Also, Infuse, which is a nice app for playing video files over the network and support Jellyfin, Plex, and others. It also have Dolby and DTS decoders, which works great as the box only have PCM output.
The scroll wheel is a step up over both d-pad and touch screen. I also had a Creative Zen which has a scroll lane and it was great too. Why? Because interaction was a factor of motion control and it has great feedback. Same with Apple touchpad. Yep you still have to learn it, but it was something done in a few minutes and fairly visual.
There's a reason a lot of actually important interfaces still have a lot of buttons, knob, lights, and levers and other human shaped controls. Because, they rely on more than visual to actually convey information.
I was recommending laptop to someone and the only criteria he had was a number pad and a big screen because he mostly use Excel. I think input method is fairly context sensitive. Touch is the most versatile one as it acts directly on the output, but I still prefers a joystick for playing game, a midi keyboard for creating music, a stylus for drawing, and voice when I'm driving or simple tasks. Even a simple remote is better than mouse+keyboard for an entertainment center (as long as you're not entering text). We need to bring the human aspect of interface instead of the marketing one (branding and aesthetics).
Apple TV remote has it’s problems but at least it strives to be simple. Magically it also controls enough amplifier and projector (I don’t know how, hdmi signals?) so I don’t need to touch any other remotes on daily basis.
> one of the greatest changes in power user tooling in recent years
Alt+x in Emacs was here for ages. Even the command prompt in vim follows the same pattern. And while it's useful, I still prefers to bind commonly use commands to keybinding, especially if there can be prefix.
There's a reason I didn't say "innovation"—I knew that people would immediately point out it's been around forever. What's new is that it's in mainstream tooling.
The fact is that for a lot of projects, you don't write a lot of code. And for the occasion that you do, the issues lies mainly in integrations and requirements/design cycle. I learned Vim and Emacs, not to write code faster, but to edit it faster. I've never been in a position where I said: I wish I could write more code.
In fact, most of my coding happens in an unfocused state. It's when I'm reading code (when there's a gap in the docs), learning a new system (libraries, platform, language), or designing a system (architecture, integration,...) that I give my full attention. The actual writing is mostly Edit/(Compile|Lint|Test)/Fix cycle that actually goes pretty fast in term of iteration and don't use that much mental energy.
If most software were following DDD, UI should be a generic domain. But they bind themselves to Electron and bring the whole kitchen with them. And then a note app bring a whole audio and video ecosystem among others.
Before software only needs to be useful. Now the C Suite thinks it needs to be engaging and isolating like a casino.
I'm currently using Gnome and their UI may not be the most beautiful or complete, but they've gone all in on consistency. I don't mind software like Blender, Audacity, and others having their own design systems as their domain is much more complicated. But a lot of software only needs a few controls and the native ones should suffice.
I don’t think it’s a coincedence that out of the Linux DE ecosystems, GNOME has probably the biggest presence in little third-party utilities made to match the environment. The DE itself is quite flawed in my opinion, but its consistent and opinionated design system catches the eyes of devs and would-be devs and motivates them to build things.
A similar effect I believe is what’s been largely responsible for the healthy botique indieware scene on macOS too.
I think what motivates people to patch over Gnome deficiencies is its position as the de facto standard "enterprise" DE, where you basically have no choice but to use it.
There’s a handful of third party apps that serve that function, but that’s really more the domain of GNOME shell extensions.
What I’m talking about are apps built not because there weren’t serviceable options in their categories prior, but because there weren’t any that made an effort to be at unity with the larger GNOME desktop. Apps like Errands[0], Folio[1], Shortwave[2], and Newsflash[3].
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.
I grew up with physical encyclopedia, then moved on to Encarta, then Wikipedia dumps and folders full of PDFs. I still prefer curated information repository over chat interfaces or generated summaries. The main goal with the former is to have a knowledge map and keywords graph, so that you can locate any piece of information you may need from the actual source.
Which I highly doubt for anything other than greenfield project. When you look at any mature open source project, it’s mostly small commits, but a large context is required in order to make these. If you’re in boilerplate land, becoming fluent in your editor and using snippets can bring a more advantageous boost.
No I work in a huge company and many of our systems are 10+ years old. I did have a lot of snippets but AI is good at handling new things I haven't seen before and wouldn't have had a snippet for yet. It's also great for extending configurations / large switch statements / etc. the kind of stuff you see in big codebases.
It's terrible when you get to complex code, but I'd rather spend most of my time there anyways
Supercool bro'! Show these luddites! See non-believers this one works at a huge company solving hard tasks. So again please teach us! How did you get the 10-20%? How did you measure it? What methodology? Control group? Is it 10-20 more projetcs done? Or profits!!??? I bet its profits!! This guy is living the dream!!!
