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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • A better analogy is search engines. It’s just another tool, but

    • at their best enable your I to find anything from all the worlds knowledge
    • at their worst, are just another way to serve ads and scams, random companies vying for attention, they making any attention is good attention, regardless of what you’re looking for

    When I started as a software engineer, my detailed knowledge was most important and my best tool was the manuals. Now my most important tools are search engines and autocomplete: I can work faster with less knowledge of the syntax and my value is the higher level thought about what we need to do. If my company ever allows AI, I fully expect it to be as important a tool as a search engine.








  • AA5B@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    9 days ago

    Granted the icons are getting better over time, but all too often I’m still looking for the name to figure out what that mysterious icon is. Now I need to adjust the screen size so more names appear so I can figure out what to click. Wouldn’t it be nice if the names were all visible at a click, organized hierarchically?


  • AA5B@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    9 days ago

    Sure auto card is a great example where you might want to maximize a window to make it more useable. Although wouldn’t it be nice if there were small widgets somewhere out of the way for functions like texting or email? I have no idea what the autocad ui is like, but you’d bet I’d be frustrated if some stupid ribbon was taking up valuable screen space, especially the all important vertical space


  • AA5B@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    9 days ago

    No wait, let me go with your example ….

    You believe a laptop window is useful because you can run a browser with 11 headlines visible

    My first work “computer” was a vt100 terminal: black and white, 80 characters wide (on the newer models), by 24 rows. I could and did have a reader that could display as many as 20 headlines on a single screen, and I could scroll and drill down much faster. Sure the UI was shit, but it had the functionality to do the task.

    Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate the usability and power of a modern graphical UI and would never go back. However the point is designers focus too much on eye candy and “doing it because they can” over actual functionality. Can you understand my frustration that a modern 1900x1200 screen with millions of colors is really no more functional than a 40 year old black and white character based terminal. I get that designers want to show off their UI, but I want the UI to get out of my way and let me do more stuff. I want there to be more focus on compactness and efficiency. I want at least some attention paid to using resources wisely


  • AA5B@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    9 days ago

    Wow, you can fit one whole browser window on it … with headlines.

    Even back in the CRT days, I could have a couple windows, such as email, text, and IDE

    • my email program now has huge wasted ui space so might take up the whole laptop screen, leaving me thing. Email is not work, but something on the side for communication that shouldn’t interfere with work
    • my text chat is no longer a tiny rectangle in the corner but has huge wasted ui space and wants to take up an entire laptop screen. Even that is sometimes not enough. Text is not work, text is somethign on the side that shouldn’t interfere with work
    • my IDE has huge waste UI space and no longer fits any useable workspace on a laptop screen

    Laptops are great for portability: I used to carry them to work from any loaation. It was great while it lasted. Now I carry it from docking station to docking station, and I’m back to the bad old days of dpneeding an office set up, so I can have usable monitors



  • AA5B@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    9 days ago

    Then how will I find new features? How will I use other computers? I just want the functionality organized in some predictable way and leave me some place to work in. I want my work to be the focus, not some designer on peyote’s idea of a good time. And I want to be able to do it on any computer I happen to use