[HN Gopher] The Canon Cat
___________________________________________________________________
The Canon Cat
Author : maguay
Score : 165 points
Date : 2022-10-21 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (reproof.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (reproof.app)
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| The keyboard is intriguing: the two "LEAP" keys before the
| spacebar, obviously to be used with the thumbs, are not
| dissimilar to what some ergonomic keyboards are now using.
| Apparently they're both labelled "LEAP" on the top of the key
| while on the side it's written "LEAP AGAIN" (that's what I see
| from googling a few images). On Wikipedia it says these keys are
| for "incremental string search".
| robinhouston wrote:
| They're briefly explained later in the article. It sounds as
| though they function similarly to ? and / in vim.
| whartung wrote:
| Closer is eMacs ^s and ^r. You csn type ^stext and it will
| jump to the next instance of 'text'. Keep hitting ^s and you
| continue searching.
|
| Pedantically it's a keystroke less than / <enter>.
|
| The distinction is that the Leap key is more like a shift key
| bs how vim and emacs works.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Yup. Jef was big on eliminating modes, so came up with the
| LEAP "semi-mode". Emacs ctrl-s enters a mode that you use
| ctrl-g to escape (or at least that's what I use, there are
| probably many other ways to exit search mode.)
|
| Subsequent ctrl-s presses in emacs is the equivalent of the
| "USE FRONT" / "LEAP AGAIN" key press.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| If you press and release the LEAP key, it advances the cursor
| one character forward (or backwards if you hit the left leap
| key.)
|
| If you press down (but do not release) the LEAP key you enter a
| search semi-mode. As you type a search term in this semi-mode,
| the cursor moves to the first instance of that search term it
| finds. After moving to the first instance of the search term,
| you release the leap key to exit the search semi-mode.
|
| If you want to move the cursor to a subsequent instance of the
| search term, you press (and do not release) the "USE FRONT" key
| and press the leap key again (whose key front is labeled "Leap
| Again.")
|
| You can see this in action in this YouTube video, but it
| happens pretty fast so you have to watch carefully:
|
| https://youtu.be/o_TlE_U_X3c
| jessegrosjean wrote:
| Is anyone aware of other apps that clone Cannon Cat's leap
| feature? I've always wanted to implement in my own editors, but
| it's never quite reached top of the list.
|
| VIM search is similar in some ways, but not sure it's really
| the same thing. I don't know VIM well, but it seems to be
| missing many of the little details, anyway would be interested
| to know about any other apps.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433
| eesmith wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)#Leaping
|
| > Archy is a software system whose user interface introduced
| a different approach for interacting with computers with
| respect to traditional graphical user interfaces. Designed by
| human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his
| ideas and established results about human-centered design
| described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas
| include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with
| commands instead of applications, navigation using
| incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI).
| layer8 wrote:
| > The system provides two commands, Leap-forward and Leap-
| backward, invoked through dedicated keys (meant to be
| pressed with the thumbs), that move the cursor to the next
| and prior position that contains the search string. Leaping
| is performed as a quasimode operation: press the Leap key
| and, while holding it, type the text that you want to
| search; finally release the Leap key. This process is
| intended to habituate the user and turn cursor positioning
| into a reflex.
|
| > Leaping to document landmarks such as next or previous
| word, line, page, section, and document amounts to leaping
| to Space, New line, Page, and Document characters, which
| are inserted using the Spacebar, Enter, Page and Document
| keys respectively.
| wruza wrote:
| I suspect that Shortcat app recently advertised here was
| named after it. If not, it is a cool coincidence.
| bitwize wrote:
| It basically works like C-x C-s in Emacs, but within even
| easier reach since you're in search mode as long as you hold
| down the LEAP key, and releasing it puts you back in regular
| editing mode.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Is there a way to create such mappings in vim? E.g. pressed
| Shift sends vim to inc search mode and any input goes to
| search string.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I take issue with the "forgotten" moniker. I use my cat every
| other day.
| rubenv wrote:
| I'm sure this may be interesting, but with such low contrast it's
| simply impossible to read.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I understand the mild annoyance but this is a problem easily
| solved by clicking the "Toggle reader view" button on your
| browser.
| nottorp wrote:
| And you could install an extension to get rid of those
| "subscribe to the newsletter" popups etc.
|
| Or you could let the authors know they're doing things wrong.
| Applying technical solutions to bad content sources only
| encourages their existence.
|
| Edit: in this case, the article didn't seem unbearably low
| contrast to me. I guess mileage may vary with monitor.
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Edit: in this case, the article didn't seem unbearably
| low contrast to me. I guess mileage may vary with monitor.
|
| Hence my suggestion for a technical solution.
|
| Additionnally the beauty of the web is that for the most
| part[1] the user has full control over how he want to show
| the content as the code is interpreted locally. Custom css,
| your own fonts, which js you execute, your own page
| treatment. You can do whatever post treatment you want with
| the content provided.
|
| [1] Lazy loading through javascript makes it a bit less
| true but it rarely concern opinion/text stuff and for the
| most part web applications on which data can be also
| accessed through an api. The rest are dubious social medias
| that try to steal your life, attention span, privacy and
| make you an addict for commercial purpose and are best
| avoided like all hard and dangerous drugs.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Additionnally the beauty of the web is that for the
| most part[1] the user has full control over how he want
| to show the content as the code is interpreted locally.
| Custom css, your own fonts, which js you execute, your
| own page treatment. You can do whatever post treatment
| you want with the content provided.
|
| Your time is free?
| forinti wrote:
| It's interesting that the Cat came out in 1987, the same year as
| the Cambridge Z88.
|
| The Z88 cost 250 pounds (about US$400 at the time), which would
| make it a lot cheaper than the Cat.
| Lio wrote:
| The Cambridge Z88 is immediately what jump to mind on reading
| this for me too.
|
| I still sometimes wonder if I should finally buy one. They were
| wonderful little machines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88
| mst wrote:
| I had one of those!
|
| Very cool piece of kit for its time.
| jessegrosjean wrote:
| If you are interested in Canon Cat these are two good sites:
|
| - Documents: http://www.canoncat.net
|
| - Web based emulator: https://archive.org/details/canoncat
| kkfx wrote:
| IMVHO _all_ "big of IT" have done their best to castrate users
| ability to use a computer instead of being used by it like a
| piece of a machine.
|
| Computing is power, if users get such power they improve,
| becoming less easy to milk and steer. That's why we see a war
| against the desktop concept from Xerox, initially by IBM and then
| by all others.
| blowski wrote:
| Linux and emacs might be massively powerful in the hands of a
| competent, experienced computer user sitting mostly at their
| desk. For somebody with less time and competence, a tablet can
| give them much more power because they can use it straight
| away, in many situations.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| You can use Emacs straight away too. Every version I have
| installed in the last few years uses CUA (Common User Access)
| key assignments for copying and pasting and a toolbar that
| makes it easy to open and save documents.
| kkfx wrote:
| GNU/Linux as a bootloader to Emacs can give a competent,
| patient and experienced computer user an usable enough
| desktop to get a real damn desktop system to work with, and
| that sorry state is not due to nature of such system but lack
| of real development toward a generic target.
|
| Just see mails in Emacs, in a classic desktop word mails
| would be base64-encoded/makeself-alike archives files to be
| dropped in the recipient mail server, a FAR simpler thing
| than IMAP. All the end users have to do is choose an
| available domain name, with a main address and any alias they
| like. In the present world nothing stop a dev write a simple
| Email package in Emacs wrapping fetchmail/maildrop/notmuch to
| offer a simple config and automatically do the rest, only
| it's not there because we are too few to use Emacs like that
| and so there is no interest in such development.
|
| Similarly office guys have FAR MORE interests in present
| directly and simply in org-mode instead of wasting time in
| PowerPoint/Impress/*, but they simply do not know org-mode
| even exists. The few org-mode users have not much reasons in
| a tremendous education effort who should start from schools
| instead of wasting public resources to feed some GAFAM
| surveillance business to teach equally complicated, but
| limited and limiting tools, to children. Consider that: a
| modern tablet i NOT at ALL more friendly than Emacs, it's
| easier only because being far more widespread people already
| know that with knowledge absorbed a bit at a time as we
| absorb our mother language in our childhood and when we start
| learning it formally we already know it more than enough.
|
| Let's say you want to know your spending habit: how a modern
| tablet on-sale can really be powerful? How on contrary can
| serve such and so many other purposes well in Emacs/org-mode?
| In a fictional world how powerful is just grab their
| transaction from ofx FEEDS (not manual exports) in a local
| fully-integrated application instead of wasting time on
| countless of spying crapplications and slow services for
| doing very limited things with them? It's better for you a
| computing centered on you or one who use you for someone else
| profits just living some breadcrumbs to keep yourself
| engaged? It's better a fully integrated computing or a
| service-centered one?
| dchest wrote:
| Software written in Forth. Here's a video showing its interpreter
| mode and Forth words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZomNp9TyPY
| elzbardico wrote:
| It just shows the genius of Steve Jobs. Jeff's Macintosh would be
| an utterly boring, dumb, and limited machine.
| timbit42 wrote:
| It wasn't designed to be a general purpose computer. It was
| designed to be a word processor.
| Razengan wrote:
| Most of the ideas and rules there, like "auto-save changes,
| restart where you left off, and make commands accessible
| everywhere" have been a core of the Mac experience since over a
| decade and a big reason for why I've loved them since jumping
| ship from Windows.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| It's funny that many of the principles like "Auto-save changes",
| "Restart where you left off", "Make commands accessible
| everywhere", "Use words instead of icons" are qualities I enjoy
| on Emacs, and qualities that derived from the Lisp machines also.
|
| The only conflicting point is "Never allow customization", which
| I guess is where typical user needs diverges from expert user.
| Everything else seems to be universal of good UIs.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| What customizations do you want to make? I made a few macros in
| FORTH, but that's probably not what you're talking about. Plus,
| those macros were stored on floppies, not nvram or a hard disk,
| so you had to remember which macros you put on which disk.
|
| But yeah, you can't change the desktop image on the Cat (cause
| there is no desktop.) And you can't change window border width
| (cause there are no windows.) It's a very focused interface.
| [deleted]
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Yeah Cat vs. Mac is just a proxy for Lisp Machine vs Smalltalk.
| msla wrote:
| I'd be happy if you didn't impugn Smalltalk so, as it was a
| marvelously customizable system.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Jef Raskin's _The Humane Interface_ is a very good read. I didn
| 't find myself agreeing with many of its proposed solutions to
| HCI problems, but it does an incredibly good job of identifying
| the issues that we still have to this day with user interfaces.
| [deleted]
| predictsoft wrote:
| The other day was a story about the CueCat. I always got confused
| between the CueCat and the Canon Cat!
| lisper wrote:
| > design the computer to fit the human's needs
|
| The problem: different humans need different things. But Apple
| nowadays operates as if everyone needs the same things, at least
| in terms of UI/UX. If your actual needs (or desires) differ from
| Apple's preconceived notions, you are simply out of luck.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| or are holding it wrong!
| Roark66 wrote:
| The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I really
| dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that present a
| cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I much prefer
| words. Also having each widget take a lot more space forces the
| designer to really think about the value of adding one vs hiding
| it.
|
| Multilevel menus are IMO definitely better. If the app is a real
| productivity app people will spend ages in adding an ability to
| add "shortcuts" to some most often items will provide power users
| with ability to reach them quickly.
| jpe-210 wrote:
| But users can grow accustomed to what an icon means over time
| right? It happened with the floppy disk icon, the notification
| bell, open folder, etc. If you start it out as
| [icon][description] for the first few iterations wouldn't the
| user eventually learn to associate the icon for the action?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _But users can grow accustomed to what an icon means over
| time right?_
|
| Only if you use the same program all the time, and only if
| that program never changes.
|
| I use Adobe Illustrator a couple of times a year. There's no
| way I'm going to remember how to do very much from the ten
| minutes I used it in March to the next time I need it in
| October. And by then, the process is likely to have changed
| because the program got auto-updated by the Almighty
| Cloud(tm).
| alxlaz wrote:
| That only works if icons remain consistent and reasonably
| detailed over long periods of time. Nowadays all icons are
| abstract, monochrome shapes. They are similar enough to each
| other, and vary enough from one application to another, that
| one application's "back" or "new" buttons can look pretty
| similar to another's "undo" or "copy" buttons. With most apps
| on my phone I have no idea what the buttons do unless I press
| them, even if I'm perfectly familiar with the function.
| wruza wrote:
| I can only learn colorful icons. B&W ones I cannot recognize
| even after a long time. E.g. right now I'm looking at my
| opera sidebar and cannot quickly decide which icon is
| history. Much easier to open O-menu and navigate from there,
| which is what I always do to erase that last hour. Same for
| downloads - I know _where_ they are at the top-right corner
| and I click "Show more" there instead. Can't find it in
| sidebar without thinking twice.
|
| Btw, I have no trouble using Paint.NET. I just made a
| screenshot of its UI and turned B&W. Icons instantly became
| less discernible, and that still with correct shades of grey.
| If they were this modern outline-abstract bullshit, I
| couldn't use it at all and would look for an alternative.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| For better or worse, the web (and now all the various
| portable devices we carry around) introduced users to all
| manner of user interfaces. I think we're a little more
| flexible now. Or are we a little haggard?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The "don't use icons, use words" rule resonates with me. I
| really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that
| present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I
| much prefer words.
|
| Yeah. I've used a Mac for the last few years at work, and I
| think the Windows task bar is unambiguously superior to the
| dock. A big part of that is how it integrates text, which just
| seem to take _far_ less cognitive load to process. With the
| dock, I frequently have to pause for a couple of seconds and
| try to remember which inscrutably-styled circle I need to find
| to open the app I want.
|
| Though a dock interface would probably be better if each app
| picked a distinct object to use as its icon, rather than the
| design-collapse we've had where all icons are either some
| circle or rounded square (often with a circle inside).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > A big part of that is how it integrates text
|
| Interestingly, I just looked at my Win11 taskbar. The only
| text there is "type here to search".
|
| I have a KDE taskbar at the same computer. It currently has a
| similar number of open windows, all with enough text to
| understand not only what application they are, but also what
| I'm doing there. (Except for emacs. Emacs could use some
| better title texts.)
| mcguire wrote:
| Have you looked at the Acme editor?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
| andrekandre wrote:
| > design-collapse we've had where all icons are either some
| circle or rounded square (often with a circle inside).
|
| ive noticed this myself, now that almost all icons after
| bigsur have the same shape it takes me a lot longer to find
| anything in the dock / applications folder
|
| this is really frustrating and disappointing to see things
| like this deteriorate like this and nobody seems able to stop
| it...
| gcanyon wrote:
| I find your interpretation of the dock interesting,
| especially because _I 've never used the dock_.
| - I don't use it to launch applications, I use launchpad for
| that. - I don't use it to open files in a given app, I
| right-click and use the contextual menu for that. - I
| don't use it to delete files, I use command-delete for that.
| - I don't use it to get to downloads, I use the Finder for
| that. - I don't use it to switch applications, I use
| command-tab for that. - I don't know what else it's
| good for, or what I do instead.
|
| I say this as someone who has used Mac OS X since it
| launched: the dock is useless to me; I have it hidden, and if
| there were a way to permanently kill it, I absolutely would.
| tibanne wrote:
| Same, I make it quite small, put it on the right, and
| autohide it, and it still annoys me.
| lone-commenter wrote:
| To "disable" the Dock -- not really: it will pop up
| sometimes, e.g. when some icon bounces, but anyway -- you
| can defaults write com.apple.Dock
| autohide -bool true defaults write com.apple.Dock
| autohide-delay -float 100 killall Dock
|
| Here 100 is how many seconds you will have to keep the
| cursor on the edge of the screen before the Dock appears.
| You could set it to 3 or 5 should you need the Dock
| sometimes but don't want to trigger it by accident.
|
| [Edit: Autohide can be toggled on/off also with [?]+[?]+D.
| You can use the combination to show/hide the Dock, paired
| with a high autohide delay.]
| gcanyon wrote:
| Thanks! Yep, I used to set the delay to a long time, but
| I gave it up because my post above is a _slight_ lie --
| when something pops up in the dock to notify me, I go to
| the dock to see what the heck it was. That _one_ use case
| caused me to give up setting a long delay because of how
| f 'ing annoying it is for something to pop up, and then
| need (I think I set it to) 5 seconds to figure out what
| it was.
| Jiro wrote:
| The fewer words you use, the easier it is to localize for other
| languages, which I suspect is why a lot of things are like
| this. And a lot of things that don't need localization are
| probably designed by people who saw all the ones that were
| created that way and copied them without understanding.
| kbr2000 wrote:
| The exmh E-mail client frontend used this: https://rand-
| mh.sourceforge.io/book/exmh/thexmdi.html
| andrepd wrote:
| And if it's not cryptic icons it's undiscoverable actions or
| swipes... How come all the lessons of UI design that were known
| in the 90s got so completely forgotten?
|
| I wonder how the standard is at these sort of software shops.
| If the SV dev/designer can navigate through the app then it's
| good to go? I don't know...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Multilevel menus, like drawers in a workshop, hide tools.
|
| At least keep the square, block plane and pencil within easy
| reach.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Icons are used for a very good reason; us humans have a
| remarkable visual memory. Also we can distinguish icons by
| appearance faster than by words. Also words are language
| specific, icons... it's more complex...
|
| I can't provide evidence of this ATM but I did do a degree in a
| related subject.
|
| (I'm ignoring significant visual impairment here)
| hulitu wrote:
| > Icons are used for a very good reason; us humans have a
| remarkable visual memory.
|
| That's why since some 10 years they change it regularly.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I once designed an app with a lovely iconic interface.
|
| The customers _hated_ it.
|
| The next release had a lot more text.
|
| For one thing, icons tend not to translate well. We're best
| off using ISO icons[0], but designers _hate_ them, and always
| insist on reinventing the wheel.
|
| [0] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#home
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > The customers hated it.
|
| Sigh. You screwed up. You gave the users what you wanted to
| give, not what they wanted. You must always test & iterate.
|
| > The next release had a lot more text.
|
| Yes, I was too general - different interface needs must get
| different interfaces. Sometimes icons aren't appropriate,
| sometimes icons + text is better, sometimes you have to get
| creative.
|
| > For one thing, icons tend not to translate well
|
| I said that.
|
| > We're best off using ISO icons[0], but designers hate
| them, and always insist on reinventing the wheel.
|
| That's a flaw in the designers, not the icons then. Are you
| blaming the icons for that failure?
|
| Edit: those icons don't seem to have anything to do with
| standard computer desktop UIs AFAICS, am I missing
| somethign?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I don't understand the hostility. I simply told a story
| about one of the many "bad judgment" stories that I have
| encountered, and the lessons learned, therein.
|
| I wasn't asking for judgment.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Was intended as blunt, not hostile (how does it come
| across hostile?).
|
| WRT 'giving the users what you want not what they want',
| that's a classic mistake I've made several times and
| finally learnt from. Hopefully you can get there faster
| than I did.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I did, many years ago. The story is from about 1993.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > We're best off using ISO icons
|
| Hm, first time seeing this and not getting any good
| results. Here are the results for "save"
| https://i.imgur.com/UC4H3jE.png.
|
| Are you sure any of these are meant for a technical
| context?
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| The first one is "to indicate the entered data is saved"
| and it's been registered since 2004. I think it's more in
| the context of forms and less about saving a modified
| file.
|
| Never seen it before either.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, their browser sucks.
|
| I have a few collections that I downloaded, that have
| software-relevant ones.
| guenthert wrote:
| icon #6177 was bewildering. Apparently it is for "use on
| equipment" in the "eltrotechnical" domain. Without too
| much of a stretch of imagination, I can see a graph on an
| oscilloscope there, but why for 'save' and not for
| 'print' or selecting the time domain in a multi-function
| device?
| samatman wrote:
| If you enter "data" instead, you'll get the full context
| of the only one of those four which is applicable.
|
| I could quibble with some details of how these icons are
| designed, but I like that read and write point in the
| same directions as the carets in Unix redirects.
|
| That leaves up for "make data leave this device and go
| elsewhere", with down for "make a local copy of this
| data", aka upload and download.
|
| I must confess, however, if I saw the ISO icons in the
| wild, I wouldn't understand them. This is while already
| being aware of their existence.
| twoodfin wrote:
| And to be fair, the 1984 Macintosh relied on text far more
| heavily than icons. The trash can even said "Trash" underneath
| it!
|
| What Jobs wanted to build was indeed radically different from
| Raskin's vision. But many of the underlying ideas and
| principles ("No modes!") were preserved to valuable effect.
| bombcar wrote:
| Icons reinforced with text are amazing, because people can
| learn what the icon is, and then you can reference without
| text at times when there isn't enough room.
| rileyphone wrote:
| "No modes" was Larry Tesler, not Raskin.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I know, but it's a principle that Raskin endorsed & you
| also see in the Cat.
| samatman wrote:
| It's almost an irony, given where they're deployed, but icons
| are an interface which favors the expert over the beginner.
|
| iOS has terrible discoverability, you'd think Apple could
| afford to release a detailed manual, but once you've figured
| out what all the icons and gestures mean and do, it's fluid.
|
| A better example is any photo or vector editor you've ever
| used. They all have tons of icons, all over the place, and if
| you want to use them, you do need to figure out what they mean.
| Even with keyboard shortcuts, the selected tool is indicated
| with the icon.
|
| Programmers are heavily biased towards using words for
| everything, it's a strength in the context of the profession.
| The "any text can be selected and run as a command" interfaces
| are a dead end, but I'm in favor of revival, it's a great match
| for the kind of work we do.
|
| But if you give an artist a drawing tool with only "Tool-Lasso-
| Magic Lasso" as an interface, they just won't use it.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >iOS has terrible discoverability,
|
| I've used it since v1 and still don't know how to do some
| things reliably.
|
| Lately some weird new copy and paste bar appears, no idea how
| I'm triggering it. I mean if it works better than the OG
| awful copy paste menu I'd be all for it but how the heck is
| it even appearing.
|
| Don't get me started on the camera app, can never figure out
| how to get the flash setting how I want it. It tries to be
| smart but stops me just setting it as I want. Need apple to
| trust me when I know long exposure won't be enough
| ghaff wrote:
| Every year or two, I figure I really should read up on what
| new features/changes Apple has added to iOS (or iPadOS)
| that I don't know about. (And, because I so rarely use, I
| still never know how to use the split screen stuff in
| iPadOS.)
| bitexploder wrote:
| Split screen is easy. Tap drag from top middle down and
| to a side. App takes up less than all of screen if app
| supports it. Anchor it to a side. Tap another app. Done.
| Not intuitive at all, though.
| projektfu wrote:
| iPad OS frequently pulls up a file list that I am not
| sure where it came from that is extremely hard to dismiss
| (no close box and obvious gestures are mockingly not
| effective). I eventually get rid of it and forget how.
| The whole process makes me feel like an 80 year old
| facing DOS.
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. That's sort of my point though. When I haven't
| used it in 4 months, I forget and can't figure it out
| without looking it up.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its so stupid, because on a mac for touchpad gestures
| they have these nice demonstration videos built in. They
| have what could be a great model for this documentation
| already.
| kemayo wrote:
| > Lately some weird new copy and paste bar appears, no idea
| how I'm triggering it.
|
| iOS 13 added a whole set of gestures that all key off of
| three-fingered interactions with the screen. Just tapping
| with three fingers shows that bar, which is probably all
| you're managing to do accidentally.
|
| The rest: three-fingered pinch-closed to copy ("picking
| up"); three-fingered pinch-open to paste ("putting down");
| three-finger swiping left/right for undo/redo... and three-
| finger double-tap for an undo shortcut.
|
| Totally agree this is undiscoverable, but it's also fairly
| well gated behind a single root gesture so once you
| understand the trigger it's memorable.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Wow thanks. Yeah no idea that was a thing. Think I
| remember seeing the bar during WWDC and assumed it
| replaced the existing one.
|
| A cheat sheet or a tutorial like the OG Mac mouse
| tutorial would go a long way.
| gcanyon wrote:
| > iOS has terrible discoverability
|
| I think you mean: a touch interface makes discoverability
| especially difficult, and iOS doesn't do enough to address
| this.
| prox wrote:
| Menu's are beginner level, icons are for intermediates and
| keyboard shortcuts are for experts. All are necessary.
|
| Tutorials are for onboarding and getting the beginners
| started.
| pavlov wrote:
| In my experience artists using complex software actually
| prefer text labels to an endless sea of icons. High-end
| visual effects software tends to use text buttons.
|
| Twenty years ago, when there still was competition in high-
| end 3D packages, before Autodesk bought everybody and
| monopolized the market, there was a race between Maya and
| Softimage XSI. The latter was generally praised for its
| artist-friendly UI which used text labels while Maya was
| icon-heavy and seen more as a technically oriented tool.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Yeah I would love to see references to studies that attempt
| to categorize these disparate use cases you've described. On
| the one hand, there does seem to be a clear demarcation
| between an interface that's facilitating information creation
| and retrieval versus ones that facilitate more artistic
| endeavors such as photo and video editing. On the other hand,
| you have use cases like Autocad which seem to blur the lines.
| prox wrote:
| Read the book "About Face : on Interaction Design" , you
| are describing different "postures" of application. It's a
| must read if you want to stop guessing about what interface
| fits where. It's my bible as it were.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > But if you give an artist a drawing tool with only "Tool-
| Lasso-Magic Lasso" as an interface, they just won't use it.
|
| I just can't fail to remember how every architect absolutely
| loves the AutoCad CLI.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _iOS has terrible discoverability_
|
| Absolutely. I really don't understand how people think that
| making controls invisible is in any way useful, or user-
| friendly. To me, the worst is "We just showed you this big
| screen of options. But we're not going to show you that you
| can search the options if you drag the screen downward to
| reveal a search bar. But you wouldn't think to do that
| anyway, because pulling down on a screen is the Refresh
| function in other places."
|
| _you 'd think Apple could afford to release a detailed
| manual_
|
| It does: https://books.apple.com/book/id6443146864
|
| _but once you 've figured out what all the icons and
| gestures mean and do, it's fluid_
|
| Yep. How to do something in iOS _n_ is not how to do
| something in iOS _n+1_.
|
| By the time you read through Apple's 74 page manual, you have
| a new version of iOS and have to start over again.
|
| I'd rather spend time with my cat and my family than re-learn
| every piece of tech from every giant tech company over and
| over again.
| samatman wrote:
| > _It does:https://books.apple.com/book/id6443146864_
|
| I wish I was joking: my first iPhone was a 4, and you're
| telling me this for the first time.
|
| Did I mention that discoverability is terrible? I'm sure
| that URL was printed in tiny gray text on that tiny piece
| of paper you always throw away first...
|
| On the bright side, I'm going to read it. Thanks.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 'm sure that URL was printed in tiny gray text on that
| tiny piece of paper you always throw away first_
|
| You are correct. That's exactly where it is.
|
| Or maybe was. Because I don't remember seeing it this
| time with the latest phone. Maybe it's not even there
| now.
|
| Maybe it's in the Tips app now.
|
| It used to be available as a PDF, but I could only find
| it in Apple Books.
| SllX wrote:
| > Did I mention that discoverability is terrible?
|
| Apple does also include the Tips app, with notifications
| for it turned on by default. In previous iterations if
| you read all the tips for your new phone, it would point
| you to the iPhone User Guide; now it's just at the bottom
| if you scroll all the way down and you don't have to read
| it in Apple Books anymore.
|
| iPhones have a lot of new features every year, so I find
| it helpful to go through the Tips app at least once every
| new OS release and also every phone purchase and I
| usually learn a couple of new things by doing so.
| bantunes wrote:
| It's Apple-think. I showed someone I know (who used to work
| at Apple) my SailfishOS phone, and this was before iOS
| added gestures to manage apps. SailfishOS had those "pull
| down to minimize" and so on gestures before iOS, and when
| he tried them out he said they were terrible UX because
| they were hard to discover.
|
| As soon as iOS added them, they were the future of mobile
| UIs.
| pram wrote:
| The whole flicking 'cards' to manage apps thing was from
| WebOS.
| indymike wrote:
| Flicking cards was the absolute best part of webos. It
| was irrationally entertaining.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| What made it great was the Palm Pre's size made it so
| ergonomic to hold the phone one handed and manipulate the
| cards with the thumb.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Words in interfaces are terrible unless a lot of thought goes
| into localization.
|
| For example, consider an American UI designer creating a 'Save'
| button. Now, translate the button to Dutch ('Opslaan').
|
| What you'll see very often is that the button is only wide
| enough for the English text ('Save'), so 'Opslaan' gets
| rendered as something like 'Ops...', which is obviously a
| terrible experience.
|
| I just set my computer and phone interfaces to English to
| sidestep this problem, but not everyone wants to do this.
| afandian wrote:
| It's been a decade since I did any app development on MacOS.
| But I do recall having to create a separate dialog box XIB
| resource for each language, with different sized buttons.
| galad87 wrote:
| That's not needed anymore when using auto-layout,
| introduced in 10.7 if I remember correctly.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Why does the word "save" need to be in a button? The claim
| that natural language is an inferior interface is up for
| debate.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I'm pretty confident that "save" is only one of many
| examples where this issue can happen.
|
| > _The claim that natural language is an inferior interface
| is up for debate._
|
| They only said that it requires much more thought, not that
| the debate is finished with their comment.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| On any Apple platform, that would be considered a serious
| bug. It shouldn't ever be a problem in SwiftUI, and you can
| achieve the necessary dynamism without too much trouble by
| using layout constraints in both AppKit and UIKit.
| code_duck wrote:
| Apple's own products do this often. For instance, an
| instrument in one of my tracks in iOS GarageBand is listed
| as "Kind...ass". It's supposed to be "Kindergarten Bass".
|
| https://i.redd.it/0ncp6hgad7v91.jpg
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I really dislike android drawing(and other similar) apps that
| present a cluttered interface with a dozen of cryptic icons.I
| much prefer words._
|
| Or at least give me a choice.
|
| I like how many macOS programs let you have both the icon and
| the name of the icon under it in the toolbar. It's especially
| helpful when I'm new to a program and learning its functions.
|
| But opening something like Photoshop or Affinity Photo or
| Illustrator that I only use maybe once every few months, and
| it's all hieroglyphics.
|
| And Photoshop makes it worse by piling multiple functions into
| one icon. So flood fill and gradient are the same icon, and box
| and circle are the same icon; so the tooltip is useless.
| perardi wrote:
| Oh, no, Adobe does it _even worse_ than just a tooltip.
|
| Rich tooltips! Big fancy full-color tooltips! That still
| don't really show you how the feature works, and also doesn't
| explain there are more features under that icon menu. That
| obscure huge chunks of the icons next to them, and are
| patronizing and annoying to seasoned users.
|
| https://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/rich-tool-tips-
| ph...
| guenthert wrote:
| Yeah and don't get me started on "swipe up/down for volume"
| (VLC on iPad).
| al_be_back wrote:
| More like Canon Emacs!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Leap Technology (1987) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33137433 - Oct 2022 (40
| comments)
|
| _The Canon Cat: The Writing Information Appliance (2004)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836958 - March 2022 (42
| comments)
|
| _Demo of the Canon Cat computer released in 1987 with 'leap'
| feature [video]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29423545
| - Dec 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213934 -
| Feb 2021 (31 comments)
|
| _Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca
| 1987)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22042900 - Jan 2020
| (1 comment)
|
| _Canon Cat Emulation_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18032916 - Sept 2018 (2
| comments)
|
| _Canon Cat Resources - Jef Raskin 's Forth-Powered Word
| Processing Appliance_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650365 - June 2017 (23
| comments)
|
| _The Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6978587 -
| Dec 2013 (30 comments)
|
| _Canon Cat Documents Archive_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3394546 - Dec 2011 (8
| comments)
|
| _Canon Cat_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595744 - May
| 2009 (15 comments)
| msla wrote:
| I remember reading about Raskin's work on Ward's wiki, back
| before Ward and crew made it unusable. I wrote some pretty heated
| diatribes against it, which I'm not going to do now, but I will
| push back on one of his dogmas:
|
| > Never allow customization: Consistency, though, led Raskin's
| perhaps most controversial idea, prompted by the trouble he saw
| customers have with documentation. "Customizations are software
| design changes that are not reflected in the documentation," and
| as a documentarian, this could not stand. The designer knows best
| --something that comes through strongest in Apple's products--and
| "allowing the user to change the interface design often results
| in choices that are not optimal, because the user will, usually,
| not be a knowledgeable interface designer," said Raskin. "Time
| spent in learning and operating the personalization features is
| time mostly wasted from the task at hand." Better a consistent,
| well-designed interface than one you could fiddle with forever.
|
| This is a meta-dogma, a dogma about being dogmatic about your
| design. Never allow the user to change your Holy Vision, because
| Your Beneficent Self, The Designer (Peace Be Upon You), has
| decreed it shall be such, such it shall always be, yea, unto the
| ends of the system's profitability, never allowing the user to
| grow in their knowledge of how to do their tasks, never allowing
| the user to bring their own domain knowledge to their tasks.
| There shalt always be an unbridgeable gulf between Designer (
| _insert holy trump here_ ) and user, and the user shall never
| trammel the Designer's Roarkian Vision. So mote it be, amen.
|
| It's High Modernism in software. It's the exaltation of One True
| Vision above the people who do the work and might, therefore,
| know something about how the work is done. It is, in other words,
| utterly shocking Jobs rejected the Canon Cat and its immense
| hubris. Probably because it wasn't Jobs' immense hubris.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its so ironic reading this, considering most of the
| "conveniences" of modern ios are clones of some popular tweak
| on cydia.
| omar_alt wrote:
| A simple low energy computer that does one task like word
| processing or act as a terminal client with an ink display would
| be a useful for focusing on one task without distraction. I
| personally would love to have a low energy terminal device that I
| could work in for hours however my pessimism tells me there is
| not enough demand to scale this.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Those things already exist:
| https://shop.boox.com/collections/eink-tablet
|
| Associated with the keyboard of your choice.
|
| But also very easy to DIY by plugging an old laptop or a
| raspberry pi to an e-ink display/monitor and set it up to
| automatically start a text editor at boot time. Even a
| raspberry pi zero would handle that task superbly. I am not
| sure what prevents you to do that except lazyness if this is
| really something you want.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I am not sure what prevents you to do that except lazyness
| if this is really something you want.
|
| The problem with a general use machine is you can always alt
| tab out and procrastinate. If you're the one who set it up,
| you're the one who can un set it up.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I am pretty sure that as long as you have a phone/laptop at
| home you are as much ready to put the focused machine aside
| for what you think will be a few seconds in order to
| procrastinate.
| nottorp wrote:
| It does make it a bit harder. Also... NEW TOY.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The problem with DIYing things with a Pi, I find, is that you
| inevitably end up with a fragile nest of wires and not a
| device you can rely on not to have been cannibalized
| (probably by oneself) or unplugged or disassembled to make
| room for other stuff. Not conducive to something like a
| bombproof note taking device that's always on standby- and
| good luck if you want it to be portable or even luggable.
| the-printer wrote:
| I am interested in starting a Guild based on this practice.
| mft_ wrote:
| For many years, my father used an NEC 8201a [0] for just this
| purpose - sitting comfortably writing without distraction. He'd
| later feed the text into his PC for layout.
|
| It also had BASIC, which I used to play with - and at one later
| point, I even wrote a little program in Visual Basic to
| simplify the process of transferring text from the NEC to his
| PC, including getting rid of the many erroneous carriage
| returns that the process otherwise inserted.
|
| [0] https://www.old-
| computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=334
| detritus wrote:
| Such as this?
|
| https://getfreewrite.com/
| mattkevan wrote:
| I use my Newton eMate as a distraction-free writing device.
|
| The keyboard is great, NewtonWorks is a surprisingly powerful
| office suite and it syncs nicely with the Mac through a serial-
| to-usb adapter.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Have a look at the old Tandy m100. AA batteries, and you can
| type for days without distractions on a mechanical keyboard.
|
| Or, pick up any Android based e-ink ereader and plug in a
| keyboard.
| thejosh wrote:
| Would the refresh rate not be an issue for this?
| mattl wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart had some cool devices
| and they're still usable today.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| I still use one plenty. The batteries just lasting forever is
| such an incredible feature. Plus the Mac layout keyboard.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah I love mine.
| maguay wrote:
| The closest, today, feels like eInk tablet devices like the
| Remarkable--though it's built more for sketching and
| handwriting notes than typing.
| prvc wrote:
| The Freewrite has been around for a while.
| guenthert wrote:
| An article about the Canon Cat which doesn't mention that it was
| programmed in FORTH? Perhaps not essential to the UX, but when
| claimed "A predictable, documentable system must be entirely
| under Apple's control," FORTH, renown for its extensibility, in
| fact, complete blurring the lines between language, OS and
| application, seems a non-obvious choice.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| I think it boils down to icons + mouse vs text and keyboard.
| Imagine a mac without susan kares icons that played such a big
| role in making it feel truly human and developing an emotional
| attachment. Among so many great UI guidelines is that outlier
| with a dislike for icons with a minor and solvable (hover +
| tooltips) reason.
| kaveh808 wrote:
| I am currently working on a new 3D system, and have been thinking
| a lot about GUI design.
|
| My impression is that as applications have grown in complexity,
| there has not been a corresponding change in our approach to GUI
| design. I'm talking of desktop apps for doing 3D content creation
| (Maya, Houdini, Blender, etc).
|
| The menubar and hierarchical menus worked elegantly in the
| simpler days of the Xerox Star and Apple Macintosh, but the
| continued reliance on them makes me chuckle at times.
|
| The other day I decided to count the number of GUI elements
| visible in one such app. There were over 200. I can't prove this,
| but my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create
| confusion and anxiety in users. Or maybe users just learn to
| ignore the 90% of widgets they never need to use.
|
| I find it increasingly awkward to have to move the mouse to click
| inside a 16x16 pixel widget on a 4K screen. Most GUI actions are
| not inherently graphical (click on a button, menu, icon).
|
| One app has such a large contextual menu (with many submenus)
| that the menu includes its own search field, and users click to
| make the menu appear, then type in a few characters to locate the
| menu item they want, then click on the item. I can't help but
| shake my head and chuckle.
|
| My own attempts at coming up with something different have
| resulted in a series of (short) popup menus that can be invoked
| via keyboard. My hope is that users will develop muscle memory to
| go to the selection they want quickly. For example, hitting
| "C,C,C" (the "c" key three times) invokes, in order, the Create,
| Curves, Circle menus (each menu replaces the previous one) and
| creates a circle in the 3D scene.
|
| Been planning to make a video demo...
| angelgonzales wrote:
| That's why I always advocate for formal training and
| certification when it comes to using complex software. Sitting
| down for eight hours or 40 hours in a classroom setting allows
| users to familiarize themselves or master the other 90% of
| functions they aren't normally aware of or haven't used. There
| is software that needs to be complex because some job functions
| are complex, the big focus on collaboration in the workplace
| now results in people with fundamentally different job
| functions using the same piece of software which clutters up
| user interfaces as well.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >my feeling is that this visual/usage clutter can create
| confusion and anxiety in users
|
| Designers have been stomping all over presenting useful
| information under this assumption for the past 20 years.
| Speaking for myself, I am sick of the hypersimplification of
| what should be useful tools. Complex workspaces have complex
| needs, and that's OK. Doesn't mean we can't find ways to
| improve, but just hiding things isn't the answer.
| kaveh808 wrote:
| I think the onus should be on the UI designers to present
| features when they are needed. This means making an effort to
| model the users' workflow, which is not trivial.
|
| A good first step can be seen in Lightroom, where the TAB key
| will hide the tool palettes, leaving the entire (uncluttered)
| screen available for examining and selecting/ranking photos.
| Hit TAB gain to get the palettes back when you are ready to
| use one of the tools.
|
| Just putting 20 icons along the edge of a window and washing
| their hands of it seems like a cop out to me.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Every time the Canon Cat comes up, I'm surprised no-one mentions
| the Amstrad PCW family and Locoscript. It was launched two years
| before the Canon Cat, and not only made it to market but had
| roughly the same market penetration in the UK as lightbulbs.
|
| Given that a lot of Amstrad stuff wasn't exactly known for being
| the highest quality the PCW8256 and 8512 were surprisingly good
| for the PS400 they cost (about a grand in today's money, roughly
| half the price of the Canon Cat). You got a fairly chunky
| computer about the size of a 14" TV with a green screen monitor
| which had a not-ridiculous persistence so no flickering and a
| fairly "gentle" colour. The 3" disks were a bit weird. The
| keyboard was a nicely clicky "spring over membrane" design that
| felt nearly as good as a proper mechanical one (not a patch on a
| Model M but better than most!) and had a bunch of buttons for
| commonly-used functions. If you pressed any of the modifier keys
| the menu at the top of the screen would change to show you what
| you could do. It even came with a dot-matrix printer that could
| do graphics after a fashion.
|
| You could buy a posher version with a white screen and a
| daisywheel printer, too, but they were more expensive and the
| printer was extremely slow and noisy.
|
| It was only slightly harder to get started with than a biro and a
| notepad.
|
| I wish Locoscript had won instead of MS Word.
| rob74 wrote:
| I can totally understand why the Canon Cat was a flop. At the
| time it came onto the market, mouse-driven GUIs were largely seen
| as the thing of the future, and those didn't have to be
| explained: moving the mouse and clicking was like pointing your
| finger at the screen and tapping it directly. And then this weird
| thing with no GUI and no mouse comes along. Its UI may have been
| easy to use too, but it probably needed a lot of explaining and
| getting used to before you could internalize it, so only a few
| power users really made the effort to familiarize themselves with
| it.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| It came out in '87, 3 years before windows 3.0. Macs were still
| twice as expensive as PCs and accounted for something like 3-5
| percent of new computer sales. DOS was the most popular PC OS
| at the time, and wasn't known for its user friendliness. So the
| idea of a "turn it on and start typing" machine had some
| cachet.
|
| I think the near absolute lack of marketing is what doomed the
| Cat and IA.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Apple 2e and 2c was still popular in 87 and probably sold
| more than Mac in that year.
| hallarempt wrote:
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