Satisfyingly-clicky real buttons in memorizable positions
Easy to grab without thinking
I have a functionally identical emulator on my phone, which is far better than the built-in calcualtor, but it's a supremely dissatisfying substitute for the real thing.
A couple of times in my career, I've had the extreme pleasure of working as a dedicated support/backstop engineer within a small-ish (~20 person) development group buried deep inside a giant multinational corp. (I'm one of those seemingly rare weirdos who strongly prefers troubleshooting, bug-fixing, etc.)
My priorities were inverted: customer escalations first, and if you have time left over, then go work on bug backlogs that no one else wants to address. Everyone else sprinted while I bumped along at my own pace -- subject to escalation priorities, of course.
Those were dream jobs for me, and the rest of the teams seemed to appreciate having someone -- anyone, just not them! -- dedicated to the support role.
Is it just my imagination that this kind of (I would say "enlightened") management/organization is rare in the industry at large? Or do lots of dev teams do this sort of thing? And where can I find them? :-)
> a lot of devs just never found out they'd written buggy code and couldn't do anything even if they did.
This is undoubtedly true. No doubt there are countless quietly-malfunctioning embedded systems all around the world.
There also exist highly visible embedded systems such as on-air telephone systems used by high-profile talents in major radio markets around the country. In that environment malfunctions rarely go unnoticed. We'd hear about them literally the day of discovery. It's not that there were zero bugs back then, just nothing remotely like the jira-backlog-filling quantities of bugs that seem to be the norm today.
A sense of mastery and adventure permeated everything I did. Over the decades those feelings slowly faded, never to be recaptured. Now I understand nothing about anything. :-)
Starting in 1986 I worked on bespoke firmware (burned into EPROMs) that ran on bespoke embedded hardware.
Some systems were written entirely in assembly language (8085, 6805) and other systems were written mostly in C (68HC11, 68000). Self taught and written entirely by one person (me).
In retrospect, perhaps the best part about it was that even the biggest systems were sufficiently unsophisticated that a single person could wrap their head around all of the hardware and all of the software.
Bugs in production were exceedingly rare. The relative simplicity of the systems was a huge factor, to be sure, but knowing that a bug meant burning new EPROMs made you think twice or thrice before you declared something "done".
Schedules were no less stringent than today; there was constant pressure to finish a product that would make or break the company's revenue for the next quarter, or so the company president/CEO repeatedly told me. :-) Nonetheless, this dinosaur would gladly trade today's "modern" development practices for those good ol' days(tm).
When you make keyboard software with nine different toggle settings, most/all of which are unknown to 90% of users until they read a HN comment buried 43 pages down, you've lost the plot. :-)
Didn't Apple used to promote a design principle, sometimes to a maddening extreme, of minimizing user options/settings because they were too confusing? (e.g. single-button mouse) The ios keyboard apparently adheres to an opposite philosophy.
For many decades I've kept an HP calculator on my desk within easy reach. I use it regularly for one thing or another. (day job: programmer)
Due to force of habit, my physical calculator is easier and faster to use than on-screen calculators. Not unlike Emacs commands, the calculator interface is burned into muscle memory: my fingers know how to use it more than my brain does.
I use an emulator app on my phone when not at my desk, but it's always unsatisfying. Real calculator buttons give me some kind of brain-stem level of satisfaction that a functionally identical phone app can't match.
The worst offender in recent memory was Walt Disney World. Starting about nine months after a physical trip to WDW, my Disney hotel reservation email address received spam from the following Disney-related enterprises before I finally black-holed the address:
- Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
- FX Networks
- shopDisney | Disney store
- ABC News
- Freeform
- National Geographic ("Now streaming on Disney+")
- Walt Disney Pictures
- Storyliving by Disney
You could argue that this wasn't a "sell out" since it was all Disney, but not a single one of those enterprises had much to do with a trip to Orlando. :-)
Why?
Satisfyingly-clicky real buttons in memorizable positions
Easy to grab without thinking
I have a functionally identical emulator on my phone, which is far better than the built-in calcualtor, but it's a supremely dissatisfying substitute for the real thing.