nubero

Blackmagic Camera, Filmic Pro and Halide. All iOS. Their problems are not exactly the same across but the button shapes are a great part of it. The other problem is, that people invent abstract icons for abstract ideas and then expect people to remember every one of those. Whatever happened to text labels beneath buttons?

Amen to that. You seem to have completely gotten the point I was trying to make. Thank you!

If I had been a real stickler when writing my piece, I could have pointed to the “Select” button missing an ellipsis (…), making it “Select…”. Since the first Macintosh, when choosing a command from a drop down menu that would present you with a modal dialog, the command in the menu would have the ellipsis. This would tell you that you would get asked something after selecting the command. So “Save” but “Save as…”. Since “Select” presents you with a mode to select things before you do anything with them, it would technically need the ellipsis. However, I suspect it isn’t there (amongst other things) because the round button next to it is already an ellipsis. That would have to be changes as well. So you see, I could probably write a whole piece just about that… :-)

> So what is the problem? If you can recognize they are buttons in context, that sounds like a successful design.

Then you didn’t get my point about cognitive load or I wasn’t explicit enough. Sure you can recognize the icon-only buttons in context (mostly) but if they work worse in a sterile (or call it academic) example when compared to buttons with shapes, how are they better when in an UI? The UI will help but the cognitive load will still be higher than if they looked like buttons by themselves.

> If you implement your touchscreen buttons like this, I’m not sure what to say. It’s not a problem with the style of button, but a bug in your implementation. I can’t say I’ve ever come across it in the wild in anything that is remotely competently made, as it would basically be unusable.

I had this in several apps across the years. If it happens often enough, you develop an itch in the back of your head that makes you ever so slightly distrust buttons in that shape. Something that can be completely remedied by the solution I proposed.

> There’s a perfectly good reason why they look different. The back arrow is a navigation pattern that is used across the entire OS.

It’s a bad pattern, made by people who confuse website content with native GUIs. I can’t go as far as to explain all the reasoning behind this but just this much: The back arrow I proposed is something that – and believe me or not, I realised after I wrote the piece – had already existed in iOS before the flat nonsense.

Exactly. I thought I was rather explicit in my afterword that a redesign doesn’t have to look like my redesign.

I was actually thinking of writing a piece about the legibility of typefaces in the context of UI. It would have gone far beyond for this post though. In the meantime, go to the website of Monotype and write the word “Iliad”, once in Neue Haas Unica (similar to the Apple font) and once in FF Unit. Notice how you can tell apart the capital “I” from the lowercase “l” and “i” much better. It’s things like this that make typefaces like FF Unit much better for UIs and also signage (in hospitals for example).

You understood the point I was trying to make in that piece, congratulations!

There’s always one like you, isn’t there?

My original tweet vanished. Here is an updated link: https://x.com/nuberodesign/status/1749861418172604545?s=20

My original tweet vanished. Here is an updated link: https://x.com/nuberodesign/status/1749861418172604545?s=20

Thank you! Comments like this motivate me to write more! You should check out the rest of the blog here: www.nubero.ch/blog/

You can also retweet if you like: https://x.com/nuberodesign/status/1749730123954221373?s=20

My secret hope is still, that someone at Apple and the others sees this and finally act…

Thanks! Share it around if you liked it. Would be much appreciated! You can retweet it too: https://x.com/nuberodesign/status/1749730123954221373?s=20

Good piece by Thom Holwerda on the cancer that is SEO

Just to be clear: That the article itself exists is no joke and certainly helpful to the people who use it. that being said, I work with video every day and neither I nor my filmmaking friend use it. It’s a tool for the same kind of people who like to spend sundays in their garage, fixing their cars. In that example, the people who need to get actual work done are the ones who take their cars out and drive them…

That article is a far longer joke than the two word classic “Desktop Linux”. Seriously though: good software has a user interface.

You need to read “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch. It will help clear up all the muddled thinking I see going on when I read those lines of yours.

Edit: You can also go here and watch this: https://youtu.be/lX-K63pVPTM I still recommend the book though.

In the international FIDE list of chess grandmasters, 39 out of 1953 are female. That’s 2%. And while I’m certain that there’s some icky misogynistic men who have made some decisions in that regard, I’m equally certain that we will never see the ratio being fifty-fifty. Not even close.

That being said, I really don’t care what we will see or what the outcome will be in a truly meritocratic system. I’m just interested in the merit.

Well, I for one think “the goal of equality” should be discarded. People are to be treated equally and we already have the declaration of universal human rights as a foundational and international document for that.

If you want people to end up all “being equal” to one another you will just end up on the farm, where all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

Also, I think it quite amusing that you call what Fermi said “a strong claim” and a “moral judgement” and a few lines down you have the audacity to say that certain “ideas need to be discarded”. First of all, some of the “ideas” you talk about are indeed facts. And then who on earth do you think you are to tell other people what they may think of?

Indeed… The rot has spread frighteningly far.

Enrico Fermi comes to mind: “Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.”

I guess he wasn’t talking about the magazine…

That’s the SJ interview I was thinking about…

You’re absolutely right. Steve Jobs warned about process and process people as well and it’s not surprising.

This might very well be true as a general statement. However, I don’t see where it applies to reseting the contents of a form.

Good article, and rather very similar to what I had written a while ago about the “save changes” dialogue boxes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920422

I’m constantly wondering who even cares about the bugs, seeing as this “game” has hardly anything worth to be called gameplay. Imagine having to drive a tank through narrow back alleys while being drunk. That’s what the controls feel like…

The only tool in that video you linked to is that dishonest cheerleader Gruber.

I’m glad that not everyone in human history has shared your bright outlook, otherwise we would still live in caves…

Looking at the replies to my comment, it seems clear that the brain rot is well advanced with some people. Therefore some random points in no special order:

23 billion is nothing for a project that has 23, mostly western European, member states paying for it. The GDP of Switzerland alone (which has a population of only 8.5 million) was around 700 billion in 2019.

Climate change is not going to be solved by an “International Center for Climate Modeling”. That is so completely nonsensical that I didn’t even thought it worth pointing out. We already have climate models – that’s how we know we have a problem.

Also, we have solar, wind, hydroelectricity and nuclear fission already. The first two could be refined a lot. The last one I am not a fan of but it’s either that or coal in many places. THAT is what’s going to solve our energy and thus climate problems. It will also solve some longstanding geopolitical problems as a bonus (no more western money for the Saudis).

That being said, nuclear fusion could be developed much faster (than ITER is) with the right minds and organizational structure behind it. Just look at the Space Launch System (SLS) which still doesn’t exist, has cost 20 billion already and whose ultimate goal is throwaway rockets vs. what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money, faster.

Then there’s individual transportation which is being solved right now with electric cars and batteries. Both of which are just at the beginning of their development. More interesting to me however, is the loss of energy through badly built homes that have almost no insulation at all (U.S. and Japan come to mind).

Hossenfelder rhetorically asking “why, you may have wondered recently, do we not have a center for epidemic modeling” is the worst kind of pandering to the fears of the people at this moment. It’s also wrong because epidemic modeling has been done for a long time at many universities and the pharmaceutical industry.

Hossenfelder says a lot of extremely idiotic things in her piece but “the potential rewards are unclear” is on my number one spot: The potential rewards in experimental science are always unclear – that’s one of the key characteristics of experimental science.

The only point she could potentially have would be the one about inertia in funding. That’s something I don’t see into as I don’t work in that field. Given, however, how ill-informed and, I have to assume, ill-intentioned her other twaddle in that article is, I would rather hear that information about funding problems from a more trustworthy source than her.

It’s a mystery to me how people with an outlook as parochial as Sabine Hossenfelder’s even get a job in the sciences. This is really mind bending and quite frankly unsettling.

I knew without clicking that it had to be Japanese… fascinating product…