Pedantry time: Fitts' Law is a law in the same sense as Newton's Law. Fitts' Law is an established model for understanding how humans interact with objects. If you're jumping on a trampoline, you aren't breaking the law of gravity, but you're certainly using it to some effect.
Similarly, if you decide that your button positioned at the edge of the screen actually shouldn't be an infinitely long click target, you aren't breaking Fitts' Law. You might be doing it with Fitts' Law in mind, or not, but Paul Fitts' ghost isn't waiting in the shadows to prosecute small buttons. Some actions should be difficult!
With that said, they definitely screwed up here, but I don't like when we're like "but Fitts' Law" and act like that proves our point on its own. If they wanted, they could "Fitts' Law" right back at you.
I feel like Disney+ really cemented the decline here. I enjoyed watching Reservation Dogs, which I think I had pirated originally because it was one of those smaller shows with awkward distribution rights. I genuinely wanted to just go and buy the second and third seasons up front when they were airing. It's fine if it's unreasonably priced and it takes a day or two for the episodes to be available, I needed to absolve my guilt for pirating it. So I tried iTunes, which has basically everything if you bring cash, right? Used to, anyway. Not anymore. The only way to watch this show is if you subscribe to Disney+. I don't know why they make this hard, and I don't care either. Episodes were available immediately on TPB. I felt bad, but Disney made me do it. To be fair, Netflix does the same thing, but they don't have their fingers in so many places.
If it’s important to you that an application doesn’t need to cooperate, then that’s something Snap has an answer for. I don’t remember the name of it or if it got past the proposal stage, but it’s like “if an app opens a file, intercept the syscall and show a dialog.” I think it’s a disgusting solution to a non-problem (it was demoed with Firefox which has dutifully cooperated with our shit for decades). But it’s interesting :)
> When it asks me to open a file, or a directory, it should invoke a system dialog that cannot be faked, and when I pick a file/directory for it, that directory or file should be bind-mounted into its mount namespace without giving it extra information about other files beside it, or indeed what's the full path of the file. When recording a screen, I should be able to pick which regions and which applications it should be able to see, and the system should make it think it's all there is.
You've described exactly what flatpak is doing? I'm curious what gaps you see with its approach in particular.
My favourite thing about Django is the versioned documentation. Land on a page - any page - and you can trivially read the docs on that subject all the way back to 1.8. That's ten years old. And it works, because Django knows how to patiently deprecate APIs and migrate things. They built one docs site, and it still works. It didn't bitrot. The URLs haven't changed. They didn't restructure everything and force people to rewrite their entire projects or be judged quietly. Every single time I end up working with a framework where docs are littered across a handful of different websites for different versions and types of docs or whatever, I think of Django and I wonder why people have such terrible taste.
Alas, that tends to be the majority of my experience with Django. Using it for one-off personal projects and quietly wishing for the current new shiny JavaScript thing to go away. It still feels like home, but most of my time is somewhere else.
I'm okay with modal dialogs working that way as long as people get the message: dialogs are supposed to be ephemeral. If closing the dialog loses important state, or you need information from something under the dialog in order to use the dialog, what you have shouldn't be a modal dialog. And you can tell, because in most UI frameworks that widget is just begging to be closed. Unfortunately, a lot of teams don't get the message.
Another thing to look at is bubblewrap (https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap), which is what implements the sandboxing in Flatpak. It's handy if you want to run a command from your host in a particular sandbox as kind of a one-off, or if you just want to understand more about how that sandboxing works :)
This is why it's often safer to "jaywalk". If you're in the middle of a block, you only have to look two ways. Even if you screw up, a driver going at a reasonable speed is more likely to see you anyway because you're directly in front of them. I'm not exactly advocating for crossing in the middle of a street in North America since it's depends a lot on the situation, but there's a reason why people sometimes just do it intuitively, and it's unfortunate our infrastructure doesn't know how to address it.
America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There's a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we've created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags.
> This was really neat, traditionally you have to access those by right-clicking some whitespace in the list/grid view, but in the list view there is only a narrow band of empty space to right-click, usually you accidentally click a file. So this was a genuine innovation in UI design. Unfortunately they since removed it again.
Wait, no? It hasn’t. I’m looking at a fresh build from the main branch right now. The menu doesn’t have Paste in it in this version, which might be what you’re referring to, but I don’t think it was ever there. (Alas, copy and paste UIs are sad). But otherwise it is very much there. And arguably better because the other big menu has moved somewhere else :) If you’re finding it’s completely gone, um, what distro are you using so I can quietly judge them?
> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.
In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.
It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.
One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/.
That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.
I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.
This is one of my favourite things about Fedora Silverblue and rpm-ostree. If I run `rpm-ostree status`, I get a list of all the packages I’ve installed or removed compared to the base image. Makes it really easy to keep track of what’s different in my system compared to the current default.
I adored this in Return to Monkey Island, as well. Elaine and Guybrush just have a … functional relationship. They love and support each other and they get along well. It's an important part of them as characters, but it's just there, and you don't have to worry, and the plot doesn't revolve around it. I found it refreshing.
You all are crazy. It desperately needs work, but Siri is the only mainstream assistant thing that meets users where they are instead of forcing them into whatever ecosystem it's attached to. Sure, Google Assistant's contextual awareness is super cool, but it only works if you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Tasks, etc.
If we include the umbrella of machine learning stuff in iOS that gets branded "Siri", Siri finds useful connections between my firehose of email from Fastmail, my work Gmail, my text messages, and my Nextcloud calendar and contacts. Completely offline, without even mentioning iCloud.
The voice assistant is extremely clunky and I do hope they'll borrow from LLMs to improve it it, but they really are doing something right here with their modest approach, and "just use ChatGPT" isn't the solution people seem to think.
To be fair, OLPC was accidentally instrumental in making people buy cheap small laptops. The Eee PC netbook emerged very soon after the OLPC, and it was definitely responding to peoples' interest in the OLPC - particularly from the "Give one get one" program. The Eee PC became netbooks, which were eventually strangled to death by Chromebooks.
The OLPC project said "we can help kids by designing $100 laptops just for them", and rich westerners heard "$100 laptops."
The mistakes happened way in the beginning, along with a certain economic downturn. In retrospect, the interest of (on-average) wealthy people in cheap disposable laptops was obscene, and it's a shame the market allowed that interest to be entertained the way it was. Netbooks happened because we are incapable of accounting for the long term costs of crap electronics outside of futile attempts to educate consumers. Thus, netbooks and then equally disposable Chromebooks were dumped into the market without scrutiny, and computers are Google now.
I find this project really confusing, as well. I'm sure sure this project is doing some good work, but I'd love if they take the time to catch us up a little bit, or maybe tweak their name to better reflect what it is they're actually doing. Like, for a modern Linux desktop on well supported modern hardware, what is this affecting?
From my perspective as someone who is rather picky about pixel perfect scrolling and animations, and happily using GNOME 45 with a Magic Touchpad, a Logitech mouse, and a Thinkpad touchpad, and finding nothing particularly amiss with any of those[0] … I'm, um, lost.
Is this all about backporting things to X11? I'm unfamiliar with how touchpads are over there nowadays. (Frankly that sounds like a waste of time to me, but if it still makes people happy, that's cool). Or has this project been actively contributing to exactly those things I'm using, and I just didn't realize?
[0] The Magic Touchpad is definitely a better experience than the Thinkpad one, but they both support multi-finger gestures, and Gtk apps correctly do pixel-perfect scrolling with kinetics and all that jazz. Could maybe do a better job doing the right thing when I lift my finger after scrolling at low speeds. If I used more apps with different toolkits, I know I'd be annoyed by the differences in behaviour between them, so there's definitely something missing there. Happily, since somewhat recently, pretty much every app I use supportsGtk 4 apps all support pixel-perfect scrolling with smooth scroll wheels, too, which is pretty cool.
So, the thing that made Mastodon click for me was when I reminded myself social media doesn't matter. That's really the whole point of this stuff to me. Twitter's long failure began when people were convinced they should make it more important in their lives than it ever deserved to be. When the daily news started to earnestly read nonsense like "X tweeted in response …" for minutes on end, or when the RCMP used Twitter to communicate important public safety information, I felt it in my bones (though I might not have understood exactly why): this was wrong.
I set my Mastodon posts to auto-delete after 6 months so I don't care if I lose them, and I made sure to have some "me" links in the appropriate places pointing at my profile. Even if I were to lose that paper trail from doing proper account migrations, it's pretty easy to say which profile is mine. And if I lose followers, so be it. I'll follow people when I remember who they are. I'll make new posts. If I don't, that's fine. Life happens.
Quality is a pretty good guess, there. I know nothing about porn, but I've watched a few VR-first films. In my mind, the only good attempt at the genre has been a ten minute real-time rendered thing that invites the viewer to come sit down and look around the room while the story happens around them. Small scale. But it makes sense to me. Flat screen cinema didn't start with Lord of the Rings. Even if it was technically possible, that would have been a disaster.
It's very tempting for a filmmaker to carry whatever techniques they are used to in traditional film and use a fancy camera to make it "VR". It takes a long time for the lessons we've learned to actually take root so we can tell a story without throwing the viewer around in some gravity-defying kaleidoscope of headaches.
Apple is up against a widespread misconception that VR means motion sickness for a huge number of people. Largely because of cheap garbage like Gear VR, and content designed for it.
Similarly, if you decide that your button positioned at the edge of the screen actually shouldn't be an infinitely long click target, you aren't breaking Fitts' Law. You might be doing it with Fitts' Law in mind, or not, but Paul Fitts' ghost isn't waiting in the shadows to prosecute small buttons. Some actions should be difficult!
With that said, they definitely screwed up here, but I don't like when we're like "but Fitts' Law" and act like that proves our point on its own. If they wanted, they could "Fitts' Law" right back at you.