This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.
But I couldn't disagree more with the premise. It complains that computers have been reduced from physical, tactile, hulking mainframes to neutered generic text interfaces, but I've watched the opposite happen over the past two decades.
My phone is physical -- I swipe, pinch, and tap. It buzzes and dings and flashes. I squeeze my AirPods, I pay by holding my wrist up to a sensor, I tilt my iPad to play video games and draw on it with a pencil.
Everything the article complains about, we've already solved. All of its suggestions, we already have. It wants "multi-modality" but we already have that too -- I can change the volume on my iPhone with physical buttons while I dictate. I can listen to music while I scroll.
Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.
> This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.
Hard disagree. It's incredibly distracting and the constant movement of text, the introduction and disappearance of images within the medium makes it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the message.
It screams 'look at me, I'm really smart with all these neat effects'. But you know what interface for articles like this has served us pretty well for > 1000 years? Just the words. Please, just display the words rather than this conceit.
In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto "A word is worth a thousand pictures.
This is advice many modern designers need to know - I don't like seeing an icon and having no idea what it does without clicking it, and having to guess what the icon might mean, where a label could easily fit, or replace the icon, and be a vastly better UX, but "looking good" is more important to most designers.
I've seen some contexts where this is what's happening. IKEA instructions would be one, or I've also seen it in some board games, where things like cards will use icons so only the instruction book needs to be translated.
But in UIs you usually have to have some text equivalent somewhere, on hover or long-press or in a menu or just as text for screenreader users, so you don't generally get to avoid translation even if you take visible labels away.
That struck me as well. Whatever interesting message the author may have been trying to convey was lost on me, and probably many others, because of the visual distractions. Visual distractions are precisely the problem that we're facing with modern interfaces.
The images are also irritating and jarring when you notice that the bokeh is fake and that they're all AI generated (and AI generated images have really headache inducing depth of field effects).
Thanks for pointing this out. Never thought of it like that, but I guess you're right, I sensed something in those kind of images. Except for the sugar rush of saturated colors and overall soft blur of course, that always seems to be there with AI images.
I'm currently stuck on LTE due to a power outage. The page is horrible to try to read due to most of the images being either in the process of being loaded or not loaded at all.
If it was a book I wouldn't buy it. The theme does seem to fit a kids book.
What I find hilarious is that I cant tell if this took years to draw and compose or if it was 5 minutes worth of prompts. Did they knit everything? I sometimes see my art on low effort articles, I'm 99% sure they think it's AI.
The only detail I really liked was how the arrow representing the computer communicating to the user has a ring on the back so that the user can be roped in like a whale.
I have great news for you. The article is also perfectly structured, which means it shows flawlessly on reader mode.
Reader mode is a standard feature on all major browsers on both desktop and mobile. Given you're so vocal about how articles should work by just "displaying the words", I'd suggest that you acquaintance yourself with the one feature that does exactly that.
Thanks to reader mode, you get to concentrate on the message. And we get to keep our joy.
I have bad news for you. This is cut-and-paste directly from reader mode in Firefox mobile.
"Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied."
I stopped reading after that. There are also missing full stops, which means it's difficult to understand what's happening.
Reader seems to be broken on iOS Safari—after the first few paragraphs sentences start repeating 8 or so times in a row
Plus the longer paragraphs, confined to the height of their parent image, are cut off on my iPhone mini, leading to sections reading e.g.:
> controls with GUIs—graphical user interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches, flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big
This complaint is like visiting a flower garden and complaining that it is an inefficient use of space because it doesn't grow enough root vegetables.
The style and emotional feeling of the page is the message. An article consisting of only words is not an "article like this", and if you are starting from that premise you already totally missed the author's point.
They might have gotten the point but disagreed. In particular, if the style and feeling of the page is the message, and they are saying they don’t like the message and page feels bad… then, it seems like the premise was understood and rejected.
> The style and emotional feeling of the page is the message.
And for many people, that message is, "go away, this is not for you".
Which is a valid take if that's what the author intended, but generally speaking, when people take time to pen manifests, they expect them to be read and heeded.
The question is whether the text on the page is supposed to match the message. If it’s purely an artwork, then perhaps the text doesn’t matter - but that’s a bit confusing. The problem with the site is that it’s making a claim in its text and, for many people, refuting that claim with its presentation.
Our interfaces have more modalities than before but they are disconnected from both physical and emotional reality. Buzzes and dings and flaps are nothing like hearing a happy shout from a friend or feeling the 'clunk' of an actual motor starter engaging.
I totally agree with OP that the 'flat' visual style is appalling. (And gray-on-gray text is an obscenity.)
I don't want my computer's interface to be overtly "emotional". I don't want it to have the same effect as "a happy shout from a friend". I want it to be unobtrusive and functional, so that I can pay attention to the message my friend recorded with their happy shout that is actually real. And I prefer my cars quiet because I want to keep my focus on the environment.
And what do you mean, disconnected from physical reality? I listed the examples where I pay with my wrist, squeeze my earbuds, draw with a pencil. I also snap photos and take videos, record with voice memos, send a pin with my location. I track AirTags, I identify plants by pointing at them, I learn constellations by aiming at them. Computing is more connected to physical reality than ever.
The two best experiences I had with touch were the the Sony WH-H900N [0] and Procreate on Ipad. The headphones had a touch surface where tap was play/pause and swipe up/down manipulate volume and swipe left/right change track. Due to the large surface, it was easy and quick to do these actions and natural.
Another good experience was shaking my phone (an Android Motorola) to turn the flash light on and off. Another great natural movement is taking my iPhone and transfer the playing music to an Homepod by tapping on the two together.
For almost everything else I loathe touch devices. While older ones may be clunky visually, they are far more ergonomic. Yes, my phone can do a lot of stuff, but the whole process for a specific one is always clunky and companies go out of their ways to block you from altering the UX.
The article reads like a description of personal computing in the late 90s to early 2000s. It also reads very similarly to Apple’s early marketing around multitouch displays.
> This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.
The artwork on those is stunning. It's hard to imagine someone would spend so much time and effort illustrating an article with so little content. (the other articles on that page are similarly well illustrated)
If this article were created 5 years ago, I would be downright impressed. Sadly, I've defaulted to assume the artwork was generated by AI those days. (even though I have no evidence of that)
It doesn't help that the author claims they "empower devs with AI" in their home page, and their older webpage from 2019 [0], while still very beautiful, isn't illustrated to the same standard.
I just wish authors were upfront that they generated the artwork with AI (with a little caption, footnote, something; the same kind of thing newspapers use to credit their photojournalists). I really have nothing against using AI for this kind of thing and regardless of whether AI was used, the author of the article for sure has a lot of artistic merit for the composition as a whole.
There has been a number of attempts at making screens create tactile bumps and provide direct feedback which haven't yet worked which might improve physical interaction somewhat so we can get buttons and switches and knobs in a programmable way that isn't hardware specific to the task but we aren't there yet.
Having no tactile interaction on computers saddens me very much. A couple decades ago, a colleague and I did a mind experiment on pixel-level tactile interfaces and imagining all the affordances that would provide - including of course for those that are sight challenged. All humans have a very very strong tactile aspect to their neurophysiology. Cortical Man shows that clearly.
It would be sad if in 10,000 years we evolved to lose our tactile senses.
I'll also add the buttons and switches and knobs are not all that tactile. They are a modern human creation.
This, by the way, is partly why MacBook trackpads are so good - they have excellent haptic feedback for clicking that is superior to most (all?) physical trackpads.
> buttons and switches and knobs are not all that tactile
But they are, though. You can touch them without pressing, and, once you get used to them, they have different textures.
Back in the ball-mouse days I had this vague notion of including some kind of togglable magnetic resistance on the mouse rollers, to make physical tactile ridges and divisions in the user interface. Probably completely impractical, but it would open up some interesting possibilities.
It seems like it ought to be possible to add tactile feedback to a modern mouse with gyros that could make certain directions hard to move in but the weight likely isn't worth it with mice trying to get ever lighter.
I quite like force feedback generally, I have a ffb steering wheel from fanatec and a joystick from moza.there is definitely a market for this sort of thing and a mouse that had feedback if only vibration might be interesting. Usually more complex signals are where the value comes in, having a spring/rubber push back on pedals is better than nothing but vibration at multiple frequencies adds a lot and then actual motorised pedal feedback is a whole other level again.
It would be cool to have the mouse button upon which my index finger rests be a tactile version of the 32x32 grid around the cursor. But I've no idea how you would add 1000 tactile points into that small space.
Beautiful? It looks like utter garbage to me. I really can't abide that twee visual style. The designer is trying way too hard and completely lost the plot.
Honestly using GenAI slop pictures to illustrate the article about the soullessness of modern computing clashes with the message in a way I don't think the author intended.
As far as GenAI goes, this ain't slop. Guess people wouldn't be so hostile to GenAI used as stock footage if it were of this quality and consistency. But this sort of output is hardly "type a prompt and press a button", not sure what was used but I imagine style transfer or LoRAs were involved - or at least few rounds of prompt refinement
> Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.
Hard disagree. Let's take a very simple example, Wikipedia[0]. Took way too long to build in a dark mode and when they do they have the options "light", "dark", and "automatic". YET the default value is "light". WHY THE FUCK IS THERE AN AUTOMATIC IF THIS ISN'T THE DEFAULT!? Obvious stuff like this is everywhere.
I find a lot of interfaces INFURIATING. My car wants to do things with touch screens while I want to feel because I want to keep my eyes on the road. My iPhone won't capitalize the letter I and will change not just the word I'm typing but the word previous to it making swipe style texting painful to use. Speaking of the iPhone, it's 2025 and there's no universal back. I still don't know how to exit the YouTube popup asking me to activate my free trial of premium other than swiping close the whole app and reopening[1]. Or I scroll through an app with threads (e.g. Twitter) and I move slightly left or right and bam I'm on a different tab and when I move back I'm not where I left off but somewhere completely new.
You may say "well that's a 'you' problem, I'm happy with the way things are" and my point is that humans are all different. There's no one size fits all. Maybe that swiping thing happens because our thumbs are different sizes or our phones are different sizes. Maybe you like light mode and don't open any websites with the lights off. But that difference is what makes us human. The problem is that things are converging to things that are bad for everyone. Design matters a lot and getting used to a design is very different than designing things around people. A well designed product needs no instructions (obviously not absolute), just see the "Norman Door."[2] We shit on backend developers for making shitty UIs (as a 'backend' person, I agree, this deserves criticism) but I don't think the front end people are at all concerned with design now a days either. There's a special irony with Apple, considering the magic was the interaction between Jobs and Woz. The magic is when the good backend meets good frontend. Yet now we're just doing both like it is a competition of who can create the worst thing the fastest.
I don't think these are so different. The reason a lot of UIs feel like they've lost their minds is because they are not adapting to humans. Which that is the argument for using more senses. I mention Norman Doors because this is that intersection. I could definitely have communicated better, but I think these things are fundamentally related.
But I couldn't disagree more with the premise. It complains that computers have been reduced from physical, tactile, hulking mainframes to neutered generic text interfaces, but I've watched the opposite happen over the past two decades.
My phone is physical -- I swipe, pinch, and tap. It buzzes and dings and flashes. I squeeze my AirPods, I pay by holding my wrist up to a sensor, I tilt my iPad to play video games and draw on it with a pencil.
Everything the article complains about, we've already solved. All of its suggestions, we already have. It wants "multi-modality" but we already have that too -- I can change the volume on my iPhone with physical buttons while I dictate. I can listen to music while I scroll.
Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.