Notices by Scott Jenson (scottjenson@social.coop)

This TED talk is so powerful. Please watch it.
"This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like" by Carole Cadwalladr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkNE

I'm demonstrating tomorrow against Trump and Musk (May 1st) If you're in the US, please https://www.fiftyfifty.one/ and find one near you. We won't fix this by sitting on the sidelines.

New UX models have friction.

The Mach E has a push button door: push the button first, pop the door. It works once "you've read the manual" Two problems:
1. As I approached the car at Avis it was dark, I couldn't see the button at all so couldn't get it, I had to ask someone to let me in.
2. When I picked up my son at the airport, he had no idea how to open the passenger door so I had to open it from the inside.

Ford may keep this, but it's going to be a painful road. #ux

Book Lovers!

I just joined BookWyrm and am looking forward to learning how to use it. But I have a rather obvious getting started question: How do I manage having two "fediverse addresses"? (the one you're reading and my new Bookwyrm one)

If I post reviews using my BookWyrm account, I'm assuming no one will see my reviews as, not surprisingly, no one is following that account. Am I missing something obvious? For example, if I wanted to share a book review in BookWyrm, do I just share the link?

@nyquildotorg Thanks. I (naively) thought I could "log into" BookWyrm with my mastodon account. or maybe I'm just not thinking this through properly....

@dahukanna @troed @nyquildotorg I'd like to understand how this would work. As I read what you said. This would allow me to post to either one or both of my accounts (mastodon and bookwyrm).

Where I'm confused is how would I make a "bookwyrm post"? My mastodon client has no idea. So would I got to Bookwyrm, make the post and 'target' my mastodon account?

@isaaclyman @mhoye @mekkaokereke

Kenji Lopez Alt agrees with you
https://www.seriouseats.com/kenji-no-knead-bread-beer

@marioguzman Hello! I worked on the Mac HIG early 1990s. I actually have some of the "Human Interface Notes" that went out a 'deltas' to the HIG. I only have a paper version of them. Would you be interested in a scanned version of those?

@marioguzman Sure, I'm visiting family right now but will get to this in about 5 days

#Cloud #hosting recommendation?
The world of cloud hosting is changing so rapidly. What I'd like is a provider where I could "one-click-install" a range of packages. For example, I'd like to try NextCloud or my own instance of PenPot. I realize not all services will provide a 1-click for EVERYTHING but I'd like one that has a robust set that would allow me to play. This does NOT need to be high performance, this is for personal exploration.

What I so enjoyed about the Finder team was that there was no string utility to remove the middle of the string. They had to write it themselves. It was extra work they just took on. I never heard a peep from them about "implementation complexity".

It's experiences like this that have spoiled me. When I hear over (and over) that UX needs to "work within business goals" I think back to this experience where I just had an idea... and they did it.

Why was it so easy then, and so hard now?

I'm active on both BlueSky and Mastodon and I have to say Mastodon, while smaller, is far calmer with far fewer "hot takes". My engagement is still very high and helpful.

There is something here, about crowd size. As a platform grows, the number of hot heads appears to grow even faster.

One of my earliest UX wins was for Mac System 7. The Finder team wanted to truncate files names with '…' if it wouldn’t fit. I argued that too much critical info would be lost and suggested it be in the middle instead. The Finder team loved it and implemented it later that day. They were so easy to work with.

I'd totally forgotten about it until I overheard someone commenting it was an example of Apple's attention to detail. I'd didn't say anything at the time but yeah, that was me ;-)

For years now, I've offered free consulting to any hardware company that has a product with buttons. Why? Because most companies don't have a UX department, and bad UX hurts their bottom line. Tiny and inexpensive changes, like a better label or a simple software tweak, could make a substantial difference.

I've written about it here: https://jenson.org/free3/

This isn't a gimmick. I'm lucky to be retired and don't want their money.

This is just me throwing my hat out there one more time...

This is why it's critical we pay attention to local, single board computers. Where are they going to be in 10 years? They will easily run any LLM we have today and use far less power. Eco friendly, privacy friendly.

*THIS* is why I'm so excited about projects like @homeassistant

https://mastodon.social/@kornel/113643027860953741

@happyborg It has nothing to do with trust. Do you "trust" a spreadsheet? a word processor? LLMs are useful but far less magical than people think they are.

They most certainly are a viable new technology that WILL be used in lots of situations. If you don't think so, just wait, they'll come to you. Now if you don't trust the *companies* e.g. OpenAI, that's completely different and I respect that.

But that's why I'm so excited by local versions as we are driving, not the cloud.

@happyborg of course in that situation I totally agree with you. But my point is that there are so many other much milder and much simpler things that they can do that is not nearly as horrible and error-prone as you think they are.

And frankly we don't need to have a definitive discussion here right now. Let's just wait a few months and see what's available and try them. It should be obvious (either way)

#webdev friends! In honor of #BlueBeanieDay curious if there have been any proposals for a "remixed web", where there could be a large cast of simple info websites (e.g. weather, traffic, astrology, podcasts, etc) and then an ability to remix pieces of each of these apps into my own personal dashboard?

Yahoo pipes was so close! I never understood why it didn't catch on? Now that things are becoming more federated, it feels like we could make another go?

@Meyerweb @brad_frost following this thread as I'm in the exact same boat. I've been wanting to convert over to #eleventy (to be like the cool kids) but the process is far from trivial (if you're not a front end engineer). At the same time, there are things I'd like to try outside of WP.

ATM, I just upload static files to orphaned URLs which works but isn't integrated with the site (obviously)

Rivian’s chief software officer says in-car buttons are ‘an anomaly’. His basic point is that voice is far better.
<sigh>
We go through these every few years, you'd think we'd have learned by now:
1. Voice isn't enough
Voice is great, and it does have value but it's best when you're alone. There are lots of situations where voice just doesn't work. It's an ADDITIONAL modality, not a REPLACEMENT.

#UX #Voice