Scroll of Wisdom
On App Icons
This post from the Pixelmator blog is great, loved this part:
The app icon is a fundamental part of any app. I personally judge apps by their icons and I am very comfortable admitting that. The icon is a reflection of lots of things, including quality, beauty, innovation, platform nativeness, and even the developer’s values. All of this is visible from the very first glimpse. It’s incredibly rare for an app with a beautiful icon to be crap. Even more, app icons are of utmost importance in macOS, since we, Mac users, care a lot about how our apps look and feel.
America's Gladiator Sport
This comment from a Hacker News thread:
Football is America’s gladiator sport. For all the fun, the money, the excitement, the money, the drama, the bombast, the cheerleaders, and even the money, we should remind ourselves that American football is a very violent sport rife with injury and long term disability, and our participation as passive spectators and consumers makes us just as responsible for the incentive structure that harms so many young men for the rest of their lives.
And yet we can’t stop. Football is practically an addiction in this country, and I don’t think there is one serious proposal that could reduce the size and scope of injuries and brain trauma in particular, and allows the game to continue in its current familiar form. So we tuck the problem under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist until moments of faux anguish pierce our veil of doped-up depravity.
Sorry if this post comes across as depressing and masochistic. After all, I am a Bills fan.
Excerpt from Resilient Web Design
Really great new web book from Jeremy Keith, I loved this part:
Despite JavaScript’s fragile error‐handling model, web designers became more reliant on JavaScript over time. In 2015, NASA relaunched its website as a web app. If you wanted to read the latest news of the agency’s space exploration efforts, you first had to download and execute three megabytes of JavaScript. This content—text and images—could have been delivered in the HTML, but the developers decided to use Ajax to retrieve this data instead. Until all that JavaScript was loaded, parsed, and executed, visitors to the site were left staring at a black background. Perhaps this was intended as a demonstration of the vast lonely emptiness of space.
Mozilla Won
There has been some back and forth between Mozilla and Chrome in regards to browser market share. While Chrome has signifigantly higher market share, I found this HN comment spot on:
But I don’t think Mozilla lost.
I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.
John’s response was awesome. “This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice” Firefox was a response to a world of “best viewed in IE” badges, and it changed the browser landscape.
Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There’s a lot of options out there, and they’re all standards compliment. And that’s thanks to Mozilla.
So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It’s a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it’s a standards compliment world.
I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what’s next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It’s time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.
We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla’s swan song.
Worst Operating System Feature
From a Quora thread:
Windows 95 had a counter that added up every millisecond since the operating system was started. The counter would add up to 2^31 in a little less than 25 days, and the next millisecond, the operating system would crash due to overflow of the counter. In reality, however, that probably never happened, because Windows 95 could never run for almost 25 days without crashing for another reason.
Microsoft’s Google Docs Competitor
I find this fascinating:
Microsoft built a competitor to Google Docs in 1997. MS Office used its political clout to kill the project.https://t.co/sW4fEow7Fa pic.twitter.com/uvPRJbI3OD
— Dan Luu (@danluu) October 24, 2016
Samsung Automatically Airbrushing Selfies
Wow Samsung. When you get a brand new phone and go to take a selfie and realise that the default setting on the front camera is automatically on “Beauty level 8” which evidently means: seriously airbrushed face. This means everyone who gets a new Samsung phone and flicks the front camera on is automatically being told “Hi, we’re Samsung and we think you look way better when we automatically airbrush your selfies for you
Not surprising, but still somewhat disturbing that it’s the default setting.
When Bad Design Kills
Over the weekend Anton Yelchin, the 27-year-old actor known for playing Chekov in the recent Star Trek movies, was killed in what was referred to as “a freak accident” in his Los Angeles driveway. But was it really “freak?” It seems to us that lousy design may have played a role.
Yelchin was found crushed between his car, a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the security gate at the end of his driveway. It appears that Yelchin had exited his car and walked behind it, perhaps to close the gate, and apparently believed the transmission was in “Park.” Instead it appears it was actually in “Reverse” or “Neutral” and the car rolled down his steep driveway, killing him.
Watch the video. It’s insane how much more effort is required for the shifter. Let alone the dramatic lack of precision and feedback.
Information Architects Inc. “On Icons”
Great Article by iA on icons and their widespread use and misuse. Loved this quote in particular:
Design is not a natural science. It’s a practice that benefits from science and measurement, yet the full quality of a design cannot be objectively assessed in theory. User tests and analytics do not replace your designers, but verify their assumptions. There is more in a product than the designer can premeditate and there is more in a design than we can measure. This “more” can only be reached when we talk to humans working with it.
1,200+ New Planets
Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.
“Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. “This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe.”
Wild.
Orthoprint, or How I Open-Sourced My Face
Guy 3D prints his own teeth alignment molds:
As far as I know, I’m the first person to have tried DIY-ing plastic aligners. They’re much more comfortable than braces, and fit my teeth quite well. I was pleased to find, when I put the first one on, that it only seemed to put any noticeable pressure on the teeth that I planned to move- a success! I’ve been wearing them all day and all night for 16 weeks, only taking them out to eat. I’m planning on fabricating a bunch of retainers for the current position, which I can use – till I die – at night. They also happen to work very well as perfectly fitting whitening trays, when trimmed down a tiny bit. They’re also fantastic night guards- they’ve been protecting my teeth from nighttime grinding, without being bulky.
And, most importantly, I feel like I can freely smile again. That’s what’s most important.
Impressive.
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
Fascinating Article on How Junk Food is Engineered:
Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.
“It’s absurd, but explanatory”
In trying to explain this requirement for a visceral, gut-level understanding of the system, we came up with a metaphor that helps illustrate the point. It’s absurd, but explanatory.
Netflix’s technology team seems top-tier. Running a service that makes up over a 1/3rd of the downstream internet bandwidth can’t be too easy.
User Interface’s From The Martian
Territory Studio created hundreds of screen graphics for the motion picture The Martian and they’re great:
As a story that is mediated by technology, hundreds of screens are employed across eight key sets, forming the lens through which the drama unfolds.
Working closely with NASA, Territory developed a series of deft and elegant concepts that combine factual integrity and filmic narrative, yet are forward looking and pushing NASA’s current UI conventions as much as possible.
Awesome.
Light Stopped for 1 Minute
Back in 1999, scientists slowed light down to just 17 meters per second, and then two years later the same research group stopped light entirely — but only for a few fractions of a second. Earlier this year, the Georgia Institute of Technology stopped light for 16 seconds — and now, the University of Darmstadt has stopped light for a whole minute.
Baseball Advanced Media
Fascinating article by Ben Popper on MLB’s Advanced Media division:
The latest expression of this boundless initiative is Statcast, a big data approach to sports that only a major league nerd could love. High-speed cameras and radar installed in every stadium capture the game in three dimensions and allow for real-time tracking and tabulation of each motion a player makes on the field. Fans watching an amazing replay of a diving catch can learn exactly how fast that outfielder’s first step was, if he broke in the right direction, and how that compares to his historical average.
Baseball has always had a strong statistical element to it. This just takes it one step further.
The World Wide Advertising Web
Great excerpt from a LWN.com article:
Krekel quoted former Facebook researcher Jeff Hammerbacher, who said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That Sucks.” Instead of spending time on “getting us into space, flying cars, or whatever”, the best minds in IT are focused on how to get people to click more ads.
Web advertising has become invasive and hostile regardless of the platform. The advertising-driven business models have put reputable sites in a bad position, they either make less money or provide a better experience. This plus the above note make me think that this topic isn’t getting the attention it deserves.
Minimalism in Web Design
Unfortunately, some designers misinterpret minimalism as a purely visual-design strategy. They cut or hide important elements in pursuit of a minimalist design for its own sake—not for the benefits that strategy might have for users. They’re missing the core philosophy and the historical context of minimalism, and they risk increasing complexity rather than reducing it.
Great point. Minimalist strategy is one where you approach designing layouts and information architectures with the intent to reduce unnecessary cruft and focus on the user’s goals. It’s easy to get carried away and end up with something so spartan it’s barely usable.
Realizations of Rounded Rectangles
Nänni confirmed my theory: “You are absolutely right. A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our “fovea-eye” is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.”
Professor Nänni is saying that rounded rectangles are literally easier on the eye. Put another way, compared to square-edged rectangles, rounded rectangles are more computationally efficient for the human brain. To me, this is a revelation. An idea that at the very least demands more investigation.
Rounded rectangles have been a staple of UI design since the dawn of the graphical user interface. Lately there has been an increasing number of sharp-edged rectangles used in UI designs, specifically in buttons and forms. For instance, Material Design uses nearly-straight edges throughout its UI components.
Testing Critical Software
In the late 1980s, around the time the Airbus A340 was introduced (1991), those of us working in software engineering/safety used to exchange a (probably apocryphal) story. The story was about how the fly-by-wire avionics software on major commercial airliners was tested.
According to the story, Airbus engineers employed the latest and greatest formal methods, and provided model checking and formal proofs of all of their avionics code. Meanwhile, according to the story, Boeing performed extensive design review and testing, and made all their software engineers fly on the first test flights. The general upshot of the story was that most of us (it seemed) felt more comfortable flying on Boeing aircraft. (It would be interesting to see if that would still be the majority opinion in the software engineering community.)
Well that’s one way to do it.