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    Ran across an unreleased redesign of the BeOS UI. I hadn’t seen this before. It would have been a pretty drastic change to the UI, and I wonder how it would have been received.

    I’ve always loved the original #BeOS user interface. For something that was apparently designed by engineers, it was notably clean and elegant. More, it was iconic, in a way that few 90s GUIs are. The simple yellow tabs are immediately identifiable. Nothing else looked like BeOS—it had a quirky but well-crafted distinctiveness that felt very Apple-y. (Unsurprising, given how many Be folks had worked at Apple.)

    The new design introduces complexity: more shapes, more borders, more dimensionality. Sanders, the designer, says that this was intended to modernize the experience. I don’t doubt they had justifications for this, but it does make me wonder what thinking was taking shape at Be, and where the company would have gone if they’d made it past 2001.

    Eco-music

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      I wonder if Honda sells hour-long audio tracks of the ethereal drones their electric vehicles make. I could see that being very relaxing.

      Save Everything

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        Just discovered Wayback Machine Downloader. This is turning out to be a fantastic tool in my archival arsenal.

        Save everything. Don’t wait. If you find something you like on the web, save it now. Because later on, when you want it again, it will probably be gone. (And the Internet Archive, while they are doing the Lord’s work, is not infallible.)

        Note: the original WMD has problems. Use this fork instead.

        X Blocks

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          I don’t pay much attention to #X these days, having abandoned it a while back, but things like basically gutting the “block” function make me wonder what the strategy is here, or if there is one. I don’t think this solves a real problem in a way that will make the service better for users.

          That’s the problem. I can’t think of a single thing Elon Musk has done that actually improved #Twitter. Not one thing.

          Lax moderation and a UX polluted with upsells and junk might get them more money short-term and make it more fun for right-wing trolls, but as far as practical-minded product decisions that took Twitter to the next level, everything Musk has done so far isn’t just off-putting, it’s weird. Bad products aren’t good long-term bets. Especially not a product that (1) already doesn’t make money, (2) has a deeply entrenched reputation for being bad, and (3) is facing an ever-broadening array of less-bad competitors.

          There is no way he’s getting his $44 billion back with X in this shape.

          Quad-bomb

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            If you’re watching Four Seasons on Netflix and you get to the part where they’re playing frisbee on the quad or whatever it’s supposed to be, that’s the shot I almost photobombed on the way to lunch today.

            Keep it simple

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              An attitude I’m seeing a lot of, in the wake of the Mullenweg/WP Engine drama, is “ditch #WordPress and replace it with [whatever static site generator is currently trendy].”

              So many folks in the tech community don’t seem to grasp that a lot of us—including those of us with tech skills—don’t want to be worrying about things like build processes, deployments, or command-line wrangling with Ruby or Node. We want to log in, do our work, and hit “Publish”.

              Mailmanarchist

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                The local mailman is a somewhat wild-looking guy: heavily tattooed, long beard, hair buzzed on the sides and long on the top, which he’s pulled into a ponytail. I’ve never talked to him, I just see him around town. He apparently keeps his lunch in the large, green mailbox-shaped cabinet outside my building (I thought these were used to store mail, but my landlord, who thinks it’s unsightly, was complaining once that the mail guy just stores personal items in it).

                I’ve always wondered about this guy: clearly a nonconformist, but he’s working one of the most regimented, straight-laced jobs there is. What’s his deal? Does he play in a punk band on weekends? Working his way through art school? Recovering from something?