simulo

I tried it!

Good:

- It is a good copy of figmas UI. With much open source software, it often seems the UI comes last in priority and interest; Penpot’s UI is well working and looks good. - Basic features are all there - The team has build an open source online platform before, so they know what they do.

Bad:

- In design systems particularly at variants and states of components, it is not on figma’s level yet

Interesting:

- You can self-deploy (cause open) or use their free instance - Front- and backend are written in clojure/clojure script

I did not know that crypto scams were this common!

A plausibe "big-picture" explaination is attributing it (partly) to several intertwined cultural movements, originating or being popular in California in the 60s. They focussed on individual self-improvement, particularly the human potential movement with its idea of self-actualization as highest virtue (See Maslow’s pyramid of needs) and claims that we "only use 10% of our brains". Human potential matches some other ideas that are influential in the tech industry, like frontier-ism and libertarianism and engineering technological solutions for problems (Herbert Simon might be an example for putting forward a problem focussed model of thinking, which also influenced Artificual Intelligence and thus probably the rather AI-influenced early hacker culture).

A nice introduction to this perspective is Christina Dunbar-Hester ’s talk on "Hacking Diversity": https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11569-hacking_diversity_the_polit...

Not much as far as I am concerned, though the then-mentioned figma-like penpot.app/ keeps improving continously!

The challenge for end-user focussed design is that it is very resource intensive to develop parallel UIs (and for many devs they are the least fun thing to implement), whereas it is not that much of a problem to add an additional parameter to a command line program.

I am active on opensource design since several years. Back when we created the logo we had many discussions what would represent design well. Problem is that design often means something rather abstract and it easily leads to boxes and/or arrows to signify "process" or "concepts" etc. If I remember correctly I would have preferred a pencil but, admittingly, it has a less recognizable shape in the flat-shapes-design of today’s icons.

Nice! I just looked at it yesterday when I was collecting resources on architecture of WebApps in python. I found that Refactoring guru also has python examples for them pattern section.

I made the experience that they are hard to learn and understand out of context, so practicing on flashcards does not make much sense for me. What I did is programming some mini projects in which one or two patterns are used: Pub-sub is nice in anything UI related, commands+state is great for a simple undo/redo-manager etc.

It is a great piece of code to study as a beginner. It is easy to understand, non-trivial and has an easy-to-relate-to purpose. Norvig's implementation is in python, but he links to variants in many different languages at the bottom of the post.

> They also tried to change regulations to suit them better. But they are allowed.

They might be allowed. But just because it is legal does not mean that it is right, particularly as they themselves are "making their opinion known to the people who make the rules" and can excert economic pressure on lawmakers. And while their products might indeed be inferior – if they place their products as default on their own systems (android), buy themselves default placements on other products (Safari, Firefox…) many customers who do not try out all the options only use google’s products. And I can't blame them for not trying out all alternatives.

Micrografx Picture Publisher allowed that more than 20years ago, but it is the only image editor I know of that did this

A repeated topic in Agre’s writings are the practices and consequences of (computable) abstraction, which is reflected in his (and Chapman’s) AI approaches, his criticism of AI and his writings on privacy. A core claim is that engineers make abstractions based on an implicit aristotelian/cartesian philosophy, assuming that what they abstract actually exists in the world and is merely "extracted" or "found".

afaic it does, yes. They try to decouple it, though.

Most what steam offers is game related, but the categories they have are rather broad, one of them being "utilities".

That is interesting. I did not read the article as a plea to avoid algorithms or 'Western culture' in general and interpreted it more as suggesting that ideas like "bias", "data" and "rationality" do not exist outside of context, politics and history (data cleaning is typically the phase where this is obvious to many researchers) and that this should be considered even though a perspective like X is the problem and Y is the solution might make an algorithm or its debiasing seem to be a generally positive outcome/solution.

> it's the only kind of approach that > generalizes across different cultures.

I agree that the "rational" approache’s mobility is very interesting and powerful.

The general point from science and technology studies would be that, to move research results around and get this agreement, there needs to be a vast infrastructure that standardizes what rationality depends on – and even then, scientific replication, e.g., can be quite difficult (Collins story of the attempt to replicate building an early TEA-Laser is an interesting example).

The point specific to the paper is that determining what you assume to be bias and what you assume to be unbiased is already a political and ethical decision that can not be 'rationally' decided from within the research.

I think it is hard to overstate how impressive this is. While it aims to be well integrated in tech workflows, it is a product that allows designers to work well, with a nice, usable and useful UI.

For the few designers in open source, designing with open source software is often a love/hate activity: We want to use and support open software, but it often is painful to use, lacks features relevant for design activities (which, yes, can mean: Being similar to industry standard products) while at the same time being overflowing with settings.

Trying penpot makes me look forward to a product with a clear vision and great utility.

I often recommend "Don’t make me think" (Krug) for people who are interested in improving websites; my go-to resource for (desktop) applications would be "About Face" (Cooper et.al)

Not really. https://penpot.app/ seems promising, though.

I have no good idea about the origin of users as lazy. However, there is a good argument for an origin of users as stupid. And this might be the close connection of Human Computer Interaction with Cognitive Science, which understands thinking as computational. Thus, the ideal way of thinking is computer-like and diversions from this are framed as due to limitations that cause problems and need to be worked around: The user is like a limited and erratically failing computer.

Gedenryd showed the problems of understanding the user and designer as thinking computationally in his PhD thesis: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-designers-work-mak...

I second that. The RCTs get discussed most often. But what was eye-opening for me were their observations on how poor people manage the few resources they have matching the infrastructure they can access – like investing in bricks (Ch8)

Bigger cities need booth more in-game electricity and real-world electricity, it seems.

I use atom editor [1] (but any other will do, too) for editing and pandoc [2] for conversion. It is not the most integrated solution, but independent of any platform.

[1] https://atom.io/ [2] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

To be able to help, it would be great to get to know a bit more about your aims and the current process:

- What do you hope to achieve by the design-reviews? What would be, e.g., a huge issue which is missed?

- In which form are the designs delivered? (Photoshop files, Specs, Interactive Prototypes…)

From what you describe, it seems to me that people might be unsure about what they should do and how they know that they did a "good" review.

The http://hood.ie/ community is nice. Also, I was rather happy with etherpad’s community: http://etherpad.org/

Do you mean books in general or books on design and/or psychology, like Norman’s?

Backbone 1. Learning is relatively easy (I can’t give Hours, for my first code I needed like 2h, for totally understanding the whole lib in depth (at least possible) probably 1 or 2 Months) 2. 1 (Relatively much Boilerplate code) 3. 1-2 (depends on your skills and if you use any extensions that help you structuring your code) 4. It is easy to understand and to extend. I work a lot with interactions like Drag/Drop, custom Widgets etc. Using those was a chore in other frameworks (and needed much binding code and/or extensions), in Backbone it can be just bridged to jQuery (UI).

Think Stats by Allen Downey (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkstats/index.html)

»A Beg­inner’s Guide to Finding User Needs« read: http://jdittrich.github.io/userNeedResearchBook/ source: https://github.com/jdittrich/userNeedResearchBook

Is a free/libre guide teaching how to find out what your users’ needs are.