Those icons were incredibly visually distinct, despite being meaningless. I still know exactly what they are for instantly, in my peripheral vision, years after using many of them.
Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and rounded rectangles...).
This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction, especially after the first time you use something, at least for me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.
It seems like just such a weird and rigid way to evaluate it? I am a somewhat reasonable human coder, but I can't copy and paste a bunch of code without alterations from memory either. Can someone still find a use for me?
That seems like the kind of feature where the LLM would already have the domain knowledge needed to write reasonable tests, though. Similar to how it can vibe code a surprisingly complicated website or video game without much help, but probably not create a single component of a complex distributed system that will fit into an existing architecture, with exactly the correct behaviour based on some obscure domain knowledge that pretty much exists only in your company.
> probably not create a single component of a complex distributed system that will fit into an existing architecture, with exactly the correct behaviour based on some obscure domain knowledge that pretty much exists only in your company.
An LLM is not a principal engineer. It is a tool. If you try to use it to autonomously create complex systems, you are going to have a bad time. All of the respectable people hyping AI for coding are pretty clear that they have to direct it to get good results in custom domains or complex projects.
A principal engineer would also fail if you asked them to develop a component for your proprietary system with no information, but a principal engineer would be able to so their own deep discovery and design if they have the time and resources to do so. An AI needs you to do some of that.
Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff, it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at least IME.
Also the resize cursor is completely unreliable, the cursor often doesn't change to the resize one when the mouse is over the correct resize areg. So it's even harder to tell if your cursor is in the right place before clicking. If you click in the wrong place it can have frustrating consequences, like activating another window or even clicking something inside it.
I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.
The 48 fps of The Hobbit was glorious. First time I have ever been able to see what is happening on screen instead of just some slide deck mess. There were many other things worth criticizing, but the framerate was not it.
True but there was specific criticism about how the framerate made it far too easy to see the parts of the effects, sets and costumes that made it clear things were props and spoiled the illusion. Maybe we just require a new level of quality in set design to enable higher frame rates but it clearly has some tradeoff.
I think that’s definitely the case with 4K, and we’ve seen set detail design drastically improve lately as a response.
I don’t see how it’s the case for frame rate, except perhaps for CGI (which has also improved).
I think just like with games, there’s an initial surprised reaction; so many console-only gamers insisted they can’t see the point of 60 fps. And just like with games, it only takes a little exposure to get over that and begin preferring it.
It's not just the framerate mismatch, OLED's un-pulsed presentation with almost instant response time greatly reduces the perceived motion smoothness of lower framerate content compared to eg, CRTs or plasma displays
It’s happened to me since before any cinemas were digital. I only figured out why by trying to play games below 30 fps. At least for me, it’s definitely the frame rate.
Some audio software lets you do this but mouse wheels are incredibly imprecise compared to the mouse sensor itself so this isn't really useful for many types of control which require precise adjustment.
It works great though, what's the alternative? It's visually small, so you can fit a lot of controls in a small space. You can glance at it and know the current setting and where it falls within the range of possible values. By making the mouse control modal when you click on a knob (so you start dragging and can drag over a much larger area than you could for say a slider, which isn't modal) you have immensely precise control over the value in realtime, while still being able to quickly make big changes. This is essential for performance. Combining this with some gentle mouse acceleration for the rate of change of the control when dragging gives you even more precise control. This isn't possible with a slider either.
I would say the opposite, it's basically the perfect interface for a very specific scenario with requirements that don't really occur in much other computer software.
The alternative is the mouse wheel and keybinds. Flight Simulators got this right. Roll up on the wheel to increase the value, roll back on the wheel to decrease the value. Left click to push, right click to pop (or context menu, left click to push it again to turn off).
In fact, if it was all MIDI controlled, it's just a matter of mapping the mouse scroll wheel to a midi channel.
I don't really see how that would be precise enough, the mouse wheel has a DPI of like 10 vs 400-800 for a mouse. A mouse wheel has like 25 notches in a full rotation and even MIDI CC values go from 0-127, that's 5 full rotations, that doesn't sound practical as it would be far too slow. And many parameters require much more precise control than 127 steps.
I don't play flight sims but I imagine most flight surfaces require small adjustments and the effect of those adjustments on the aircraft is naturally smoothed out by the dynamics of the plane (you're adjusting an acceleration).
I imagine the scroll wheel is not suitable for dogfighting.
I would assume the better programs implement some velocity control, turning it quickly will cause it to increment in larger steps, turning it slowly will increment single steps. This is how I have done it in the past when I have used the scroll ring on my trackball in PureData.
I would also assume there are detent free mousewheels with a far greater number of steps, there used to be. The scroll ring on my trackball is detent free and quite fine but it is also ~2" in diameter, considerably larger than the wheel on any mouse.
I only use logic now but used FLStudio in the past. I’m by no means an expert or anything, just an audiophile ex-musician turned software guy and find that it’s similar between flight simulator and logic. With FLStudio I did everything with midi controllers so I never used the mouse that way.
Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and rounded rectangles...).
This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction, especially after the first time you use something, at least for me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.
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