Posted by nozzlegear 18 hours ago
Sometimes I log into my big Windows machine at home with RDP from out of the house to post photos to my socials, like
and with a folder with a few hundred images in it is is awkward to use the official file chooser dialog because it is based on modern UI toolkits and practices which are wasteful and slow over the net. It is much easier to use XnView MP because it is based on an old widget set which isn’t flashy.
Similarly I find myself impressed with the old Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator because, sprawling as they are, they come out of an old time when they were expected to work on machines with a fraction (1/2000 of the RAM!) of the capacity of modern machines and there is just less junk. Adobe recently took the “(legacy)” label off “Save to Web” because that ancient feature alone goes a long way to justifying the creative cloud subscription.
I don't have Mastodon so can't follow you there, but I've added your profile to my RSS reader. Looking forward to seeing more of your photos!
Also I work in XR and rely heavily on hand tracking and I'm precisely trying to use that accident so re-consider what does typing mean without a keyboard. How can one use hand tracking in XR as input without relying a virtual keyboard, which is so slow and lacks tactile feedback.
Anyway, all this to say yes, ours hands are impressively precise, fast, flexible. We take them for granted but it's definitely worth spending a bit of time training them, considering the interfaces at different level, ergonomic, physical interface, firmware, then the software with its UI.
Overuse of animations is a terrible thing that has made iOS far worse over the years. I long for the days of yore, when the loading screenshot had a chance of being accurate.
These days, when loading something like the health app I get a series of three different screens, rather than just landing at the destination it knew o wanted to start at. It is idiocy of the highest order. Why show some series of random screen transitions while starting the app? Somebody who has no clue about UX programmed that piece of crap, and then an entire team put up with this behavior. I dearsay that if this shipped under jobs there would be a director level firing to stop it.
Same BS happens with Apple Maps. If you launch the app and it remembers that an hour, day, or two weeks ago you had your phone in a particular orientation forever ago, it slowly rotates the view pane over 1000-2000ms from you ancient view pane as if you've been waiting patiently over two weeks so that Maps doesn't suddenly disrupt your view...
Animation can be helpful but at some point a half-wit VP shoved it into everything Ruth disastrous results and Apple is still recovering. Liquid Glass is a similar disaster of incompetence being promoted far beyond capability.
And if you have a tray button that needs to e.g reach over the network to a HomeAssistant instance that needs to itself reach out to some fuckass IoT vendor server, you may as well not expect any sort of feedback before you close the tray.
It sounds like Android needs a middle state indicator. When your action is in a pending state, the state indicator should not be the same as the previous state. A common pattern is to show a pending animation.
While this animation is running, what should happen if the user presses the button?
When they're off, they don't blow any air so it would make sense to me to decide that the button to turn them on is the one that controls how much air it blows. It goes from 0 to 1 to turn on, so you just learned that that button changes how much air comes out of it.
But no, most of them do the opposite. So, you turn them on with the temperature control. The action is: no air, yes air, air gets super-hot if you keep pushing the button.
I can't find any modern air dryers where they get this right.
It could be fixed with a relay or a solid state switch on the heater, or with a multipolar toggle on the airspeed. But that's several cents more expensive than making it turn on at the heater switch.
Something technical made it easier to implement.
I almost always need to rotate photos 90⁰ to the right, so I have to tap that button three times. Apart from that, if I have only one way to rotate my photo, clockwise seems more intuitive to me anyway.