There's something naive about all this, as if the entire metaphor is a somehow laudable, benign or 'natural' process tied up with Americans' origin story - but some omits the wholesale slaughter of indiginous people, the mass enslavement of people from another continent, and along the way poisons half the land with toxic waste.
They're both also stuck in the "golden" 1970s, and is without the subsequent stages that contain bureaucrats, politicians, mafioso, tech oligarcs and demagogues, which pretty much reduces the prior stages to proles, subscribers or fodder.
As Adobe continue to enshittify their products, to public disgust, they're more profitable than ever, I'm not sure if these cutesy "Townspeople" metaphors mean anything at all.
function exampleQuery1() {
const gq = new GQuery();
const result = gq
.from("Tags")
.select(["ID","Name"])
.where((row) => row.ID == 12) // you can use > or < etc
.get();
JSON.stringify(result, null, 2)
}
I was once at a coding conference (Prograph CPX now you ask) and there was a coding competition. Who could create a usable To Do List App in one hour. About six people took part.
At the end of the hour, people demoed their creations. "This one is clunky and works like this...", "This one uses text to" etc.
The last person got up and showed some doodles and notes on sheets of paper. He said "Mine is the only one that actually works and is well designed, I just need to code it now".
I don't know if there's a lesson in there, but to me it was cool as.
Yeah... one might use Sonic to load a csv and generate sounds based on your data, that might then be used as static assets in their app.
I recently helped a tutor using BespokeSynth to create audio explainers, wiring together frequencies and interactive oscillators and waveform viewers to explain resonant frequencies (or something, I didn't completely get it)
I came here to say the same thing exactly. Tufte books are very visual (and expensive - see if you can find a copy of any of his books, changed my life). You can just dip in.
Norman is ace. Although his books turned me into a usability weirdo unable to switch off my usability sensors... be careful! :-)
As is Raskin - whose interface "notation" (click-drag-click etc) I think isn't talked about enough.
There are dozens of methodologies to learn, and put into practice. I would put it that you don't really learn UX, you do it, and revise - in order to solve problems and make things better. Once you've digested some of the ideas you need to start trying the methodologies out. This is harder than it sounds. Even companies that claim to support UX, sort of bugger things up.... in that UX can't "fix" crap... it needs to be in at the beginning.
My favourite activities / methodologies, that produced REAL results were
* Ethnography - kinda just hanging out and observing what actually goes on. One client used to print off every page to proof read their changes cos the font sizes were designed by 21 year olds and they were 60+. The applause I got for raising the font size would never have been found any other way than sitting in the corner.
* Card sorting - often collaboratively with armfuls of post its to decide on categories/navigation
* Wireframing - I had less success with paper prototyping, but still ...
* Personas + Use Cases
...and Eye Tracking - which tbh was SO VALUABLE, not because of the insights it provided, but for the EVIDENCE (video and heatmaps) that you could use to persuade the big wigs.
So find a way to start getting yourself into trying out various methodologies, to fix problems. Doing UX when things are "kind of OK" can be quite hard imo, especially at the beginning.
Your background will be so useful, again imo and experience, you will be able to use UX to provide guidance and ideas and then MAKE THE BLOODY THING which lots of UX-ers can't do. I liked the cross-over - I code a bit and sometimes found it easier to make what I wanted, rather than specifying it or creating "designs".
Gdevelop might be described as a low code platform as it's language is visual (like Scratch on acid). It already has "Generate a game with AI" built in. It's not very good.
What makes you think LLMs will get better? The more we've seen AI develop the more fine tuned everyone's senses have got hyper-sensitised to what's AI and it just reeks of the uncanny, rendering it ultimately useless.
I've probably mentioned this a few times on here, but Prograph was a GREAT example of a visual language, that solved a LOT of issues (spaghetti code) etc. It's worth a look if you're interested in visual programming
* object oriented
* scrunching of code - tha could be turned into functions (local-to-opers)
* you could edit code and values whilst it was running
* FAST!
Here's an ole video of some server software I made, that at the end shows me rustily doing some Prographing.
This really isn't crowing but we created a dynamic site that used HyperCard as a CGI and we did that in 1984. Not kidding. Mosaic'd up to the hilt.
Still, it's a good idea.
You can further this idea (especially when the slug returns nothing) by having this page also list "Best Bets" or what people most often come to your site for (regardless of any search query, perhaps, with their referrer, or on this day of the week etc)
And additionally, put the slug (bar the dashes) into a search box so it might be ammended (but tell them that you didn't find anything and they need to try something else).
Came here to recommend GDevelop too. I taught my 10 year old GDevelop and she preferred it to p5js (Javascript programming) and it's a lot more powerful than Scratch coding. (but is visual too, like Scratch)
Also, lots of good tutorials on YouTube and a friendly community.
I teach creative coding and maintain a site that has a list of creative tools (graphics, music, coding, writing, game-making) that are mainly free, and web-based. You can filter them by "easiness".
I made the site for university students, but I have tested/vetted all of the tools myself, often with my child who is now just 11. There are some activities you could do with her too. The Inspiration section might throw up some useful stuff for you both.
With regards to game-making, Scratch is a great starting point, but recently we have been really enjoying working with gDevelop - a free, no-code game engine. The videos on YouTube are great to get you both started. Twine (Chapbook) has been a fun tool for creating interactive adventure games, and this Zine-maker is ace https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker
The text is bloody almost invisible which is so bloody annoying. A blacker font? Or a better or bigger one perhaps? Or is it just the colour? The notes are not linked to the text either... (which may or may not be a good idea).
Back in the days when "small pieces loosely joined" was a thing, I thought Delicious was very, very cool. (I use Diigo (free) now which is the closest I could find to Delicious when it went bad). I needed something that isn't account dependent and works on web and mobile, so matter where I am browsing content I can save a reference to it. Hypothesis looks interesting but imo is more geared to textual annotation than tagging.
Bookmarks are so bad, that they don't even keep your most recent bookmark in a folder at the top.
But what we lost when we lost Delicious was so much potential. For example...
* people were exploring using tag clouds semanticly, to sort of translate how two different people categorised things (you say "cool", they say "hot" etc)
* I think NASA did collaborative tagging where you merely tag interesting things to keep an eye on with nextYear, fiveYears or TenYears then produced a Horizon Report of the overlaps.
* People were making news readers that found interesting items based on your tag cloud and items adjacent to those tagged in your cloud.
* A tag cloud was a quick "Contents page" for any blog out there... You could glance at one and see if this content was for you.
* They were emergent, as in, they evolved over time - so much better than most peoples' idea of categories, or how categories are used in the real world.
I think that despite all the potential in bookmarking/tagging people weren't ready to pay for it - and if you're the kind of person who squirrels lots of things away for later, in a sensible manner, you're going to find a way to do it somehow.
I'd say one reason. It's an absolute nightmare for the regular end user to handle relational data in a spreadsheet. I've tried a lot of those below (you missed of AppSheet from Google which kinda falls into this bracket too).
I regularly work with intelligent people (who aren't techies) who by themselves figure out their project needs to be relational all by themselves (knowing nothing about SQL).
I think, and I guess these companies do, that there must be a market for those millions of people who want to manage a few thousand rows of project data but are never going to learn SQL + web development to put a UI on it, but are struggling to keep their data managed "logically" and easily.
They're both also stuck in the "golden" 1970s, and is without the subsequent stages that contain bureaucrats, politicians, mafioso, tech oligarcs and demagogues, which pretty much reduces the prior stages to proles, subscribers or fodder.
As Adobe continue to enshittify their products, to public disgust, they're more profitable than ever, I'm not sure if these cutesy "Townspeople" metaphors mean anything at all.