Birman's new podcast reminded me that I really love listening to smart people discuss UX. You know, that format when they say obvious things and get outraged that software doesn't work properly, and I'm like "yeahhh exactly, annoying".
Well, for example, that Apple taught everyone for years in HIG that you can't interrupt the user, you need to let them do what they came to the app for. And now at the start of their own apps they show modal "What's New" or several permission requests. For their own apps, on their own devices, yeah. 🤡
I remember the thought that guidelines and native components almost don't exist anymore and everyone makes their own UI kits. I still can't really come to terms with this, but it's true. On the web they never existed (Bootstrap or something?). On desktops everything is different (each framework has its own bicycle). On mobile there was some time after Material appeared, but it's clearly over, look at Instagram, then TikTok, and then Twitter or YouTube. Everything is different. And we just need to accept this probably as a new reality.
Or a non-obvious thought that before we could understand that the computer was heavily loaded by how loudly it hums and wheezes. And you could do something about it if you didn't launch anything like that. And now many of us have MacBooks on ARM, which at best suffer, heat up, but generally don't make any sounds. And there some Gradle daemon holds Java at several gigs of RAM.
Never even thought that radio buttons are called that by analogy with mechanical buttons, pressing which releases already pressed ones. Remember there used to be such on tape recorders?
To be fair, the podcast also reminded me that smart people still tend to hate on Windows and Android from old memory, with old arguments. Not that there's nothing to hate, it's just that the arguments need to be updated somehow.
PS. On macOS the dock is now visually separated from the edge of the screen by a few pixels, but it's clickable in that gap. Now you have to live with this fact somehow.