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It's a lovely set of sentiments. I think another aspect of UI that has been lost is discoverability - finding out how to do things in a new interface seems harder than it used to be when there was one app-level menu bar. Too many things are hidden in context menus, found only by right-clicking or long pressing on just the right spot. A set of multi-modal interfaces might just make discoverability even worse.


Consistent use of context menus would actually be a boon, because it’s a single mechanism that can be applied everywhere, and just opening a context menu is a benign interaction (no fear of triggering some undesired action). The disappearance of context menus is one thing that I lament about modern UIs (another is tooltips). There may be “share” or “ellipsis” or long-press menus, but they are highly inconsistent, and you never know where to look for desired or possible actions.


But don't you love buttons with ad-hoc icons and no text and no explanation of what they do and they don't even have any visual indication that they're buttons? :)


In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we used to call that "mystery meat navigation." Now, we call it user interface design.


Ah yes, often found within a Fisher Price user interface, wherein standard UI controls are thrown out in favour of a custom "artistic" and often unintentionally infantile interface. Good thing that never happens in today's world...


I couldn’t afford software in the 90s, but I would definitely have registered PowerMenu from Brown Bag software (DOS front end and program launcher). It was really powerful and enjoyable to use, and the interface was delightful. I still think about it often and fired up a DOS emulator pretty recently.


We used 3DMenu for a long time, it was great, I eventually learned how to add menu entries and had a bit of fun with it too.


Also an extremely happy Zim user for desktop notes, projects & work journal.

Recently I was looking for a self-hosted equivalent to Google Keep (which I use mainly for lists, quick notes and web snippets), and tried out Joplin. It looked pretty good, but I wanted a web app frontend, which Joplin doesn't seem to have. I'm now trying out Memos [1] now, and it's pretty good so far (though I would love to see postgres support in Memos as well as the current sqlite DB).

[1] https://usememos.com/


Take a look at Gemini: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/


Same here - I was a Cakewalk user back in the 90s, and decided on a whim to find out if it was still around.


There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me.

I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)


I'm running one for calendar syncing (cyanogenmod and iOS clients), personal file storage and as a limited photo gallery. The automatic file sync from my phone is good too. It's running at home on my server. Setup was straightforward, and although I had the odd couple of glitches after setup, it was nothing too major. It's worked out pretty well.


As an aside to your edit, I have also seen "different than" used more and more often of late. I'm not sure if it is an Americanism that I was just unaware of. It's not that "different than" is wrong, it's just different from what I'm used to!


In Year Eight at school, I had an English teacher who liked to mix things up a little. One time, I was answering a question in class, and I used "different to" or "different from" or something -- maybe even "different than", I don't remember now. The teacher told me to stand up, then explained that there was a right form and a wrong form for this, and got everyone to pick sides -- "than" here, "from" there and "to" over there. Then I bamboozled him, because I noticed that the smartest girl in the class, a gorgeous lass who gloried in the surname of Snodgrass, had picked a different side, so I reasoned that she was more likely right and defected to the same group. The teacher was deeply annoyed that I apparently didn't have the courage of my convictions; my point, which I understood instinctively even at that age, was that embarrassing a student to make a point was a totally shit way to educate people, and if he was going to place such a high premium on game playing in class, he could call me Kobayashi Maru.

To this day, I still can't remember which is correct - "than", "from" or "to". But I can remember the look on his face, and the fact that after that he stuck with slightly less aggravating teaching methods.


Yes, "different than" is an Americanism.

I believe that "different from" is most common across all dialects of English: http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxdiffer.html (Note: This only compares UK English and American English, not "all dialects".)


One of my previous companies was producing a Digital TV set-top box based on a Via mini-ITX board. When using component output, the overscan on the image was way too big and we were losing a significant portion of the TV picture outside the displayable area. The next best video mode put large black borders on all four sides of the image.

I needed a video mode that was a better fit for the screen, so I derived a set of parameters to add a new video mode to the Linux drivers for the VT1625 Via video card.

I did this by writing a small C program which could inspect the video card registers on a Win98 machine that was using the official driver. Once I had a set of register values, I used online documentation to transform them into the initialisation values used in the video driver.

The video mode was submitted back to the openchrome project, and as far as I know it's still there. It took me about 5 days of prodding, and another day of trial&error.


I have trouble finding any candidates I can believe in. The only benefit (for me) of the two main parties is that their stance on any issue is widely known regardless of who the individual candidate is, so I can avoid them. I like the idea of independent MPs, but it can be hard to tell ahead of time whether the candidate is a wingnut, even with fairly careful research.

I might vote, but tend to spoil the paper when I can't find a palatable candidate. I also live in an area that has had an unbroken chain of conservative MPs for the last 400 years, and will probably continue to have one for a very, very long time.


> I have trouble finding any candidates I can believe in.

If the issue is important enough to enough people, why aren't any of them becoming candidates?


So why don't we set up a UK political party with a philosophy that cascades out of these concerns? A party that is built on Libertarian, participatory principles, committed to policy-making that is informed by in-depth technical expertise and empirical analysis, open data, and broad, open participation, where weight is given to contributions by merit, and by the expertise and experience of the participant, rather than political affiliation and deal-making pork-politics.

A party that is empowered by the development of new tools and technologies to enhance and support broad participation and effective decision making. A party that is not encumbered by the past: A party that self-consciously makes a break from historical partisan divides, and uses it's unique position to bridge left and right, and to take the best ideas, where-soever they might originate.

A party that believes that the electorate is far from stupid, and that attention to fundamentals and excellence in policy will, given time, shine through. A party that pays attention to details, and that cares about policy execution as much as short-term media coverage. A party that can effectively fight the inefficiency, corruption, cronyism and restrictive practices that plague big government and big business in equal measure. A party that can more than restore the freedom that our people and our markets have lost; but enhance it.

Freedom. Fairness. Effectiveness.

Achieved through: Transparency. Simplicity. Broad participation.

Supported by: Policy-agnostic decision-support processes & technologies.


Unfortunately in the UK we have a system where you have to post a "deposit" of quite a large amount of money in order to stand. If you don't get a certain percentage of the vote you lose this deposit. This is designed by the major parties to discourage left-of-field candidates from even appearing on the ballot.

I'll admit that this frustrating bit of ballot rigging does make it harder to vote for the throwaway candidate, but you should still vote for the one closest to your beliefs even if they're not a great match for the reasons summarised by emess in this thread.


The deposit is £500. (About $800). Candidates need to get over 5% of the votes cast.

http://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/electin...

There might be some seats with very low turnouts where a decent campaign by someone wearing a monkey costume could persuade apathetic voters to turn out to vote, getting 5% of the vote and possibly winning.

The traditional protest vote is for the Monster Raving Loony Party. (Loony here is "lunatic", not the bird.) While seen as a nonsense party some of their policies have found their way into UK law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_...


A response to your post indicates that the amount isn't that large, which suggests that if there is even modest support for the ideas -- especially among even middle-income people -- it shouldn't be that hard to raise.

Sure, there'll probably be some elections in which the deposit is lost. If the approach to government is even a little bit important to more than a tiny handful of people, it doesn't seem like that should be a significant barrier.

I mean, really, I can't believe that the risk of a couple weeks wages for a single person per constituency is a substantial barrier to finding candidates who hold a view that is held as important for even a modestly substantial part of the electorate.

Historically, people who hold political views strongly have been willing to risk a lot more than that for them.


I was going to suggest you gather some like-minded people and run for office, but then I read "live in an area that has had an unbroken chain of conservative MPs for the last 400 years" and realized it doesn't work that way in your country :( .

At least in my country, several representatives are elected by region, so small parties can get representatives - I voted for the smallest represented party in my country, and I was even on the ballot myself :) and my representative got in - he can't do much though, but at least he makes his voice heard.

I wonder if a smart hacker can get himself elected - maybe Alexis Ohanian in the U.S. would care to run? (no idea about his political views though)


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