismissed it as just a fluke. But it happened again today. I bought something from them at 1:14 this afternoon and it arrived at my house at 3:26. Incredible.
It sometimes sucks being a listener of Apple tech podcasts when you’ve got an Android phone. I love the shows where an indie dev talks about an app they’ve worked on. But I can never try them out because I don’t have an iPhone.
I know there are fixes to this. Just not ready to apply them yet.
Foldables and rollables are so 2022. Where are the scrunchables? When I’m done with my phone, I want to be able to scrunch it up into a little ball and stuff it in my pocket. Why can’t I do that? Where is the R&D money going?
(Honestly, the whole foldable phone thing seems kinda ridiculous to me).