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phil294

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Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)

essays.johnloeber.com
694 points·by phil294·il y a 3 mois·371 comments

DAVx⁵, Open Source CalDAV / CardDAV / WebDAV for Android

davx5.com
3 points·by phil294·il y a 8 mois·0 comments

comments

phil294
·il y a 3 mois·discuss
I would say it mirrors common behavior in the Web, which in turn was largely influenced by old desktop software: Enter in a `<textarea>` inserts a line break, while enter in an `<input>` submits the surrounding form (or does nothing). It is an established idiom after all, many apps just get it wrong.
phil294
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
Things that definitely need interactive prompts before running or fail out of ambiguity otherwise. Let's not pretend these are impossible problems to overcome design-wise.
phil294
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
I like it and would like to see an entire Linux OS being done in a similar manner. Or shell / wrapper / whatever.

A sane homogeneous cli for once, that treats its user as a human instead of forcing them to remember the incompatible invocation options of `tar` and `dd` for absolutely no reason.

    zip my-folder into my-zip.tar with compression level 9
    write my-iso ./zip.zip onto external hard drive
    git delete commit 1a4db4c
    convert ./video.mp4 and ./audio.mp3 into ./out.mp4
    merge ./video.mp4 and ./audio.mp3 to ./out.mp4 without re-encoding
And add amazing autocomplete, while allowing as many wordings as possible. No need for LLMs.

One can dream.
phil294
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
Depends on your definition of "using" JavaScript. The main difference between common TypeScript and TS-based JSDoc is the need for an additional build step. Being able to ftp-upload your `.js` files and then be done with it is a remarkable advantage over Vite/Webpack/whatever in small to medium-sized projects. If editor based type support is sufficient to you (i.e. no headless checks), you won't need to install any TS packages at all, either. tsserver is still used in the background, but so are thousands of other binaries that keep your editor, OS and computer running, so I don't see that as an argument.
phil294
·il y a 7 mois·discuss
> So (TS)JSDoc support is a relic from when Microsoft was trying to get market share from Google.

> Today in 2025, TS offers so much more than the (TS)JSDoc implementation. Generics, Enums, Utility types, Type Testing in Vitest, typeguards, plus other stuff.

None of that is true! Please don't share misinformation without looking it up first.
phil294
·il y a 9 mois·discuss
I see where you're coming from, but "on a phone" hasn't been a valid qualifier for performance benchmarks for a long time. Phones and their GPUs are ridiculously powerful nowadays. We've been smoothly running 3D apps on GPUs with orders of magnitude less MFLOPS 20 years ago already. Apps and games with far more going on than blurry glassy alarm clock, albeit somewhat less beautiful. When I run Fluid Glass on a 10 year old laptop with an integrated GPU and move my cursor, I'm seeing less than 10 FPS. When will we finally start readjusting our expectations for "fast" software and stop blindly following Wirths law?
phil294
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
Neither are humans, so this argument doesn't really stand.
phil294
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
This is a nice idea, but looking back at how not only documentation, but also UX in general has not improved the slightest over the last decades, it's fair to say the only way we'll ever get close to anything like this is by leveraging personal LLM assistants, unfortunately.
phil294
·il y a 10 mois·discuss
What about complex SPAs? Database drivers? Polyfills? TypeScript?
phil294
·l’année dernière·discuss
In other words, a fork?

Or how does the semantics of patch/changes/update differ in any way from maintaining a fork? The packaging has nothing to do with this. It may not be a well-maintained fork, the maintainers might not see themselves capable of adding features and bugfixes on their own, but a fork is a fork.
phil294
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Do you have any subscription lists you would recommend? [1] is the only related information I could find. Would be great to expand this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994059
phil294
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
...which even applies if you enclose the specific term with quotes. These used to help against unrelated results, but not so much anymore. I don't know why. Same thing with DDG and Bing.
phil294
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
I'm not trying to kill the fun here, but since this thing relies on a working internet connection, it would probably be pretty useless on a remote island
phil294
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
I read the specification, but I am really not sure I understand you here.

Say person A sends an email to B with CC set to C. C then needs to reply to this email, but send the reply to D, with A as BCC and E as CC. From what I remember, such fine-grained mail sending configuration is not possible with DeltaChat because it does not fit common group chat mechanics.

> I think the useability problem is just that webmail as a whole has generally been stripped of features.

Yes, I agree
phil294
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Yes you can use DeltaChat for "normal" emails as well, but I was referring to the usability of it. I do not think many would ever ditch, say, Gmail in favor of Delta, as long as conventional emails are prevailing. The main problem here is that an email thread is not necessarily limited to a fixed group of people. With every answer, the audience might change, with different ways to address recipients (direct, CC, BCC; Merging different threads via FWD, manually editing quoted messages). It's hard to apply these principles to group chats, which is why Delta Chat simply doesn't.
phil294
·il y a 5 ans·discuss
Another IMO slightly more promising alternative is COI, the Chat Over IMAP protocol. It aims to extend IMAP servers while staying compatible with normal ones. https://github.com/coi-dev/ox-coi Unfortunately, the development is on hold (?). I really like how they seem to plan on integrating normal email client functionality into it, something Delta Chat is also missing. I have tried both and would not recommend either to non-technical users at all, but I think that is not the primary audience yet anyway.

The IM landscape is indeed in a bad shape currently. I hope Matrix will take the lead eventually. But not even Signal will help in that regard https://community.signalusers.org/t/make-signal-use-matrix-p...