HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

dylan-m

no profile record

comments

dylan-m
·10 mesi fa·discuss
Pedantry time: Fitts' Law is a law in the same sense as Newton's Law. Fitts' Law is an established model for understanding how humans interact with objects. If you're jumping on a trampoline, you aren't breaking the law of gravity, but you're certainly using it to some effect.

Similarly, if you decide that your button positioned at the edge of the screen actually shouldn't be an infinitely long click target, you aren't breaking Fitts' Law. You might be doing it with Fitts' Law in mind, or not, but Paul Fitts' ghost isn't waiting in the shadows to prosecute small buttons. Some actions should be difficult!

With that said, they definitely screwed up here, but I don't like when we're like "but Fitts' Law" and act like that proves our point on its own. If they wanted, they could "Fitts' Law" right back at you.
dylan-m
·5 anni fa·discuss
Alternatively, instead of a futile attempt to reinvent the universe, services like NPM could stop pretending that dependencies are easy. They should be encouraging people to pin versions, keep track of updates, and avoid packages with poorly defined dependencies of their own.
dylan-m
·6 anni fa·discuss
I think we should acknowledge many people have grandmas who build desktop operating systems, so this is perhaps a source of misunderstanding :b

What kind of global hotkeys are we talking about that casual everyday users need, as opposed to people who build their own desktop OS from parts?

We all tried the universal frictionless global hotkeys thing. It was a really bad idea for a general audience [1]. That's why we have MPRIS for global media player controls (Firefox supports it now, which is awesome!), and stuff like the keyboard shortcut inhibit protocol for VMs and the like. It's unfortunate for the building an OS from parts thing, but unlike cars and smartphones, at least it is still all open source.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_logging
dylan-m
·7 anni fa·discuss
This was also a huge problem for Android. At some point Android started using MTP instead of appearing as a mass storage device, which made for several technical wins. Most importantly, internal memory could be one contiguous block formatted as ext3. But this happened well before MTP was properly supported in Windows, which predictably made things difficult for a lot of users. (This was back when Android had competition, so that was important).

If I was a betting type, I'd wager that Microsoft's FAT patents (and various legal settlements where they got to say "Linux infringes on hundreds of patents" without ever needing to specify the patents) had a lot to do with that change, since, with the exception of a few manufacturers who continued to ship devices with external SD slots, and USB-OTG which is kind of a bonus feature, Android finally didn't need FAT for interoperability.