4 ms·

I think this isn't the crowd to demo this too. Majority of the people here would prefer a command line. Too bad this echo chamber can't understand what might be

I think this isn't the crowd to demo this too. Majority of the people here would prefer a command line. Too bad this echo chamber can't understand what might be useful to a wider audience than their own monitor display.

neilalexander 3y ago
On the whole I agree with you on this. I'm so often reminded how user-hostile computers really are by my father, who recently sent me a message to ask what Bing is and why his computer keeps asking him to use it. Despite several attempts to explain it, he doesn't really understand the difference between a web browser and a web site, he doesn't really understand that web sites and applications are different, he doesn't understand that Chrome and Edge are different but also the same, he doesn't really follow why a shortcut in the Start menu to a website is different to a shortcut to an application, or where things actually go when he saves or favourites or flags them, the list goes on. Somewhere along the lines, we have built computer user experiences that bully people into trying to work how computers work, with tons of abstract concepts like "files" and "folders", applications that silo their data, difficult-to-understand application lifecycles and user interface paradigms and settings and so on. Worse is that power users and developers — the same people who have the power to do better — have come to believe that having to adapt to how computers work is an essential skill and not a failing of the computer itself. The Mercury OS design linked is arguably a massive over-simplification of where computers need to be but some of the concepts really aren't far off what I would probably want to design myself: the idea that applications are really just exposing workflow elements and sane data APIs and not a concrete "thing" you have to interact with or care about directly, so that the user thinks about _what_ they are doing and not _how_ they have to do it.

neilalexander 3y ago

On the whole I agree with you on this. I'm so often reminded how user-hostile computers really are by my father, who recently sent me a message to ask what Bing is and why his computer keeps asking him to use it. Despite several attempts to explain it, he doesn't really understand the difference between a web browser and a web site, he doesn't really understand that web sites and applications are different, he doesn't understand that Chrome and Edge are different but also the same, he doesn't really follow why a shortcut in the Start menu to a website is different to a shortcut to an application, or where things actually go when he saves or favourites or flags them, the list goes on. Somewhere along the lines, we have built computer user experiences that bully people into trying to work how computers work, with tons of abstract concepts like "files" and "folders", applications that silo their data, difficult-to-understand application lifecycles and user interface paradigms and settings and so on. Worse is that power users and developers — the same people who have the power to do better — have come to believe that having to adapt to how computers work is an essential skill and not a failing of the computer itself. The Mercury OS design linked is arguably a massive over-simplification of where computers need to be but some of the concepts really aren't far off what I would probably want to design myself: the idea that applications are really just exposing workflow elements and sane data APIs and not a concrete "thing" you have to interact with or care about directly, so that the user thinks about _what_ they are doing and not _how_ they have to do it.