I think in a lot of ways, UI ebbs and flows; a lot of modern UI feels pretty terrible and non-intuitive, and re-designed for the sake of being re-designed.
And at the same time, writing software is tremendously easier than 20, or even 10 years ago. But maybe that's an ebb-and-flow issue as well. I tried adding React to an existing project last week, and was completely unable to. Everything broke. I'm debating which is the less-bad option - create a new repo, starting with React and gluing everything else around it, or moving just-the-react parts into a repo of their own. I'm tired of trying to figure out how to glue disparate, opinionated things together. I'm missing the Unix philosophy the author is talking about.
> I think in a lot of ways, UI ebbs and flows; a lot of modern UI feels pretty terrible and non-intuitive, and re-designed for the sake of being re-designed.
I think we're still figuring out UIs. As someone who sucks at them myself, I often wonder where are the modern Bruce Tognazzini's. I'm still reminded of a point on UI design he made that the corners of the desktop in a WIMP are special because they are infinitely large targets - you just fling the mouse pointer there and hit them. This point was of particular interest to me as an early Linux desktop (FVWM) user with virtual desktops (3x3) that you could configure to flip between when the mouse got near the edge, so it broke the infinite corners convention.
I'd like to find people who are thinking about UI's as deeply as the AskTog articles used to.
I think in a lot of ways, UI ebbs and flows; a lot of modern UI feels pretty terrible and non-intuitive, and re-designed for the sake of being re-designed.
And at the same time, writing software is tremendously easier than 20, or even 10 years ago. But maybe that's an ebb-and-flow issue as well. I tried adding React to an existing project last week, and was completely unable to. Everything broke. I'm debating which is the less-bad option - create a new repo, starting with React and gluing everything else around it, or moving just-the-react parts into a repo of their own. I'm tired of trying to figure out how to glue disparate, opinionated things together. I'm missing the Unix philosophy the author is talking about.