Chuckellania for October 11th, 2021

The iOS Simulator now does video recording, including exporting to animated GIFs.

The 1987 Apple Human Interface Guidelines went into a lot more prose on the thought process than today's (which are mostly focused on how you should and shouldn't use various UI elements), including bits like:

People are skilled at manipulating symbolic representations: they love to communicate in verbal, visual, and gestural languages. [..] They are most productive and effective when the environment in which they work and play is enjoyable and challenging.

And:

It implied that the goal of human-computer interaction was the enhancement of human performance, in contrast to other contemporary efforts that focused on technology development in isolation.

I used Windows 11 (in preview) for a month or two. I should probably do a bigger post about its various UI change some day, some of which are quite interesting.

One you'll run into quickly is that File Explorer's context menus have a new design, and are vastly simplified. But, just in case you need to access items that are no longer there, you can switch to the old menus.

In practice, I've found myself having to do that every single time i needed the context menus. Nothing in the new ones solved my problems.

Which meant that I waited a second or two for the new, slow ones to pop up, only to click the last item on them¹ so the old menu opens.

(Yes, I probably should have trained myself to hit shift- F10.)

Ultimately, while 11's refined fluent theme looks a lot nicer than the drab grays of Windows 10, 11 seemed like quite a downgrade. Slower, with significant stability issues (such as alt-tab crashing multiple times a day), and with various UI options now being harder to reach than before.

Note that you can do third-party plug-ins for the new context menus; it just isn't quite as easy as before, and will probably take devs a while to adapt.

Twitter launched the ability to force someone to unfollow you.

(Technically, the same effect was already possible, by blocking then immediately unblocking them.)

Wired headphones are considered "vintage" by zoomers. Fair enough.

I cannot tell if Elon Musk genuinely believes that getting rid of radar improves his cars, or if he does it to save money on parts, but the reasoning just isn't a great look:

Vision became so good that radar actually reduced SNR, so radar was turned off.

Humans drive with eyes & biological neural nets, so makes sense that cameras & silicon neural nets are only way to achieve generalized solution to self-driving.

Good luck with a camera + machine learning while it's raining.

The myth that renaissance-era Europe was confused about the Earth's shape apparently arose in part in an effort to embellish Christopher Columbus's story.