I’ve been working on this for a while, but let’s make it official: I started a little Tumblr-like microblog about software craft and quality!
You can sign up via RSS or a weekly newsletter digest. There’s already almost two months of content in there, if you just want to check it out.
Hope you like it!
I will occasionally link to a post from the blog that I feel really good about, if you don’t mind!
From this morning, a review of the documentary Koolhaas Houselife, ostensibly having nothing to do with UX design:
https://unsung.aresluna.org/movie-review-koolhaas-houselife/
A post about the pretty inspiring and strange software that is Strudel, sort of a command line/text editor for music. I want my CSS authoring to feel this way.
https://unsung.aresluna.org/we-can-go-deeper-by-patterning-inside-of-our-pattern/
An appreciation of one tool that does screenshotting in a really interesting way, plus the history of how ⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4 ended up where they are.
https://unsung.aresluna.org/how-to-shoot-a-screen-using-a-board-of-keys/
I learned about this cool exhibit at ACMI in Melbourne today, and immediately had to write about it.
It simulates working at a help line for a videogame company in 1993, complete with fictitious games, and a physical 300-page binder of various documents. Amazing.
https://unsung.aresluna.org/this-sounds-completely-impractical-and-we-love-it/
I wrote a little bit about molly guards, or UI that protects you from other UI!†
I’m very curious if you have other examples I missed.
(† Not related to the street drug.)
@mwichary Regarding the note about adding a human friendly slug to the end of a URL, do you have a thought or preference to putting that part before the unique id?
flickr.com/mwichary/sets/alishan-forest-railway-72177720330077904
On an app I run I went with that style so the all the human readable bits could be typed and autocompleted. It does seem to be a little harder to read since it’s in the middle of the text though.
For example: https://app.mythic.nz/book/public-storybooks/sharable-public-storybooks/v4dUmg8Jjk6LmQYQlqy6Pw
`public-storybooks` is the collection slug, and `sharable-public-storybooks` is the page title slug.
Off the top of my head...
ID first means the URL can survive truncation of the slug part. Particularly good if you can keep the prefix short.
Slug first means URLs sort in alphabetical order by their slug. Maybe more suitable for small numbers of items, like a blog?
ID first is also marginally easier to construct a URL by hand - you generally don't need to add a fake slug, just end the URL at the ID and it still meets the pattern
Random example of slug-first that happened to be in my history:
- canonical URL: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/stargate-revived-prime-video-new-series-1236431118/
- doesn't work with only ID: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/1236431118/
- works if you know the format and add a fake slug: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/yeehaw-1236431118/
@mwichary I loved your point about how confirmation dialogs for closing/destructive actions are sort of a molly guard too!
I'm also thinking about the super annoying thing that Chrome does when you Command-Q to quit, where it wants you to hold down the keys to execute the command.
And, maybe a bit more of a stretch, the cars where if you want to open a locked door from the inside, requires you to pump the handle twice?
@doekman @mwichary That is also the case with German layouts and perhaps a few others.
And then you'll have the French AZERTY layout that even moved the M from the bottom row to the right of L!
Hungarian QWERTZ is kind of annoying, I guess we inherited the base layout from being part of the Habsburg Austria-Hungary and all, but we have a bunch of letters (ty, gy, sz, zs) that feel ever so slightly more fun to roll out on a QWERTY layout. It is also absolutely garbage for programming.
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