>Borders are a great way to distinguish two elements from one another, but using too many of them can make your design feel busy and cluttered.
>Instead, try adding a box shadow, using contrasting background colors, or simply adding more space between elements.
Emphasis mine. The above may be reasonable advice if you're building a low information density app for nonproductive content consumption... Or a touchscreen only app where all interactive elements must be at least a finger tall and wide... But it drives me absolutely batty when extra white space appears in software that I want to use to process/analyze a lot of information and actually get stuff done. And numerous examples on the website just make things... Farther apart and/or bigger.
I still rue the day Spotify fattened up its row height for all lists in the app. It's less readable than it was if I can't read as many song names as before without scrolling.
I don't want to rag on the book overall without reading it, especially given how many in this thread seem to love it and the table of contents does hint at good ideas within, but that seems like a terrible set of examples to lead with. 'More white space' is not universally good design advice. Give me design in the school of TMUX and Bloomberg Terminal any day over extra white space for the sake of 'readability.' As much information as it is possible to present clearly on a given screen.
There's a subchapter in the book called Dense UIs have their place in which the authors mention situations where more compact and busy design is more desirable, adding a screenshot of a sports results website as an example.
The rules in the book (and on the website) should not be seen as set-in-stone, they are more principles we can follow depending on the situation. I think the use fewer borders principle is very useful in many scenarios.
Saying that, I agree that today's designs tend to too much whitespace (there was a blog here recently ranting that all product landing pages are basically a navigation bar with a shallow text over a picture background).
I had a local entrepreneur showing me their website/product at a meetup a while ago, and after scrolling a bit through an info page, I unconsciously switched to desktop mode to get more information density.
The entrepreneur, who was watching me interact with the site, asked me what I was doing, and was confused at why I'd go to desktop mode. That, in his mind, was too information dense. But I wanted to see all the information at once without scrolling around, my eyes can scroll fine.
I guess it goes to show it should be a consideration, given its variance.
There are no universal
rule of design. You ragging about a mention of whitespace, as if whitespace is universally a bad idea, means you are just judging a book by its cover and only have the cursory understanding of the matter that is typical of most programmers.
Remember, good design is not only what the cool kids do or what FAANG might believe it is. Good design is timeless. Good design is a conversation with the product. Sometimes whitespace is good, sometimes it is not. You saying whitespace is a bad idea is as misinformed as a naive designer saying whitespace is king.
That said, I recommend Refactoring UI, but I recommend more anything on Dieter Rams or the book "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman.
Good design is also subjective. More whitespace is trendy and it annoys people who prefer a higher information density (I see the same with code formatting preferences: some people really like to space out code, others like to make it as compact as possible. Most people are somewhere in the middle).
There is a thing called user testing. I would say if big company makes design with a lot of whitespace its outcome of a process that had many variations and many tests.
So yes its subjective and people probably like it.
On the flipside, probably the most common software found and used in businesses everywhere is spreadsheet related, and it's common even in non-business contexts. How many of these applications are adding senseless whitespace everywhere?
In the cases I've seen where whitespace is added, it's purely an aesthetic choice and not a UI design choice.
I've been looking into Apple TV 4K boxes as an alternative to Roku --- I'm sick of their ads baked into the UI --- and I've read in a couple places online that if you put the Photos app in first position of the top bar you'll get a slideshow of whatever photos are in there instead of promos for a particular app's shows.
Is that so?
It'd definitely put me across the line into switching. With Jellyfin now supported with the native Swiftfin app it'd have everything I need.
Yeah, that’s correct. Only apps in the top row that are highlighted can display content on the home screen and the leftmost app is highlighted at boot/wake.
I don’t have any experience with Jellyfin+Swiftfin but Infuse has worked well with my Plex server.
As a sidenote, to test this I woke the the old 2015 Apple TV HD that the 4K model replaced and to my surprise it’d updated itself to the latest tvOS and still runs smoothly. Not bad for an 8 year old device, and no doubt in better shape than most competitors of a similar age.
XBMC and all the wacky homebrew software extended the life of my original Xbox by more than a decade. I still think the linksbox browser did alphabet input better than any other controller software I've seen. And it was always fun in college to host a Mario Kart 64 night (emulated on Xbox) in the dorms and see the expressions on people's faces when they looked from the controllers to the screen, and then back and forth again. :)
And I still use 2 original Xboxs at LAN parties here and there. Even with a softmod and Linux, it's still possible to system link Halo, Halo 2, Battlefront (2004), Battlefront 2 (2005), Crimson Skies, Metal Arms, and other games across at least three generations of console (Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One) with 16-to-32 people. Microsoft does backward compatibility like almost no one else, even on console.
It's getting harder to find replacement controllers, but I've found a local hardware guy in my city who can help find the right replacement parts as little pieces on the board start to fail. I plan on keeping both of mine running as long as possible!
Any software that re-arranges my files and folders without asking is a non-starter. So is any software that copies my files into its own set of folders and obscures any attempt to understand those folders.
Calibre isn't as bad as iTunes, which will silently delete classical music ripped from a CD and replace the tracks with other orchestras performing the same piece... But Calibre has no concept of, "this user's files are already organized the way the user wants them to be."
It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option.
> It's a manifestation of developer arrogance to not even give the end user the option.
Calibre is a free, open source software. If it doesn’t fit your flow - don’t use it. The author doesn’t owe you anything. You should be thanking him for his great job that he does for free, instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.
> you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.
They never said this, only that developing a product to be used by a lot of people and completely disregarding a (arguably very common) use case is arrogant.
> ...instead you decide that you’re somehow entitled to more of his lifetime dedicated to the features important to you personally.
Please don't put words in my mouth. It's insulting, rude, and also arrogant.
Nowhere have I suggested that I am entitled to anything. Nowhere have I requested multiple features. You're writing as if I'm in this developer's issue tracker making demands. I'm not. We're both in a thread on a forum separate from Calibre's development and maintenance where the topic of discussion is Calibre's strengths and shortcomings.
I did imply that not providing an off-switch for tangential complexity in software is an arrogant design decision. I stand by that opinion.
> Please don't put words in my mouth. It's insulting, rude, and also arrogant.
:) so you’re complaining that the existing feature set doesn’t cover your use case, calling this decision arrogant, but _in fact_ you do not want this feature implemented? Right. Now I follow. Of course you didn’t say that. My apologies.
> You're writing as if I'm in this developer's issue tracker making demands. I'm not. We're both in a thread on a forum separate from…
Calling people arrogant for the choices they made working on a product (useful to thousands) for free is exactly what entitlement is. It would be actually better if you did the same in the issue tracker, at least the author could have blocked you and limit the toxicity.
It’s not up to you to decide for the author of the free tool what features should be implemented in this tool. You didn’t pay a cent to him. You do not have any right to criticize him in this tone.
What you could do is ask politely and leave quietly if the request was denied. Or you could suggest better alternatives as the author of the linked article did. Everything else is nothing but entitlement. And yeah, I stand by that opinion too.
> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity.
Having read a bit of history about how many modern national identities were constructed over the last three centuries, that's a disturbing sentence to see written so casually. Phrases like 'breaking down regional identities' and 'assimilating the youth into the "new" national identity' remind me of the forced assimilation of Sami peoples in Norway and Sweden or the historical efforts of French governments, both republican and monarchist, to ruthlessly crush regional languages in the name of a 'right' to common language.
A more accurate way to understand the purpose of public schooling might be: the objective of public school is to break down regional identities of old and forcibly assimilate the youth into the 'new' national identity so that, as adults, they will become a more compliant, fungible labor supply which is more easily legible to the state and elites.
That deeper purpose, which you either left unspoken or weren't aware of, is what many people in the US have against public schools. There are a lot of regional identities in America that don't have much in common with mine, but I'll stand should to shoulder with them against attitudes like yours and against the policies that follow from those attitudes. Doubly so in cases where their identities were crushed in the past, which is sadly common even in America.
I say it so casually because I also find it disturbing. Don't worry, we share similar views.
And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. And in the process, I forged a new identity, much like the settlers who immigrated to this country before me.
Is it because my parents did not embed the great insecurity into me? To reject everything taught from the onset because it may lead me astray? They did nothing like that. They told me to attend school, make friends, and learn new things. I learned both the good and the bad of the dominant society I lived in, simply by observing it for myself. And I became familiar with the archetypes of the elites and the poor.
> Why are people in the US so against public schools?
> Don't worry, we share similar views.
No, we clearly do not. If you held similar views to mine, you would not have posed the question, nor followed it with a false dilemma between breaking down regional identities and, "everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples."
> And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents.
To the extent that an American national identity exists, it is rooted in shared ideals and beliefs. Those ideals predate the system of public schooling devised by Prussian officer-aristocrats in the mid nineteenth century. Our ideals have certainly taken a beating under that system. Hopefully, they will also postdate it.
Given that you believe you learned the American national identity in a public school, I do wonder a bit about how well you understand that identity. Especially in light of your initial question, which implies a lack of understanding of why Americans might oppose a major institution.
You read too much into my initial post. I would not have been so blunt if it wasn't to point out the great irony of public schooling and its inception coinciding with modern nation states. I pose the hyperbole question because I see the greatest opposition to public schooling from Americans and religious peoples.
"everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples."
Because at the same time I understand the brutal truth. The nations of today where this process of state centralization did not occur, or occurred under coercion from colonial powers are much worse off. And there people viewed as backwards or uncivilized unable to compete in the modern world, even though they admirably continue to resist modernity.
>"Given that you believe you learned the American national identity in a public school..."
I'm not American. I'm Canadian. And no I did not learn the national identity strictly through school, it was through the people I met at school. My peers, friends, etc. It was those interactions that were facilitated through the public school system.
Seems like mods should just change the title to match the published headline?
E-Scooter rental companies and their effect on urban spaces is absolutely a topic germane to HN discussion, and a simple change to match the actual WSJ article as published does away with the headline misrepresentation.
I've been searching for an alternative to Android Auto itself. After an update some months ago, launching the app takes me to a settings panel declaring that Android Auto is no longer supported for phone screens (i.e. it is now only designed to run while linked to a car with a compatible display), and the app itself refuses to run as it used to on just the phone.
Add that functionality to the Google graveyard, I guess...
Others in the thread have already mentioned how truly ridiculous and histrionic this Jacobin article is, so I'll skip to the plainly false part of their conclusion: that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D.
That's probably largely true of 5th Edition. It's a focus group led, neutered, milquetoast version of Dungeons & Dragons. All of it's official product releases are whittled down to the least possibly offensive common denominator. And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.
But the auteur creators aren't gone and creativity hasn't been killed. From Patrick Stuart's (the writer, not the actor) projects like Silent Titans[1] to the bizarrely delightful Mörk Borg[2] to Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands[3] to the space horror game Mothership[4]...
There's an insane amount of creativity in the design of tabletop roleplaying games today, and I haven't even moved that far from D&D-alike gameplay.
What's more, these auteurs are making good money without optimizing for maximum money as if they were MBAs with a drug habit to support or SV startups with "angel" investors demanding an insane return. Look up the Kickstarters for any of those projects in the paragraph above.
Even for a Jacobin piece, this article is extremely myopic, poorly researched, and comically fatalistic.
> And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.
Second attempt, actually. WOTC had a monthly-subscription webapp offering in the 4th Edition era, with (digital) subscriptions to the magazines, a character builder, and promises of a virtual tabletop that AFAIK never shipped.
While I have my issues with Jacobin, the article isn't about "RPG culture", it's specifically about Dungeons & Dragons. You say their conclusion "that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D" is false, yet then go on to say
> That's probably largely true of 5th Edition […] and the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.
…which is absolutely supporting their argument, isn't it? "Hasbro's steadily killing the artistic and creative part of D&D" and "there is an insane amount of creativity in RPG culture" aren't mutually exclusive! One doesn't disprove the other. They can both be true.
No one company has owned D&D this century. Most of it is in the public domain (Open Game Content), with some fiddly details restricted. For a while Hasbro's latest D&D was selling less than Paizo's, although I think Hasbro regained the lead. And even in the 1990s, you could share your own house rules, monsters, spells, etc. as much as you liked as long as you did not try to make money from them. RPG designers have very little control over what people do when they sit down at the table.
If the author thinks that the latest version of D&D published by the biggest corporation is the 'real' one, that just shows that he has adopted the corporate ideas he claims to reject.
The author is very clearly making histrionic statements about the state of the entire hobby, so my use of broader terms is entirely appropriate. I'm using the term "D&D" in the same way every RPG gamer I know has ever used it: as the genericized trademark that it is, often synonymous in everyday use with some broader sense of tabletop RPGs.
In some places, the author focuses narrowly in on TSR and Hasbro and D&D as a specific property. In other places, the author makes broad, sweeping, silly statements about the hobby as a whole, and implies equally silly despairing nonsense about other hobbies (which is beyond the scope of this thread to even look into).
> Without the market’s demands and the accompanying dictates that stifle creativity in favor of profitability, TTRPGs could have been part of the public domain, with gamers free to build and expand on whatever ideas they wanted, either their own or ones drawn from other sources.
> Game Wizards is not just a captivating story about how one man lost control of his dream. It’s also an object lesson in the way capitalism invariably strips even our leisure activities of their communal joy.
The author is playing a semantic game and moving the goalposts in order to commiserate where there is no imposed misery. Just consumers who sometimes make choices that lead them into boring walled gardens, while still having the choice to walk out of those walled gardens and find the rest of the forest.
I've found that second-hand bookstores are good for figuring out which books people treasure the most. Pick an author, scan that author's bibliography, and visit second-hand bookstores.
The works you can't find? Those are the ones people treasure.
Or, at least, the ones people won't part with for some reason.
> The works you can't find? Those are the ones people treasure.
I would say that you're mostly right, but it depends on the size and number of the print runs. If something's deemed a "classic" (frequently reprinted), or if it was a modern bestseller (mass printing), you'll find multiple copies and versions regardless of whether people treasure the book.
Despite being treasured by many people, there are tons of copies of "The Hobbit" in second-hand bookshops. 100 million copies sold will do that! [0] Yet there aren't many copies of "Tree and Leaf", and as you suggest, it's usually treasured thus not easily found. It was a special delight when I found a copy while browsing, as I'd never seen it before and haven't since, and I'm certainly not giving up my copy.
Frank Herbert's Dune, for example, has been difficult to find in second-hand bookshops (even the old mass market paperback) because there is (and has been for some time... thanks COVID) a film adaption by a prominent director (Denis Villeneuve) on the cusp of release.
The best used book stores are the ones that build their stock by buying the libraries of retired/deceased scholars. The few that I used to know went out of business, so I don't know what happens to good collections now.
This is an apples to oranges comparison. Roman civilization lasted a good deal longer than the Roman Empire: ~2,200 years of civilization (753 B.C. to A.D. 1453) versus ~500 years of Empire (27 B.C. to A.D. 476). And that's if you don't count, as other commenters have, the Roman institutions (including the Catholic Church) surviving the Western Empire's political collapse as the continuation of a broader Western civilization.
>Borders are a great way to distinguish two elements from one another, but using too many of them can make your design feel busy and cluttered.
>Instead, try adding a box shadow, using contrasting background colors, or simply adding more space between elements.
Emphasis mine. The above may be reasonable advice if you're building a low information density app for nonproductive content consumption... Or a touchscreen only app where all interactive elements must be at least a finger tall and wide... But it drives me absolutely batty when extra white space appears in software that I want to use to process/analyze a lot of information and actually get stuff done. And numerous examples on the website just make things... Farther apart and/or bigger.
I still rue the day Spotify fattened up its row height for all lists in the app. It's less readable than it was if I can't read as many song names as before without scrolling.
I don't want to rag on the book overall without reading it, especially given how many in this thread seem to love it and the table of contents does hint at good ideas within, but that seems like a terrible set of examples to lead with. 'More white space' is not universally good design advice. Give me design in the school of TMUX and Bloomberg Terminal any day over extra white space for the sake of 'readability.' As much information as it is possible to present clearly on a given screen.