Let's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''[1]
Interface design is not a place for unlimited creative expression. But recent user interface trends exclude many design idioms and relegate one to a limited range of creative expression also. Some people think they look better. Some do not.
Accessible interfaces have become uglier in ways which did not improve accessibility. And recent trends have made them less accessible in some ways also. Choose not enough contrast or too much. Choose contrast or color where both were before.
Since when did we care about what designers want? It's called User Experience, not Designer Experience. The target audience is not people who are intimately familiar with digital idioms, that's why skeuomorphism is remembered more fondly than the iOS 7 design.
Reminds me of when Jony Ive had the run of the place and gave us the bending iPhone and MacBooks with no ports. All for the sake of "Designer Experience".
The beauty of the web is that you can design sites as if we were in the 2000s. And they work fine!
I can't wrap my head over things like React, Next.js, Vue, Tailwind (styling web pages directly in the HTML!?)… still code HTML and CSS by hand, and it's fine. Better than ever have been.
I agree with you on Tailwind, but React/Vue solve the problem of creating complex webapps. If you write HTML and modify DOM manually with JS, it only works for relatively simple projects. As soon as it becomes complex, it becomes hard to track which JS code changes what DOM.
Another thing is maintability. Working with single-file components with state management systems is just a pleasure.
I've been using 8 GB of RAM MacBook since 2015, and by then this “8 GB isn't enough” chorus was strong. Nowadays I use a M1 Air, 8 GB of RAM, zero complains, really.
For most people that just browse the web, write some stuff and do their email, 8 GB is still enough.
You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.
You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
5 years ago if you said coding tools would be worth in the billions in value it would of been surprising to most people. Dev Tools were the thing you could never get a company to buy for you or were just free for most people. Interesting times.
Dev tools are still very hard to sell (I know, I have a dev tools company). Claude Code, Aider and Codex are given away for free. What people are buying is access to proprietary general purpose models.
Yeah, in the recent Lightcone Podcast episode, Varun was talking about how they have a lean eng team but large sales org. I thought that was super interesting for a dev tool since I was expecting a dev tool to involve bottom-up sales to the dev instead of top-down sales to a leader like a CTO or VP of Eng
Yeah, in corporate environments the leap is harder, but for home usage I guess Linux is… fine? I mean, browsing the web, reading and writing stuff, playing some games. I have a hard time trying to imagine a scenario, apart from Windows-exclusively apps (such as MS Office), that a Linux box would struggle.
I tend to find DDH's takes as innovatively great, but in this case I totally agree that your first quote is not true - Chrome won because Google was behind it.
The appeal, at least for me, is having a social layer on top of your own stuff. Are you familiar with POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)? With AP you skip the whole second part because it's automatically syndicated everywhere the moment you post on your own site.
I'm having good results with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on my blog[1].
Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…
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