Notes tagged with ui

  1. Requesting a nonexistent page whilst testing on old IE incorrectly blames the user with message “files on this webpage require a program that you don’t have installed”

  2. Miyazaki says, "Our job as animators is not only to draw scenes. We must find the minimum necessary and important lines for the specific movement in a given action. The techniques of animation drawing are not the same as those of painting a still picture. Animation is a consequence of the audience's perception of movement created by sequential drawings. For this reason, each drawing in the sequence -- especially the lines -- should not be drawn too detailed; rather, they should be drawn less [detailed] and create an instant pause in the sequential movement.” (source)

    Sounds a lot like UI design to me.

  4. That Icelandic register things is a great example of technology making bureaucracy redundant. Ironically, having said that, there are some prime examples of technology mindlessly being applied and increasing bureaucracy and waste here…

    I’m looking at you, fancy touch screen machines who’s only function is to spit out a bit of paper (average life span maybe 2 mins?) which tells me when a desk is free to serve me :/

  5. Cross-browser selection UI injection flow:

    1. Listen for mouseup on body
    2. When triggered, let s be window.getSelection()
    3. If s.isCollapsed === false, return
    4. Else, let r be s.getRangeAt(0)
    5. Create a new element e
    6. Call r.surroundContents(e)
    7. e.innerHTML and e.textContent now return useful values, and e’s coordinates can be used to inject UI into the page

    To resolve: what element should e be? Or more accurately, what display property should it have? Possibly inline-block (inline mucks up if selection is across block elements, block mucks up selections within text nodes)

    Turns out there are problems with r.surroundContent, namely that it does not handle partial element selections. See MDNs explanation and solution.

  6. The problem with all mapping software ever:

    “Hm, that placename is a bit small to read” (zooms in) “TEXT, WHY U GET SMALLER AGAIN”

  7. Why do XYZ reader applications mark things as read as soon as I select them? Just because I’ve glanced at them doesn’t mean I’ve read them. At least defer that judgement until I’ve scrolled to the bottom of the main content

  10. What is it called when you subconsciously expect a UI to be somewhere it isn’t, e.g. double-tapping a word in a dead tree book to get a definition, or expecting a "like/favourite" button in, e.g, an email client?

    And no jokes about obsession :) it can't just be me.

  11. Application of notes or similar: reminding people to contact people in areas they don't go to often. Potential flow:

    • I create an event with a location
    • my software searches my contacts for people in this area
    • a list of those contacts are presented in a non modal fashion
    • If I can't remember where I met the person, hovering on them shows date and location of when I added them to my contacts

  14. I am hugely annoyed at @twitter’s API stupidity, but almost as annoyed by their failure to provide a consistent tweet authoring experience across their platform.

    If I see “remaining chars = 0”, I expect the tweet to post, not give me some near-meaningless error message. I also expect URLs to be automatically detected and compensated for consistently across the platform. This is just crap .