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You might be off in your understanding of what an affordance is (or I might). A protruding door handle affords to close your hand around it and pull, while a pl

You might be off in your understanding of what an affordance is (or I might). A protruding door handle affords to close your hand around it and pull, while a plate or bar cannot easily be pulled and affords pushing only. The horizontality or verticality are more motivated by ergonomics and safety codes. Regarding Carbon, it's obvious to readers that the image is just that—an image—and that the buttons cannot be interacted in any way and don't afford the reader to perform any action. At best, it suggests that the content initially lived within an OS window, with some buttons that afforded some interaction. But so does your browser and music player and every other app that have nothing to do with editing source code. The monospaced font, syntax highlighting, and context are more than enough anyway. IMO it has nothing to do with affording anything and the goal is just to look fancy (which is fine since that's explicitly the goal). Try to picture for a second the same screenshots but with Microsoft Windows-style buttons and it's obvious that nobody would use it since it would look low-rent and clash with the "crafted with <heart_emoji> in San Francisco" footer.

throwlaplace 6y ago
>A protruding door handle affords to close your hand around it and pull you could easily have a bar across the width of the door that's narrow and protrudes and affords the ability to clasp it. no the real intent is to communicate to you that amount/direction of force that you need to apply; a bar across the width communicates push hard because the door opens away from you while a handle at the edge communicates pull moderately because you have lots of leverage and the door opens towards you (because if it were at the center you would open the door onto yourself). >But so does your browser and music player and every other app that have nothing to do with editing source code it is obviously emulating vscode/monaco editor that the maintainer assumes most people are familiar with. like there's literally a vscode extension that produces almost the same exact images https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adpyke.codesnap https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adpyke.c...
- peferron 6y ago
  Looking like VS Code absolutely helps. It's just not an affordance.

throwlaplace 6y ago

>A protruding door handle affords to close your hand around it and pull you could easily have a bar across the width of the door that's narrow and protrudes and affords the ability to clasp it. no the real intent is to communicate to you that amount/direction of force that you need to apply; a bar across the width communicates push hard because the door opens away from you while a handle at the edge communicates pull moderately because you have lots of leverage and the door opens towards you (because if it were at the center you would open the door onto yourself). >But so does your browser and music player and every other app that have nothing to do with editing source code it is obviously emulating vscode/monaco editor that the maintainer assumes most people are familiar with. like there's literally a vscode extension that produces almost the same exact images https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adpyke.codesnap https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=adpyke.c...

peferron 6y ago
Looking like VS Code absolutely helps. It's just not an affordance.