Can there be
A greater Evil
Than a filesystem
That is case insensitive?

Amiga. Mac. ??? !!!






(yes i say that very 1st world tongue in cheek. i know eg about Yemen.)

The fact that (as far as I know) most computing hardware lacks mechanical physical real-world kill switches for microphones and cameras is super lame. Such an obviously desirable thing in this day and age. Almost makes you think there’s a nefarious reason such switches have not happened.

Amen

Amen.

Amen.

Amen, Amen, Amen.

Aaaaaamen!

The mangling of what should be proper, full sized, inverted-T cursor keys is one of the most damning usability and user experience things of recent years. First the arrow keys got shortened to be half-height so they could fit them into one row. That was bad enough. But then the real kicker that I just cannot fathom is when they made the left & right arrow keys full-height, and had the up & down arrow keys half-height inline on the same row. This meant there was no negative space to afford touch feedback, which meant it was a lot harder to find and use the keys without looking at the keyboard, and that even when using them one could easily get off-by-one or more.

Ok, well, then the extra double-plus serious freakin' kicker to that kicker is that not only is this happening on business laptops, but... shudder... on (so-called) gaming laptops. The sky truly is falling.

My kingdom for a product team that really gets usability and ux. Google Docs doesn't. Reedsy doesn't. Microsoft Office Online/365 doesn't. Zimbra doesn't. Even (seemingly) "simple" things like Slack and Gmail screw the pooch. It is as if nobody ever uses their own products or somethin'.

There's this thing that software developers seem to do: they seem to invent all sorts of alternative ways of doing the same thing, and those things all come together to make getting anything actually achievably done well-nigh impossible. Or at least really depressingly tricky and laborious and painful and error-prone and slow.

For example, all the different ways there are to build a Java/JVM based project. Makefiles, Ant, Maven, Ivy, Leiningen, Gradle, Eclipse, Intellij, NetBeans, et. al. (Or, say, all the ways to try to build a JavaScript thing using modules.)

The fundamental epic fail of it all is that pretty much none of these things support a layer of meta abstraction and introspection that would let us actually debug them. These systems commit a cardinal sin of programming ux: being only a write-forward system with no closing of the loop via debugger tools. I have no way to know what thing I need to adjust in order to get my build to work. If you search around for people trying to solve similar problems, you will see a ton of trial-and-error crap. ("It worked on my machine." "I don't know what I did, but suddenly it started working." "Try uninstalling and reinstalling." etc.)

The fact that this kind of development environment doesn't seem to make anybody bat an eyelash and wonder, "is there a better way?" makes me so utterly steam-coming-out-of-my-ears hopping mad - and depressed.