callum85

I didn't, I said his comments were disingenuous (what was your "[sic]" for btw?). I meant exactly what I said. I wouldn't call it lying, I'd call it disingenuous (i.e. put-on naivety).

> Are you really claiming that he disliked the iOS UI because his theory told him to?

No. I'm saying his theories about what's confusing, while sometimes interesting, are not necessarily representative of what regular users will actually find confusing, and you'd need to do testing to find out. The problem is he presents them as if they're definitely true, with absolutely no evidence.

> When I tap it, it turns red — but wait — it doesn’t give me the visual feedback. Did I break it?

> The alarm is shown as a red filled square, so when I tap it, it should perform a negative action, right?

These comments are disingenous. You didn't get confused by these things.

You, as a person who's analysing a UI, have an almost totally different mindset to someone who is just using the thing for real. You know this, so here, you're just play-acting. You're thinking, what might I get confused about if I was a normal user? That's a bad way to look for what's really wrong in a UI design.

Yes, when you present points like these, they sound reasonable, but that doesn't mean they're right. Perhaps the alternative (e.g. banning the use of red anywhere in the OS other than for a negative action) might be over-restrictive as a requirement, which could cause excessive complexity elsewhere in the UI and lead to a worse overall result. Or perhaps you're right, the colour–meaning thing should be 100% consistent above all other considerations. Either way, you don't know, and speculation about what might confuse a real user should not be presented as fact.

Theories just guide us in what to test.

EDIT: I wrote the above when the title was "Gym workouts and sunbathing do more for your brain than crosswords and Mozart" and the link was to a different URL.

If it's just an ID number, what is the extra capacity for?

That's all this is, and that's fine. It would be weird for the author to start factoring in other sources of income, because the point of this story is simply to make it easier to understand what "$0.00029 per play" means, by its ratio to a more tangible figure. I don't think the author is trying to imply that all those musicians on Spotify with fewer than 4m plays/month are actually earning less than minimum wage overall.

• "dart" means "handwritten Dart running in the Dart VM"

• "v8" means "handwritten JavaScript running in V8"

• "dart2js" means "dart2js-generated JavaScript running in V8"

I can't find any link to the actual handwritten JavaScript (or the handwritten Dart) that these benchmarks are based on. Without this, it's impossible to know the value of these numbers.

Maybe the handwritten JavaScript is written really badly. Maybe the procedure performed by the respective languages is something that dart2js is particularly good at optimising. Who knows.

What a pile of shit. People who are in chronic pain can't necessarily "choose" to be happy.

After that, the article turns into the most banal, worthless list of self-help platitudes I've ever read.

I'm a very happy person by the way, and I'm interested in techniques for becoming happier. I also dislike bullshit.

"tools to understand and improve the performance of your apps" only commits them to updating their docs and tools to reflect how their system really works. It doesn't indicate any intention to fix the actual problem (the fact that requests can be routed to busy dynos), nor that they will make any kind of reimbursement to people who made business decisions based on incorrect docs.

"develop long-term solutions" doesn't really mean anything.

I disagree. Zero benchmarks is definitely better than specious benchmarks.

A blog post needs to do a lot more than that if it is to be deemed a success. Especially if it is quite long. It should bring some insight. @nkwiatek thinks this particular blog post didn't bring much insight. If this is true, then it's valid to use this as a criticism. A long blog post with a reflective tone implicitly promises to bring something more to the table than "I think X is wrong".

And you said '...the "design" crowd'. What are your quote marks for? Are you implying they're not actually designers, or are you mocking the idea of product design as a profession, or something else?

In HTML5, <i> and <b> now have the deliberately vague semantic definitions of "alternate voice" and "stylistically offset" – this could cover emphasis, book/film names, key words, foreign phrases, etc. Incorrect use of the more specific semantic tags (eg. generating <em> when the user sets a film title to "italic") is worse than a lack of semantic detail.

HTML5 was designed with the understanding that not all web content can be authored by someone who knows the correct use of semantic HTML tags like <cite>, <em>, <strong>, <mark>, etc. Application-level copy can use those tags, but a rich text editor (for normal people) can't know which one is appropriate, so it should always default to the vague ones, <b> and <i>.

Entry level is about £30,000 (US$48,600).

This is just based on my own experience looking at job ads. My impression might be skewed a bit (perhaps those ads that don't specify a salary tend to be for higher-paid roles, I don't know).

If you designed UIs assuming that that sort of user-to-user education doesn't exist, you'd be forced occasionally to reject a potentially handy power-user feature on the basis that there's no good place to promote it without cluttering the design. Which would be a shame.