I know this will never come to pass, but I sorta day dream all the time of a parallel universe I could go live in where UI and UX and UEX and whatever else you want to call it would actually get real respect, and places that flubbed it would really feel the pain e.g. financially. Like how eBay is such a horrid evil crappy experience, for both sellers and buyers.

I fail to see how the Dollar Store type things survive. I bought some packing tape and it was, of course, the absolute worst stuff ever. Utterly impossible to use, ripping, tearing, just throw in the garbage type junk. Which means I have now been trained to never bother to buy anything there ever again.

I guess maybe it is like Trader Joes or something where you have to know what to stay away from e.g. the cheese, but you get enough other good things e.g. the brown sugar, that you don't entirely give up.

But I haven't ever really gotten enough stuff at dollar stores to be hooked, so I am pretty sure I just utterly dislike them at this point.

After a million years of evolution, you'd think humanity would be able to get the UX of printing right. But noooooo.

The back button is a lie. I mean not just on Android where it is an utter train wreck, I also mean in web browsers.

Happy poopy holidays. It seems to me that more often than not, computer related things are not actually constructed from electrons or gallium arsenide, rather they are made out of pure excrement. Go read The Futurological Congress: at some point I wish the scales/drugs would fall from peoples' eyes so they could admit just how bad things really are. Not that it would cause anything to be fixed.

For example, gThumb is confused because the directory it used to be looking at is no more, and so it crashes when I try to start it, and I can't get it running long enough for me to point it at another directory.

Dave Bowman: "My God! It's full of [excrement]!"

So then I go wonder if I can start it from the command line with an argument that is a path to a real directory. The help from gThumb is like an ouroboros of usability vomit.

x@superlap4300:~/Media/20161124$ gthumb --help
 Usage:
  gthumb [OPTION...] - Image browser and viewer

Help Options:
  -h, --help                        Show help options
  --help-all                        Show all help options
  --help-gtk                        Show GTK+ Options
  --help-gst                        Show GStreamer Options

Application Options:
  -n, --new-window                  Open a new window
  -f, --fullscreen                  Start in fullscreen mode
  -s, --slideshow                   Automatically start a slideshow
  -i, --import-photos               Automatically import digital camera photos
  -v, --version                     Show version
  --display=DISPLAY                 X display to use

x@superlap4300:~/Media/20161124$ gthumb -help-all
Usage:
  gthumb [OPTION...] - Image browser and viewer

Help Options:
  -h, --help                        Show help options
  --help-all                        Show all help options
  --help-gtk                        Show GTK+ Options
  --help-gst                        Show GStreamer Options

Application Options:
  -n, --new-window                  Open a new window
  -f, --fullscreen                  Start in fullscreen mode
  -s, --slideshow                   Automatically start a slideshow
  -i, --import-photos               Automatically import digital camera photos
  -v, --version                     Show version
  --display=DISPLAY                 X display to use

x@superlap4300:~/Media/20161124$ gthumb -help-gtk
Usage:
  gthumb [OPTION...] - Image browser and viewer

Help Options:
  -h, --help                        Show help options
  --help-all                        Show all help options
  --help-gtk                        Show GTK+ Options
  --help-gst                        Show GStreamer Options

Application Options:
  -n, --new-window                  Open a new window
  -f, --fullscreen                  Start in fullscreen mode
  -s, --slideshow                   Automatically start a slideshow
  -i, --import-photos               Automatically import digital camera photos
  -v, --version                     Show version
  --display=DISPLAY                 X display to use



Even though the app purports to have different, extensive, help it turns out that in fact it only has one answer it can give. And it doesn't include the ability to be given a starting path.

Utter excrement.

I, for one, do not welcome our new (well, ok, not so new) masters:
https://standtallforamerica.com/petition/stop-mass-hacking/e

3D is a cess pool when it comes to any sort of usability. I mean, if you ask me.

• file format hell.
• progress bars that restart (yes, like Office Space) and so you don't know how long anything will really take.
• uis that don't manipulate 3d objects in good ways e.g. lock the model to not being able to be rotated upside-down, and also not giving me a way to flip the whole model.
• not showing thumbnails of things.
• and a zillion other nicks, cuts, slings, and arrows of ux pooch screwing.

Fantastic Beasts, The Movie. Where people scream in terrified horror because Johnny Depp got fat. Oh wait, maybe he was doing an homage to Marlon Brando? Or Elvis?

Software is hell. Pure, living, hell. Or, well, at least very hecky.

I think Scala is very important. Every other programming language I have seen to date pretty much fails and falls short (ironically, given Paul Phillips' missives) when it comes to the standard library e.g. of container types. This is another reason the aliens are steering a clear path around us.

My science fiction prediction is that the aliens rank all species and then avoid them if they don't meet certain standards.

One of the rankings is probably: # of web sites that fail to specify image sizes statically so that the web page ends up resizing itself while loading vs. the # of sites that are nicely done so things are moving out from under me while I'm trying to actually read or use the bloody web page.

You can guess where I think humanity lies on that scale.

I know it is silly for me to bother to blog when I hate something, especially when it is a web site. But... since I am here, I have to say: the Fandango UX is not really at all ideal.

If I were going to be any kind of N*zi I guess I'd be a pure functional staticcally typed n*zi. Things like Python's "TypeError: unhashable type: 'list'" just seem to me to be a deep, deep indictment of the whole paradigm. Start a 5 Whys with: Why are lists not automatically hashable? Uh, especially because, apparently, tuples are?

The future is broken usability hell. I guess that's my new band name. THANK YOU CLEVELAND! WE ARE: << BROKEN USABILITY HELL! >> GOOD NIGHT!

To wit: The only movie showtimes web site that didn't make me want to stab out my own eyeballs was the movies.google.com site. But they have nuked it. Now everything is hell of crap. Even Google themselves are fubar because their link from movie search results to AMC to buy tickets goes to an affiliate link that is a 404. Which I guess they are too dumb to have you know maybe automatically checked to see if it is/was/will be a valid link?!

The future is not a future where the AIs take over and kill us. Judging by things, it is a future where we kill ourselves one by one as we cannot take the bad broken usability any more. Like, say, how right now I am writing here without a visible text caret at all. Can't get it to appear. Just nothing. At all.

All I can think when I see e.g. 100,000 downloads for a file management app that requires knowing my identity is, "I guess it is true. People are idiots". Here's hoping File Manager Pro by angesoft doesn't suck...

Fundamentally everybody shows their money grubbing weasel screw-the-user nature sooner or later, it would seem. I can't sort/filter by seller rating on eBay. I can't sort/filter by required permissions in the major app stores. Or ha ha they default to sorting with highest price first. Etc.

Usability, intuitiveness, etc. are all possibly highly subjective things. For sure most of the UI/UX I come across in the world is Not How I Would Do It and it drives me bonkers. The extra kick in the boy parts is when there are inconsistent tools in an ecosystem like, say, oh I dunno... ANDROID. Even within Google's own apps. Let alone 3rd party ones.

Thus my dream, which I will put out to the world at large in the hopes that somebody with resources thinks it is a good idea and does it, is for an app search engine that lets me search by UI/UX features.

Concrete example: when there's a list of items, how do I get to do multiple selection? Do I have to long press on each and every one? Can I even do multiple selection at all? etc.

Focus is, apparently, a difficult concept to get right in UI and UX. Android screws it up. Gnome screws it up. Everybody one way or another screws it up. Hateful. Depressing. Par for the course.

I heart functional programming. Scheme was the first programming language I thought was super groovy when introduced to it, and then a year or two later SML. So I have to say "amen" and "right on" and stuff when somebody points out some of the little things that make life nicer in a decent language (including good fp ones).

Okay. Any site that has any kind of ads on it that makes noise needs to roll over and die. If you ask me. E.g.: Forbes.

iOS has become a kind of unusable un-user-friendly possibly actively-user-antagonistic user experience. If you ask me. Things like just getting the bloody menu bar to show up in mobile Safari, especially if you happen to be viewing a PDF at the time.

On the whole I do not like text completion that takes over what I am typing. I prefer it to show options below what I am typing, and then I have to arrow down to choose to use it if I want.

Similarly, I think the way Google updates the search results when I accidentally add a single space to the end of the query string is annoying as all hell because often it ends up being blankness, no results.

Speaking at least for myself, if I step away from any code for any length of time (even a day), then when I get back to it I pretty much immediately see and feel how gross it is. There's never been an exception to that, other than maybe for things as "trivial" as "alias ls='ls -FC'" in my .bashrc. (But even there of course there's a zillion ux problems to be unpacked and talked about even if they don't manifest themselves right there and then.)

Why is code mostly so "bad"?

Why does it take much effort to "swap in" what you need to know / prevent yourself from feeling about the code when you come back to it?

Usability is a four letter word. (If you can't see what is wrong with these things below, well, there's the problem.) A small sampling of proof (I have a laundry list that stretches to the moon and back, these are just off the top of my head right  now):

• I do "hg commit" and it says "abort: no username supplied (see "hg help config")" so i type "hg help config" and it says "<one thousand four hundred eighty lines of text>".
• The Android 5 SMS overlay UX seems to me to be advertising that it is a lightweight non-interrupting feature, but often when I try to use it it kind of takes forever to render and get to the point where I can reply, by which time I've probably forgotten the context anyway, so that's genius.
• If I am scrolling up as fast as I can in Android 5 Gmail, when it hits the top it bounces and reverses the scrolling at the same fast rate. So to me it looks like I am still scrolling and it will never end but in reality it is bouncing around and I am not able to get to the top and have it stop there.
• Any app (like whatever PDF reader I have set up on my Android 5 phone) with a "fast scrolling" thumb widget on the side is crap. Just like the iOS swipe-up-from-the-bottom drawer is crap. Anything that can get in the way of other normal activities -- you know, like basic scrolling, is crap.
• Most anything about Python drives me batty, it seems. Oil and water. For example.
• Most anything about Unix / file systems in general drives me batty, it seems. Water and oil. For example.
• Requisite: blogger sucks!

Usability is a four letter word. (If you can't see what is wrong with these things below, well, there's the problem.) A small sampling of proof (I have a laundry list that stretches to the moon and back, these are just off the top of my head right  now):

• I do "hg commit" and it says "abort: no username supplied (see "hg help config")" so i type "hg help config" and it says "<one thousand four hundred eighty lines of text>".
• The Android 5 SMS overlay UX seems to me to be advertising that it is a lightweight non-interrupting feature, but often when I try to use it it kind of takes forever to render and get to the point where I can reply, by which time I've probably forgotten the context anyway, so that's genius.
• If I am scrolling up as fast as I can in Android 5 Gmail, when it hits the top it bounces and reverses the scrolling at the same fast rate. So to me it looks like I am still scrolling and it will never end but in reality it is bouncing around and I am not able to get to the top and have it stop there.
• Any app (like whatever PDF reader I have set up on my Android 5 phone) with a "fast scrolling" thumb widget on the side is crap. Just like the iOS swipe-up-from-the-bottom drawer is crap. Anything that can get in the way of other normal activities -- you know, like basic scrolling, is crap.
• Most anything about Python drives me batty, it seems. Oil and water. For example.
• Most anything about Unix / file systems in general drives me batty, it seems. Water and oil. For example.
• Requisite: blogger sucks!

Usability is a four letter word. (If you can't see what is wrong with these things below, well, there's the problem.) A small sampling of proof (I have a laundry list that stretches to the moon and back, these are just off the top of my head right  now):

• I do "hg commit" and it says "abort: no username supplied (see "hg help config")" so i type "hg help config" and it says "<one thousand four hundred eighty lines of text>".
• The Android 5 SMS overlay UX seems to me to be advertising that it is a lightweight non-interrupting feature, but often when I try to use it it kind of takes forever to render and get to the point where I can reply, by which time I've probably forgotten the context anyway, so that's genius.
• If I am scrolling up as fast as I can in Android 5 Gmail, when it hits the top it bounces and reverses the scrolling at the same fast rate. So to me it looks like I am still scrolling and it will never end but in reality it is bouncing around and I am not able to get to the top and have it stop there.
• Any app (like whatever PDF reader I have set up on my Android 5 phone) with a "fast scrolling" thumb widget on the side is crap. Just like the iOS swipe-up-from-the-bottom drawer is crap. Anything that can get in the way of other normal activities -- you know, like basic scrolling, is crap.
• Most anything about Python drives me batty, it seems. Oil and water. For example.
• Requisite: blogger sucks!

There's something that I would guess or hope would be kind of a basic tenet of usability and UX: First, Do No Harm. When I see things like how the 'back' button gets screwed up in various web sites, or in Android in general, I shake my fist at the sky. Or how Google Photos web site screws up the space bar so that sometimes it scrolls the page and other times it de/selects a photo. Etc. etc. ad nauseum ad infinitum. It is not turtles but crap all the way down.

I think it is bad usability that somehow I can run a command in bash and then it doesn't end up in my history. I have no idea how that happens. Is it something about Ctrl+U? No idea. Just really think it is annoying bad evil confusing wrong.

Not to say anything particularly new, but I mostly find that the ecosystem of Unix utilities is really a piece of junk from any sane usability perspective. For example, the 'find' command doesn't seem to have a way for me to see what the src and dst are ahead of time (e.g. with dry-run) so inevitably i end up with files one directory off (due to not/having a trailing slash). And then since it was a lot of data I had to move remotely, I want to "just" fix it up on the remote machine. But doing any kind of path manipulation in bash is a living hell of utter crap. Paths should not be strings. It is just one fuster cluck after another. Fundamentally, having everything be a string is just a horrible approach. And these things have been as dumb and broken as they are now for 30+ years?!

I have to say, I find it not very funny when I tell Synaptic to completely/remove something and then it says "Downloading Package Files" as if it is being, you know, helpful.