My public writing. You can reach me at @eitland@mstdn.io
Filed under #observations and #lifeInNorway
The army is training this week. I think it is the “Oslofjord” exercise. On the radio the other day they said there were going to be 3000 troops, F16s and F35s.
Almost everytime I hear fighter jets or see army helicopters I'm reminded about how lucky I am to live in Norway.
Filed under #productivity, #lifehacks and #habitstacking
Sometimes I find myself mindlessly pressing ctrl – t, <name of news site>.
And sometimes it doesn't matter: waiting for someone to reply, for a compile or upload to finish. But often it is a waste of time.
I recently realized that while it is hard to break the first part of the habit, and removing all the triggers is impractical, I can easily stack another habit on top:
I have now trained myself so that whenever my fingers type that pattern they also automatically type ctrl – w to close the tab before even loading it.
I did that by intentionally repeating the first part of the pattern, then closing the tabs and rewarding myself by smiling.
Filed under #aifails, #googlefails and #ux
It is 0500 in the morning and I open the app launcher on my phone.
Google:
Do you want to: – text a random friend-of-a-friend or – do you want to call a project manager at work?
Me:
No thanks.
<goes on to update this rant from yesterday with a practical example complete with screenshot>
For the record, I might not be completely, boringly predictable but here are some observations I would have used if I were to suggest what I would be likely to do next:
This nicely sets the stage for my main point:
In my experience Google Pie AI can compete and win against Microsoft Clippy when it comes to being useless: While Clippy was predictable annoying and never learned, Android Pie AI is unpredictable dumb – and while it might not be as annoying and in your face it might be even more dangerous since it makes it possible to bother others as well.[0]
Why this is is a mystery to me, and while I have some high level ideas for why it ended up this way it seems clear it wasn't meant to be completely moronic, here's what Google said when they launched Android Pie:
Filed under #ux, #antipatterns and #weblog
HN discusses this article: https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/scrollbars/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951580
Seems HN mostly agrees with me today.
For me this is a perfect example of what I wrote about yesterday: the perfect ux design doesn't exist.
In this case the author has gone to great lengths to create a better ux, only be met with “get off my lawn already!”
I sympathize with people who experience unfair criticism of their hard work.
In this case though, I think the criticism is valid: please please please leave our windows scrollbars alone. There's a reason why we use Windows or Linux – and that reason isn't the price in my case but rather that I far prefer Windows and classic (Gnome 2, KDE) Linux ux to Mac ux.
Updated. And filed under #ux
Updated again today 2020-04-25.
This will be a short one. Promise.
I sometimes rant about ux. You can find some written ones here, and I hope to add more because there's a lot to cover IMO.
That said, I think UX is harder than one might expect:
We just simplified the whole Desktop Environment Experience!
Fine, this will be great for onboarding new users but you just made it a lot harder to use for all existing users.
In addition it seems you made a few changes that needlessly broke existing workflows, and you didn't put in any kind way to configure it.
In the public transport app we now use two minutes between the arrival of one and the departure of next transport. This way we will stop suggesting useless alternatives where you won't catch the second leg!
Fine, but what about disabled people, and what if the first leg is delayed?
We have now increased it to 12 minutes to cover this. We have calculated that this should solve the problem in 98% of the cases.
Fine, but now most people will get a sub optimal schedule.
While I care about disabled users a lot this change means that the alternative that would get me home a lot earlier tonight won't show up because a minority of the users won't be able to get from platform 1 to platform 4 in 11 minutes.
I could go on and on, but I think you get the point: whether your technical solution is good depends on who your users are, if they have previous experience with your application, if they have any disabilities and I'd even say it depends on if the users choice of transport is delayed or not.
All this before we have even start talking about preferences...!
When I work in the field I see quite a lot of statements thrown around, and I have certainly been guilty myself as well (although these are not mine):
vim is the perfect tool for programming
Ask certain kinds of Vim user though and you'll be told in no uncertain terms that Vims ux is close to perfect.
On the other hand I know Vim well enough to know it is not perfect for me (although I'll miss it if it isn't installed.)
Mac has better ux than Windows
Mac has a different ux than Windows. For some it is better, for some it is worse. I've tried it for three years and went from enthusiastic to disappointed, and I usually get along with most operating systems, including CLIs an most desktop environments.
I could add more examples here, but I promised to myself to be short, and also at this point I think I have proven my headline: Creating the perfect UX is impossible because the perfect UX is different between user groups and even between users.
With this giant hint to both myself and my readers about one idea I'll probably present as a possible solution, I'll leave this here and try to get back at some later point with some more practical advice on what can be done.
Filed under #NewsFromNorway and #Norway
Norway lost in Strasbourg today: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22languageisocode%22:[%22ENG%22],%22documentcollectionid2%22:[%22JUDGMENTS%22],%22itemid%22:[%22001-195909%22]}
I guess this is a good decision, but I also think it is somewhat more complicated than a lot of people think.
Filed under #internet #folksonony and #thoughts
I posted my 7400th bookmark on pinboard.in today.
I've been thinking I should go back and organize my bookmarks[0].
I might still do that but I don't think it is important: the important thing is I can find stuff I saw years ago.
Sometimes it is useful, sometimes not: it might have disappeared, or might not be as good as I thought back then.
Possibly more important though is the fact that it allows me to forget about it.
A few tricks I use:
[0]: my collection is older than pinboard.in and used to be on del.icio.us back before they were bought and “improved” until they became unusable.
Filed under #opensource and #interesting
This looks really useful, kind of like a library version of parts of sandstorm.io: https://userdashboard.github.io/home
According to the author it is not finished yet but I think the architecture can make it easy to use in a lot of projects.
Filed under #weblog, #art and #interesting
Found this on HN the other day: http://www.gabrielegalimberti.com/toy-stories/
I found the perspective refreshing and the lack of judgment refreshing. Bias is of course always present, but it was not obvious to me which way it went.
For some contrast regarding judgment vs the artists observation, consider the discussion on HN (who were kind of reasonable this time despite some hot button topics being mentioned): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20902881
Filed under #advertising and #software
I sometimes do unpaid advertising if I really like a product. If the product is good, doesn't nag me to post reviews or anything and I still like it after some time I will sometimes sit down and write something nice about it.
ManicTime is such a program: It is a program to help you log your billable hours, but unlike others that expects me to remember to stop the timer when I leave the computer or an interruption lasts longer than a few minutes, -ManicTime just logs what program I used at the time, if the computer was locked or not, if there was a long break since last I typed etc. Based on this I can click and drag to select parts of my day and assign it to projects. No forgotten hours, and I also don't have to worry about writing too many hours.
It can also snap screenshots while logging and they show up when you hver over the timelines.
In addition to being featureful it is also easy-to-use and snappy.
The whole thing works locally as far as I am aware (unless you explicitly ask it to log to a server, which can be a local server that you control.)
I often don't use Windows for months, and then I can't use ManicTime, but when I return to Windows, sooner or later I search my mail box to find the license key for the last version I bought.
Let me also mention that the support is amazing AFAIK. I can still download a version that works with my license key, they even took the time to make patched release after my license was expired.