APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: UI
Falsehoods These Programmers Believed About Countries
Well this was a hard-fought issue. Setting the scene: since April 2020 I’ve been working on Global.health: a Data Science Initiative, where we collate information about Covid-19 cases worldwide and make them available in a standard schema for analysis. In … Continue reading
On Apple’s swings and misses
There’s a trope in the Apple-using technologist world that when an Apple innovation doesn’t immediately succeed, they abandon it. It’s not entirely true, let’s see what actually happens. The quote in the above-linked item that supports the claim: “Apple has … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL, UI
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Why you didn’t like that thing that company made
There’s been a bit of a thing about software user experience going off the rails lately. Some people don’t like cross-platform software, and think that it isn’t as consistent, as well-integrated, or as empathetic as native software. Some people don’t … Continue reading
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How UX Practitioners Produce Findings in Usability Testing
The Paper How UX Practitioners Produce Findings in Usability Testing by Stuart Reeves, in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, January 2019. Notes Various features of this paper make it a shoe-in for Research Watch. It is about the intersection between … Continue reading
Posted in academia, social-science, UI
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given-when-then in XCTest
I started writing a new Mac app, and I started doing it by driving the implementation through Xcode UI Automation tests. But then it turned out I was driving the test infrastructure as much as the tests, and it’s that … Continue reading
Posted in Swift, TDD, UI
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Subatomic Chocolate
This started out as a toot thread, but “threaded tooting is tedious for everybody involved” so here’s the single post that thread should have been. The “Electron vs. native” debate doesn’t make much sense. I feel like I’ve been here … Continue reading
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Withholding the Four Freedoms
Having downsized my rather over-enthusiastic computer collection (thanks, eBay!), I was down to one computer. Unfortunately, as a rather long in the tooth MacBook Air, it’s no longer suited to my needs and neither is it upgradeable. I got all … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware, GNU, UI
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Apple’s Watch and Jony’s Compelling Beginning
There are a whole lot of constraints that go into designing something. Here are the few I could think of in a couple of minutes: what people already understand about their interactions with things what people will discover about their … Continue reading
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PADDs, not the iPad
Alan Kay says that Xerox PARC bought its way into the future by paying lots of money for each computer. Today, you can (almost) buy your way into the future of mobile computers by paying small amounts of money for … Continue reading
Posted in futurology, UI
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Intuitive is the Enemy of Good
In the previous instalment, I discussed an interview in which Alan Kay maligned growth-restricted user interfaces. Here’s the quote again: There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down … Continue reading
