#Video of new Audacity 4.0 #UX #toread
on 02026-09-03drag and drop files from a multi-select in the terminal #UX
on 02026-05-04#Economist editorial by Marie Potel-Saville, the co-founder of FairPatterns, a member of the Support Pool of Experts on Dark Patterns at the European Data Protection Board and the Paris chair of Women in AI Governance, about regulating #UX dark patterns. Archive of <https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to>
on 02026-05-04#Bret-Victor’s “Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction” #UX
on 02026-04-22#PDF #paper by Larry Tesler on the #UX #history of cut and paste at Xerox #PARC
on 02026-04-20discussion of #Unix #UX and --dry-run
Henrik Warne likes his #Unix commands to have a --dry-run flag. #UX
discussion of #Zulip and mostly its #UX
on 02026-02-10Sean McDirmid’s #paper on #UX of #multitouch programming, "YinYang" for “coding at the speed of touch”. From 02011!
on 02025-12-26text #editors on #multitouch #cellphones have terrible #UX problems with finger occlusion, constant user error, undiscoverable UI, etc. Based on his research on "Eloquent". “Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors.” #toread
on 02025-12-26#UX design principles of Nethack4 #videogames
on 02025-11-11Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup’s design philosophy. #UX #videogames
on 02025-11-11notes on #CLI/#GUI #UX unification starting from Jupyter and a terminal emulator called “Warp”, and reconnecting like tmux, plus undo/redo, etc. An ambitious project. #terminal
on 02025-11-11#video of #livecoding deep acid house #music in #Strudel, which seems to have very interesting #UX. #toread
on 02025-10-31#video about controlling #motors with #FOC (field-oriented control) and using them as dials. Using SimpleFOCproject to do PWM microstepping of #brushless motors to get smooth motion down to zero velocity? Also steppers. The BLDCMotor constructor argument is the number of pole pairs, which he got wrong at first. But he’s cheating by using an AS5600 I²C magnetic encoder! This has the very interesting #UX idea of simulating mechanical detents by using the motor for haptic feedback on a knob. #electronics
on 02025-10-17198-page (!) #PDF scanned #paper on "Pygmalion", “A Creative Programming Environment”, David Canfield Smith’s 01975 #programming-by-demonstration environment written in Smalltalk-72. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Memo AIM-260, Stanford Computer Science Department Report No. STAN-CS-75-499, from June 01975. This is the historical origin of “icons” in GUIs. Includes the Smalltalk code in a 20-page appendix. #UX #HCI #history
on 02025-10-11"nethack-el" is an #Emacs user interface #UX for #Nethack #videogames
on 02025-08-27#HCI #UX technique where a person pretends to be a computer.
on 02025-07-20#akkartik’s experimental notebook #UX
on 02024-09-21biography of #Bret-Victor #UX
on 02024-08-31#Bret-Victor’s 02011 CV says he wrote #Magic-Ink in 02005 #UX
on 02024-08-31my note from 02002 about #Bicicleta, “functional programming for amateurs in an outliner” #UX
on 02024-08-31#Kartik’s #video visualizing postfix notation similar to #Forth #UX
on 02024-08-27new #Haijun-Xia #video #toread about #UX and #neural-networks, “redesigning the information space”, including some of his older work
on 02024-08-24"GENESYS" #animation system from the 01970s #UX #video
on 02024-08-24#Bret-Victor #multitouch #UX “Inventing on Principle” #video; this point shows his #animation program prototype, with the rabbit and the leaf, using quasimodes and “performing with my hands”
on 02024-08-24#retrocomputing #history #video of #Symbolics #Lisp #3D #graphics. Probably from about 01987. Maybe a digitization of a 30' VHS tape made by Symbolics at the time with shitty elevator music. He’s interactively modeling of a little airplane.
To orient the 3-D axes, their negative sides are “marked with gaps”, and the Z-X plane is “marked with a triangle” (the Y axis being the normally vertical one, as in Minetest).
The original might have been higher resolution, because all the user interface text is illegible except in occasional zoom shots.
It takes about 4 frames at 30fps for each popup menu to fully draw, making the #UX a bit sluggish, and larger menus can take as long as 8 frames. Similarly, the little airplane model (with about 30 polygons) can only redraw about once every 4 frames, making interactive rotation clumsy.
Interesting choice called out at 6'28": the popup menu pops up with the mouse on top of the last choice, easing the task of repeating it. As IIRC is usual with Genera, the menus have black shadows, and the active menu item is highlighted by drawing a box around its text.
Object edges and points are highlighted by making them thicker; object faces are highlighted by filling them with black. Presumably at this point they didn’t have color.
It can import data from “Cattom [?], CATIA, and IGES formats”!
At 11'55” he’s enthusiastically explaining how Genera supports multitasking, as he demonstrates a somewhat Flash-like animation program called “S-Dynamics”.
At 14'44” he shows “a look at [the bird animation] on the color screen”, which implies that indeed the screen he's been looking at is monochrome.
At 18'28” he starts doing a UI demo on the color screen itself, which is even slower, probably because it uses 32-bit RGBA. There’s a sort of ribbon-like thing across the bottom with a hierarchical menu tree structure inside of it. Drawing a translucent gradient circle is demonstrated at 21'25” and takes over two seconds of computation!
At the end, he mentions being able to export to “any video format”: “PAL, NTSC, or HDTV”, and the first (satellite) HDTV broadcasts were in 01989, so this might have been at the very tail end of Symbolics, around 01990.
Oh, yes, at the very end it says it's “Copywrite [sic] 1989 Symbolics Inc.”.
on 02024-08-07Butts are difficult. #UX
on 02024-07-27notes on alternative modal #UX with chords for text #editors
on 02024-02-21#UX prototype "Mercury OS"
on 02023-11-02some discussion of #Kakoune's modal #UX and how vim's is better, and overlays are maybe better still. Also discusses #editors like #Emacs evil-mode, Vis, etc.
on 02023-06-23Maxime Coste explains #Kakoune's #UX design. “I have been working, for the last 5 years, on a new modal editor called Kakoune. It first started as a reimplementation of Vim (the most popular vi clone) whose source code is quite dated. But, I soon realized that we could improve a lot on vi editing model.” The page has a bunch of tiny looping WebP videos to demonstrate particular UI features, which I think are silent. It feels close enough to vi to be almost usable without an extensive training period, and its multiple selection stuff seems better. #editors
on 02023-06-22DHTML gallery of simulated scrollbars from #history. Gets the move-by-page behavior wrong. #UX
on 02023-06-13#Luu on end-to-end input #latency, from when the key starts moving to when a letter appears on the screen, with results from 30ms (Apple //e) to 300ms, with most modern computers around 100ms. Also, scrolling (30ms–860ms, mostly around 140ms). And he explains why this matters for #UX.
on 02021-06-05#Luu on keyboard #latency, finding 15ms to 60ms in the keyboard itself (from when the key starts moving to when the USB packet finishes); no advantage to “gaming” #keyboards. #UX
on 02021-06-05#Carmack on why #VR #latency shouldn’t exceed 20 ms. #UX
on 02021-06-05#latency in #VR shouldn’t exceed 20 ms. #UX
on 02021-06-05#Abrash on how acceptable #latency in #VR was unattainable at the time. #UX
on 02021-06-05Barrier is a fork of Synergy, a fork of CosmoSynergy, which lets you use a keyboard and mouse on one computer to control multiple computers. #UX
on 02021-01-24Deskreen uses #WebRTC to display a copy of your monitor in any browser, which seems like a really good idea. #UX
on 02021-01-24Bob Frankston explaining the #history of #VisiCalc and its #UX. Explains that unfortunately the listings are lost. Interesting that Bob already had 15 years of experience programming when he started working on VisiCalc, but it was still a prototype in Apple Integer Basic that gave them the UI design.
on 02021-01-24Dan Bricklin distributing #VisiCalc for the IBM PC under a noncommercial license. I guess the Apple version is maybe lost. #retrocomputing #UX #history
on 02021-01-24in-browser #emulation of #VisiCalc on the IBM PC. #retrocomputing #UX #history
on 02021-01-24thumbnails in the file picker are essential and GTK lacks them #UX
on 02021-01-13Don Hopkins explains why #X11 is horrible and why you should write your window manager in #JS. #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins explains the history of tabbed window managers #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins explains why #X11 is horrible #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins on how we ought to implement X window managers in #JS in a browser runtime #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins tells a bit of the #history of #HyperNeWS. #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins tells the #history of "HyperNeWS" with lots of screenshots. #UX
on 02019-02-05Don Hopkins on pie menus and patents. #UX
on 02018-10-23#Bret-Victor "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" #video is nearly an hour; it demonstrates some novel #UX techniques, including some quasimodal #multitouch stuff using multiple tablets, at 4’53”–5’12”, 6’41”–7’50”, 8’42”–8’58”, 9’35”–9’56”, 10’40”–12’15”, 12’48”–14’56”, 16’14”–18’13”, 19’30”–20’52” (multitouch puppeteering); 25’51”–33’53”, 36’00”–39’20”, 41’21”–45’47” (geometric programming by demonstration of puppeteerable animations); 50'03"–53'20" (improvisational multitouch multimedia puppeteering).
on 02017-12-31“Two-handed interaction on a tablet display” from 2004; Ping hacked together a limited #multitouch screen (though with much better user interface #latency than most modern displays, about two frames at 29.97 fps — 70 ms) and made a 3'30" video of possible #UX techniques.
on 02017-12-31#Bret-Victor #multitouch #UX excerpt from the “Inventing on Principle” #video showing his animation program prototype, using quasimodes and “performing with my hands”. The whole talk is about an hour; this is 2'13" of one particular impressive demo. (Taken private within the next year, so the link is broken.)
on 02017-12-31"FingerGlass" 2011 #multitouch #UX #video by Käser, Agrawala, and Pauly. FingerGlass uses two fingers to define a focus area that pops up magnified, permitting a third finger to do precise manipulation within the zoomed-in region.
on 02017-12-31#Michael-McGuffin #multitouch #UX #video using pop-up pie or radial menus: “First step, I put my finger down on the object I want to manipulate. Second step, I select the command [from the pie menu]. Third step, my two fingers provide the [continuous] arguments to control that command. I can do all that with a single hand, just by positioning my fingers appropriately to grab the command in the menu.” Presented at AVI 2016. The rather ponderous name is “Multitouch radial menu integrating command selection.”
on 02017-12-31#Daniel-Vogel #video of evaluation of #multitouch #UX for mode-switching, comparing chording, long-pressing, a quasimode button for the nondominant hand, hard-pressing, a thumb-on-finger sensor, and a knuckle sensor, all on a large tablet.
on 02017-12-31#Daniel-Vogel #multitouch "Pinch-to-Zoom-Plus" #UX #video improving pinch-to-zoom
on 02017-12-31#Daniel-Vogel #multitouch "Pin-and-Cross" #UX #video for rapid contextual commands with two simultaneous touches from the same hand
on 02017-12-31#Haijun-Xia #multitouch "Object-Oriented Drawing" #video on #UX for alternatives to WIMP form-filling for handling (in this case graphical) objects with many (continuous) attributes
on 02017-12-31#Haijun-Xia #multitouch "Collection Objects" #video on #UX for working flexibly with collections of (in this case graphical) objects
on 02017-12-31#video on fictional computer #UX (“#FUI”, fictional user interfaces) by the dude who wrote the “Make It So” book
on 02017-08-22Dan Luu complains that many commonly-used terminal emulators have painfully high #latency. #UX
on 02017-07-23#UX blog of screenshots from sci-fi movies
on 02017-05-11Stanislav thinks “a sanely designed personal computer system” always “Obeys operator; forgives mistakes; retains knowledge; preserves meaning; survives disruptions; reveals purpose; serves loyally.” #UX
on 02017-05-09Jakob Nielsen’s theory of #hypertext #UX, introducing (?) the “frame-based” vs. “window-based” dichotomy
on 02017-04-16#music #UX #toread “If I weren’t interacting with a computer, how would I express this musical idea? As I am interacting with a computer, what can it do for me that traditional equipment can’t?”
on 02017-04-15scrolling #performance and why it kind of sucks in #browsers and how to improve it in your #JS, e.g. with passive listeners. #UX
on 02017-03-22a new #version-control system built as a layer on top of #Git with a view to optimizing #UX through user studies
on 02016-10-11What would a #video-games construction kit need to replace ZZT and MegaZeux? #UX #CP4E
on 02016-10-11Google says 250 ms is fast enough for a search engine #UX? But William James gives 50 ms for a threshold of simultaneity, which of course is nonsense when it comes to audio. Lots of nonsense about film editing and Walter Benjamin
on 02016-09-16Nicky Case made a web site about #explorable-explanations, with an overview of not only their work but also all the other work in the space. #UX
on 02016-08-12Bernie Greenberg’s #history of Multics #Emacs, which was the first Lisp Emacs, including a lot of context about text editing and #UX in the 1970s, and explaining the kinds of #performance concerns they had: “The buffer being edited is defined by about two dozen Lisp variables of the basic editor... The alternate approach to multiple buffers would have been to have the buffer state variables referenced indirectly through some pointer which is simply replaced to change buffers. This approach, in spite of not being feasible in Lisp, is less desirable than the current approach, for it distributes cost at variable reference time, not buffer-switching time, and the former is much more common.”
on 02016-07-24Oh hey, I didn’t realize that #Oberon acquired a #ZUI at some point. #UX #history
on 02016-07-04The March 2016 #Eve Developer Diary, on #cp4e. Apparently now they have versions called “WikiEve” and “GridEve” and a #NLP #UX? Lots of pretty #typography in their screenshots.
on 02016-06-27#typography #UX. Has links to some interesting research but unfortunately mostly just repeats fashionable design dogmas without justifying them. Does have some useful tips: in particular, when HTML text doesn’t appear until the font loads, it’s because you didn’t include a fallback to system fonts.
on 02016-06-26This is Sean #McDirmid’s investigation into how to give live programming (and live probing of live programming) a more usable #UX.
on 02015-12-04Sean #McDirmid is doing some really interesting work on “managed time” programming with Jonathan Edwards; this page is about a related prototype language he’s working on called “YinYang”, and has some interesting #UX experiments.
on 02015-12-04Adam Kumpf #video of Teague Labs’s one-handed chording keyboard #UX on an Android multitouch tablet screen.
on 02015-12-03#video for CHI 2015 (#UX) best paper on proprioceptive interaction by electrical stimulation of muscles, called “Pose-IO”. It moves your body by electrically shocking you.
on 02015-12-03#pdf #paper showing that syntax highlighting is mildly helpful in programming, especially for novices. #UX
on 02015-11-26a point-free #multitouch #programming #UX environment for the #λ-calculus.
on 02015-11-16"Illusio", a #multitouch user interface for #live-looping #music. #UX
on 02015-11-10#multitouch table user interface called #Illusio for #live-looping, by Jeraman. I love it. #UX #music
on 02015-11-10The #UX problems with the first version of #Firefox Sync #security.
on 02015-08-19A #UX imitating #Scratch for #OpenSCAD, or rather #OpenJsCad, for designing #3D objects for printing. I can’t try it on my netbook right now because I don't have #WebGL.
on 02015-08-15This #tutorial #introduction to A* #pathfinding #search for #video-games programming, by @redblobgames, has interactive demonstrations! I don’t remember those from before! The #UX somewhat lacks affordances to indicate that the things in the illustrations are draggable, so the text has to tell you, but in many other ways, these are among the best #visualization of #algorithms I’ve ever seen.
on 02015-08-13Why hamburger menus don’t work for users. #UX
on 02015-08-10