For me reviews act as curation. If something is 7+ on one of my favorite review sites, i’m going to listen to it. A very useful service in a time when the music stream is seemingly endless and as you say, almost free.
A good measure for an Apple product was for me always: it makes tech disappear. That was always the differentiator, I feel: it doesn’t feel like tech and it doesn’t look like it.
As somebody who worked for the European Commission, and a european national government, I agree with your sentiment, but the harsh reality is that government divisions in generally work on a shoe string budget, when it comes to decisions like these. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a “best effort given the circumstances” move.
Side comment: I respect the author’s right to choose words that ring well to them, but jeez, as a non native english speaker, reading this, i am happy my device has a dictionary function.
That's Jerry's "thing." Jerry Holkins has always enjoyed how weird English is and what you can do to someone's brain with a few precisely-chosen words aligned in the right order; it's his writing style.
If he applied his approach to Python coding, he'd be one of those folks who isn't happy until their entire program is a single `do()` method that executes by using decorators to synthesize classes and metaclasses out of thin air, that themselves generate the Python code as strings, that itself gets `eval()`'d to execute the intended program.
They're into their second half century doing this. Would they have made it this far without being a little weird? Maybe, but it's hard to A/B something like that. I understand it well enough after following the comic that long.
Thank you for posting this. I remember it, had forgotten it, and re-reading it after completely forgetting about it is almost as good as reading it for the first time. It still holds up 20 years later!
I think the point is that this is an artistic choice. I consider that paragraph to be halfway between poetry and prose. It's not the style of writing that you would want for most forms of communication, but if you think of it as being akin to a bit of poetry, then perhaps you will find it more acceptable.
I for one really appreciate seeing language being used so artistically. (Though if I was reading a technical spec, product description, legal contract, etc... absolutely not.)
I'm not a native speaker and I enjoy his writing and have no problems understanding it. In this specific case it helps to be a bit of a nerd about religions/mythology though :P
It is a doubly-interesting speech because he was giving a counterpoint to the idea that men should sell out their hearts and become cruel machines when it was still up in the air, whether or not that Faustian bargain would pay dividends (it didn’t work out so great for them).
Still doing weekly live dj sets with my macbook from 2013, editing in Logic, researching music online, listening to Spotify,… Except for the battery, there is nothing wrong with this device of more than 10 years old.
So you’ve already lost feature and most security updates, 3 major releases behind.
I’ve got a 2012 Mac mini and it’s limping along with the OpenCore Legacy patcher. I got the kernel panics to stop but they came back with a recent update. I’m gonna sell the thing and probably switch those duties to a Linux server.
The use of icons lies not in understanding it the first time, it’s something that you learn to recognise. And that makes them more recognisable at the long term, or easier to find in moments when speed is of the essence. Like your example of the train. A conductor learned what they meant and trained with them. Just like a dj knows what every icon on his dj table means.
That also means icons don’t have to make sense visually, they just need to be recognised and distinguished.
Text is for when you have time or no idea, icons are for when you have to decide quick and you understand what you are doing.
In the case of the interface shown in the train video, the key thing the operator will rely on is the fixed physical position of the controls first, then their shape, dimension, and color.
The icons really aren’t going to matter as much. And I’d argue they’d probably be better off replaced by text labels. Imagine a new operator in a stressful situation being guided eg on the phone - how would you describe to them which of the 2 buttons with a center arrow with a curve to their right they should press, for the control panel at 4:31? You’ll end up saying “the center left/right button”, or “the one above the green P button” because those icons are pretty hard to distinguish.
Swap the icons between 2 controls one day, and watch even the most skilled operator make mistakes.
> easier to find in moments when speed is of the essence
This is, for me, categorically untrue, it's quite the opposite. I am sure it must vary from person to person. I find myself wondering whether people tolerate or like icons-only because they would find the actual reading of an array of text buttons fatiguing. I'm not better than someone who finds reading more time consuming or difficult than I do, but I do kind of resent that UIs appear to be designed to cater to the less literate, because of how slow it is for me to pick the correct icon out of 7 very similar ones.
It's especially bad because these should just be preferences. Give me text and lose the icons altogether. Others should be free to have icons.
A big proportion of visitors will never see these sites at their astronomical best, as they will visit it with their phone.
Sites with animations and crazy stuff happening on desktop, but then show a small subset of that design on mobile are like ad campaigns made for Cannes: fun for the industry, but misses the mark in terms of market value.
I wonder if you are trolling or being serieus, because me and literally everyone i know would use this feature extensively. For powerpoints, school presentations, birthday cards. 50% of the time I fired up Word, it would be for that feature.
I seriously have never seen this used ever. But it sounds like you are talking about children using it, which I hadn't considered (I was already an adult in the 1990s).
