@icedquinn @pasture
You're still wrong.

@alyx @pasture i’m literally not.

Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user’s pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current programs windowframe.[28]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

@icedquinn @alyx @pasture just here to say keyboard shortcuts are infinitely better than whatever you are trying to solve with navigation problems

@user @icedquinn @pasture
True. But there's a limit to how many keyboard shortcuts you can have, remember and use.

@alyx @icedquinn @pasture yes
i think most applications allow you to press Alt+F and navigate to the other menus with arrow keys

@user @icedquinn @pasture
Or just Alt+ key of whatever menu you want.

@user @alyx @pasture

keyboard shortcuts are good for some small number of things; they degrade when you start using multiple modifier layers.

pie menus are good (objectively) because the motion to pick items becomes muscle memory but they degrade after something like ten items in total

search baskets are fucking great where you just hit space (blender) or command pallette (sublime) or m-x with a completer mode (emacs) and just type a few letters and it summons the menu item for you in a list.

menus are crap. if they are not alpha sorted they are considered a randomly ordered list which requires O(n) search. one paper suggested alphabetical menus would hilariously be O(log(n)) but also conceded people find it bizzare to see that.

@icedquinn @alyx @pasture so it is more of a cultural shock
maybe Apple should implement it because others end up copying Apple anyways

@icedquinn @user @pasture
>a randomly ordered list which requires O(n) search
And this is why you fail. A human being is not a computer. We don't search through menus like a computer would. If you know what the software does, you'll already have a good chance of knowing in what menu you can find a particular option you're searching for. After you used the same menu a couple of times, you'll already have an instinctual knowledge of where (top, middle, bottom) you can find something in the menu. After a lot of using the same things, you'll know almost exactly where it is. You don't do O(n) over and over again.

@alyx @user @pasture they actually do search through menus when they haven't mastered the software yet.

@icedquinn @user @pasture
I haven't mastered Photoshop or Gimp. But I know that if I want a blur, I'll probably find it in Filters menu. I already eliminated a large number of possibilities. And if I try out any other picture editing software, and want a blur, if I see a Filters menu, that's the first place I'll look.

So much for O(n).

@icedquinn @user @pasture
Not to mention that the way our vision works, we can easily spot things at a glance, and we rarely properly read each and every item.
And shit, even if it's the first time opening a brand new program, I still know I'm not gonna find random tool A by looking in the File or Help menus. Again, we use a lot more sophisticated "algorithms" that eliminated any O(n) from the start.

We're not computers, stop trying to create UIs that the math says it should work. Make UI that real life testing shows it works.

@icedquinn @user @alyx @pasture

There's a dmenu shaped hole here.

@moth @icedquinn @alyx @pasture @user that's where my dmenu pops up, above my statusbar x)

@coyote @alyx @icedquinn @pasture @user

It just hits a lot of the boxes.

> Shows up at global top
> Using a keybinding
> Alphabetically sorted return.
> Basket Search
> Can be extended into shell scripts.

@moth @coyote @alyx @pasture @user i use rofi but yeah search is the best and i wish i saved the proof.

someone did this analysis of email and demonstrated that the "big unsorted pile of mail but with full text indexing" method was superior to "tries to sort things in to folder" method. had data on it. i don't have it anymore

notational velocity and qownnotes (or deft for emacsen) does this too. you don't really file, you just throw stuff in a box and search it.

blender has this command palette and i use it almost exclusively because manually seeking in menus is warm and bad

@icedquinn @pasture
It works for Photoshop, Gimp, Blender, Premiere etc. As in, it works for when it's a single program you're using, and placing panels on the edges.

It doesn't work when you're dealing with multiple programs, and have to switch between them and use another program's menu.
I've tried it, and am speaking from experience. You'd think it's better, but it's not. The only reason it "works" for MacOS, is because it's a piece of shit software, running on a piece of shit hardware, that was designed for low brained users, that barely use 1 program at a time.

Real life doesn't work like some stupid textbook. This is a common problem with UI design. Things that the math says should work, don't actually work, because humans aren't robots. If UI design actually worked like in a textbook, you'd be typing with a dvorak keyboard right now, and you're not.

@alyx @pasture i used macOS for years but if if the only defense is calling the userbase retards we don't really have much of an argument to discuss

@icedquinn @pasture
Mac userbase that purposefully chose it, while knowing the other options, are retards.

@alyx @pasture this is not an argument but i don't remember the fallacy name.

@icedquinn @pasture
Everyone is a retard at something. Get used to it.

@alyx @pasture ad hominem is still not an argument

@icedquinn @alyx > ad hominem

What a fucking pussy. Should have brought out the gamer words and made it a full on chad hominem.

@pasture it is my goal not to be rude to people

@icedquinn @pasture And it is my goal to as much as a Chaotic Neutral I can be with people.

@alyx @icedquinn @pasture If I recall correctly, the selling point of Aplle with Macs back in the 80s was that, because all the hardware and software was strictly regulated and "standardized" by Apple, the Macs had low incompatibility issues.

Apple has since dropped that standardization policy as far as I know.

@TheMadPirate @icedquinn @pasture
They're still a lot more standardized than anything else out there. And with their M1 MacBook chips, they're proving they're still interested in restricting freedom and variety as much as possible.

@alyx @icedquinn @pasture That, I don't doubt in the least.

@alyx @icedquinn @pasture
>The only reason it "works" for MacOS, is because it's a piece of shit software, running on a piece of shit hardware, that was designed for low brained users, that barely use 1 program at a time.

is that why Macs are mostly used by Musicians and Graphic Designers ?

@TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture used to be because those people had the money to pay apple tax and didn't want to deal with IT bullshit.

although apple has utterly failed to keep up with the pro hardware which has kinda fucked them.

@icedquinn @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture have they?

@fluffy they left the mac pro lines get grossly outdated compared to the market because and then they tossed out an iMac Pro but then they recently fucked that again by going nah man we use some proprietary ARM chip now and we don't care about the iMac Pro now buy your new manilla folder chromebook that will struggle to emulate your video compression code.

@TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture

@icedquinn @fluffy @TheMadPirate @alyx are you trying to tell me macbooks aren’t incredibly based? I’ll have you know…

@eris things that will never fucking happen for $1, Alex

doesn’t matter anyway, ARM chip is pretty fucking epic

@icedquinn @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture what about that tower with expandable slots?

Keep in mind you can still make 8k production video on 5 year old hardware and probably won't even be able to tell

@fluffy that's the mac pro and i think they left those outdated for a while too. it was just easier to swap some parts on them.

i saw complaints they were making like 3+ generations of consoomer planned obsolescence boxes and fell asleep on their production users.

they've been leaking users to windows for a long time. they no longer dominate video production.

@TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture

@fluffy if you think old hardware is good--maybe it's still good enough. it's certainly not worth the 2,000$+ they asked for when the hardware was new though. they still wanted full price for hardware that aged down to 500$ @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture

@fluffy @icedquinn @alyx @pasture I think Apple is investing more in the Mobile market now.

@TheMadPirate @alyx @icedquinn @pasture yeah it's no secret the iOS team is king

@fluffy @alyx @icedquinn @pasture Apple with iOS be like....
image.png

@TheMadPirate @alyx @icedquinn @pasture on a completely unrelated point, the reason they're used by musicians is because that's where all the software is and the windows sound subsystem has a bug that makes it quite literally impossible to do low-latency audio recording, this bug also creates audible pops and distortion. No studio engineer worth their salt would be on windows, therefore the only option is mac.

Graphic designers use them because of the color profiles and licensing of colors that comes with the OS, and also because mac monitors are relatively accurate to color, you see a lot of people using macs, windows isn't suited for color work and doesn't have the same built in abilities as windows. Also, that's (again) where the software is, and if you, as a business that deals with graphic design, can get an all-in-one solution with minimal in-house support then Mac is it. Since the only other option is windows, and Mac has arguably better support for this situation, they pick Mac.

I still think the Mac OS UI is appalling for how much it relies on the mouse and how unintuitive the keyboard shortcuts are, and I still think finder sucks, I still think Apple products are overly delicate, overpriced, vertically integrated, unethical, and that their devices are slowed down and otherwise forcefully rendered obsolete through planned obsolescence, I still know that Apple is shit for anything but those two things (Printing color-accurate images and recording audio at low-latency). Its *only* other use is developing for iOS but that's not a good reason.

@coyote @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture
> slowed down
they're heavily underclocked for very silly reasons

@icedquinn @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture they admitted it?

@icedquinn @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture I haven't kept up with Apple news for obvious reasons, but I remember this lawsuit, class action, that alleged they slowed down phones to get people to buy new ones, that's what I was asking about.

@coyote directly and indirectly.

directly they once claimed they slowed down old ios devices to maintain the battery life on old used up power cells that are losing capacity.

indirectly on macbooks because of how the fanless design works. they removed active coolers and replaced chunks of the case with graphite blocks and then rely on severe underclocking to keep the heat stable. so its a like, 3-4GHZ chip (which they market as some kind of boosting) gimped down to around 1GHZ or less because lol graphite can't dissipate heat fast enough.

but like, you don't have to listen to a computer fan i guess

@TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture

@icedquinn @TheMadPirate @alyx @pasture thank you ❤️ they make some stupid decisions..

@coyote @icedquinn @alyx @pasture They do admitted underclocking iPhones for "lowering battery consumption" which then it gets worse and worse the more the battery ( which is soldered btw ) gets older.

@TheMadPirate @coyote @alyx @icedquinn @pasture

Hell yeah they admitted it. Apple is the enemy of their own consumers, man. Worse tech company by far from an abuse of their own user standpoint.

@icedquinn @TheMadPirate @coyote @pasture
>silly reasons
Their reason is that they can't be bothered to design actual cooling solutions. Again, they literally can't even put a cooling fan where it's supposed to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCBYAP_Sgg

@alyx @icedquinn @TheMadPirate @pasture I personally still like Old Apple, even the jet engine Mac Pro (G4), they used to make a genuinely better product, now though it's just not worth the premium