With all these commandline and registry hacks to make macOS and Windows bearable, why not use Linux? You will also have to use the commandline if you want total customizability, but at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.
That was not my experience with Linux in the slightest. I used various distros for many years, and it eventually became just a waste of time. I got fed up with trying to play whack-a-mole with fixing driver issues.
It has been some years though, so maybe things have improved in this regard. However, I felt like using Linux as my daily driver served as an outlet for procrastination when my time would have been better solved working on the tasks I needed the OS for in the first place.
"older versions of MacOS featured a menu designed by NN/g principal Bruce Tognazzini; that menu did not exhibit this behavior, but instead, used a vector-based triangular buffer to allow users to move diagonally. Unfortunately, in the years since, Apple has reverted this excellent bit of interaction design."
But I'm on macOS 15 and the menus seem to behave that way (the good way). Did they re-implement it?
Yes, they did eventually. If I'm understanding correctly, the original design used a simple funnel shape with 45 degree sides (suitable for the resource-limited systems of the day), and when they eventually re-implemented it they used a funnel defined by the left hand corners of the submenu, as per the Amazon design. (See the large animgif halfway down https://thomaspark.co/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/ )
Just please don't start adding molly-guards to your software. The concept only makes sense in the physical world, e.g. where the "important button", that you might never have to press, needs to be in reach all the time. In software, there are better solutions.
You missed the point. Most things can be solved better. For example with undo or "fake undo" based on a delayed action or many other solutions, depending on the individual problem. Just asking "are you sure?" or forcing the user to jump through some hoops is the laziest and least user friendly way.
my favorite Debian package is Mollyguard so when you shut down a server remotely via SSH it just checks the second time to make sure you really wanted to shut down that server and not your laptop.
"Are you sure?" type guards are not suitable for actions which the user does regularly. If a user repeats this action regularly, they quickly automate the thought process (i.e. don't give it any thought anymore) and it becomes useless.
>> At 08:56 a ‘Trade Limit Warning’ pop-up alert appeared within PTE. This presented the trader with 711 warning messages, consisting of hard block and soft block messages, listed in a single alert where only the first 18 lines of alerts were immediately visible unless the person who received the alert scrolled down. The trader did not appreciate their inputting error and overrode all of the soft warnings in the pop-up.
> You get 711 alerts, you only see 18 of them, you are like “ehh 18 alerts is pretty much the normal number,” you override them all without reading.
I agree. Fortunately, molly-guard the software can be configured with automated checks to allow safe actions (e.g. shutting down servers that don't receive significant traffic) without pestering the user.
This means a properly configured mollly-guard is invisible for routine actions but kicks in only when a genuine mistake is suspected because the operation would cause some sort of meaningful loss. That way, users aren't trained to ignore it.
It's not nitpicking. The nature of the interruption being different is material. I've lost files to automatically answering yes to rm -i y/n confirm. Typing the hostname itself is different enough to get me, at least to stop and go wait, hold on. And snap me out of doing the wrong one. Especially an SSH gateway machine.
It’s really understated how much noise is purely from engines idling, and this largely brings up the average noise in a city.
There’s plenty of techniques to reduce noise coming from highways, then that leaves the noise in city streets where EVs are vastly, vastly superior from a noise perspective. It just brings down the noise floor overall.
City speeds are way below 50kmh (even below 30kmh in most cities!) and ICE cars are a lot louder when accelerating. So I'd love to see more EVs in our city too. Especially in winter days when the motors are not (yet) warm enough to clean the exhaust gas...
In SF bay area, there are always gas cars trying to show off their horsepower especially during rush hours, no matter how slow the traffic is. That noise is more annoying than tires.
Option + ] will produce ‘, Option+Shift+] will produce ’. Similarly, “” can be produced with Option(+Shift)+[. Alternatively, Option+Shift+e will produce ´.
Ugh, that is such a bad arrangement of the four combos. It should obviously have been [ for left and ] for right (just as [ and ] are a pair), and Shift to turn single into double (just as Shift turns ' into ").
I’ve looked at the ASCII tables to try to figure out ¿what were they thinking? and suspect it has to do with option \ and | being « and » (and euro key for ` and ´ being one key’s base and shift).
See the ASCII table in the article, for example. I've considered the thing done wrong is the ] and { should've swapped. But then < and > and ( and ) beg me to differ.
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