the first line goes in Cohost embeds
🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮
I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.
mastodon
email: contact at breadthcharge dot net
I live on the northeast coast of the US.
'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.
conceptual midwife.
https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut
If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.
A long time ago (6+ months?) someone linked to a really good manifesto that was in defense of adding more knobs and stuff to your interfaces, and letting power users tweak things.
It took potshots on the modern sensibility of “frictionless” (?) design? I vaguely remember Apple getting called out.
EDIT: oh right! I’m looking for help finding it again. Please rebug!
I gotta put together reading material for an intern at work and I’m sneaking in some stuff to radicalize ‘em
I'd like to see that myself. I despise the modern Apple approach and hate how infectious it is ~Chara
flashbacks to my Oblivion modding days, and how much love my total overhaul of the leveling system got for exposing every conceivable constant to plain-text configuration, including ones that would have been an unallocated implicit zero if I just shipped my defaults hard-coded (e.g., "contribution of Heavy Armor skill to max Magicka")
i don’t think this is quite it but it seems adjacent: https://odannyboy.medium.com/controls-are-choices-7de90363d0dd
with the possible exception of modern flatpanel displays (i have a point to this), may underestimate the practical utility cassette futurism has beyond its aesthetics.
for remote and like, deep space purposes, chunky, modular designs that are not only hardy but easy to repair/replace. like the engineering bay just has a room full of drawers with various ubiquitous parts to keep the place running.. including the aforementioned flatpanels (CRT's are fun but outside of the teeny ones, the scaling issues make them unwieldy so you'd have both depending on use case), to spare input keys - including the clear ones you can draw what you need them for with sharpie.
plus humans are tactile creatures, and monkey brain likey pulling switches and dials.
In software, I think it's fine, or even good, for the interface that a new user initially sees to be simplified to just the functions that an average user will need. That way, you avoid scaring off new users with an information and choice overload of hundreds of detailed settings.
But for the power user, there should always be an "I know what I am doing" toggle in the settings somewhere that unlocks the full customisation
