Will apps as prepackaged products lose importance over what they enable — the skills or data sources they add? The AI chat interface is proliferating across apps, but it seems more likely we will be bringing our own favourite assistant to them, pulling and accessing specific capabilities.

Sean Goedecke: “Much of the complexity is produced by a small set of what I call wicked features, which interfere with every other feature. For instance, adding a whole new user type: once you do that, you have to ask can this user type access this feature for every feature for the rest of the company’s life.”

Jim Nielsen laments how Tahoe has introduced icons in menus everywhere.

Accounts, notifications, feature announcements, forced updates — a solid catalogue of modern app annoyances.

David Galbraith: AI buttons are different from, say Photoshop menu commands in that they can just be a description of the desired outcome rather than a sequence of steps (incidentally why I think a lot of agents’ complexity disappears). For example Photoshop used to require a complex sequence of tasks (drawing around elements with a […]

A deep dive on the micro-interactions that made Honk (a defunct messaging app) stand out. Interesting to see so much experimentation on UIs that pretty much everyone else does the same way.

Some examples of how AI is being integrated in apps — and by integrated I don’t mean slapping a floating button with a chat interface: While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX. I […]

Sometimes practical examples work best to make a point.

Redmonk: Most toolchains, from where the first lines of code are written through test, build, integration and deployment all the way out to production, are made up of a patchwork quilt of products and services from different suppliers. […] In order to make the life of a developer easier, rather than harder, a quality developer […]

A reminder that the best emails are plain text and nothing else. Not only they read well on any screen (even on a watch), they actually perform better: The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients and had 3.3x more clicks than the designed email. The plain, unstyled emails […]

I am pleased to find out I am not the only one frustrated by the behaviour of the back button in Photos or bewildered by where it will take me in Music. There’s a growing list of apps, developed directly by Apple, that would benefit from having proper navigation but have opted for an erratic […]

And they were very meticulous about it (via Benjan Mayo)

I kind of hate messaging these days. Over the years different software have imposed on their users FOMO inducing features that lead us to this ridiculous reality in which we all collectively agreed that a response to a text needs to be returned within minutes, no matter the content nor the urgency. I sometimes choose […]

Max Rudberg propone diversi accorgimenti per gestirlo al meglio, e farsene una ragione. Perché, del resto, Apple non vuole che lo si nasconda: Apple writes in the HIG: “Don’t attempt to hide the device’s rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. […]

Roman Cheplyaka le elenca in un articolo — dal ‘qualcuno ha appena prenotato questa stanza’ alla super offerta, Booking manipola i visitatori generando un senso d’urgenza che spesso non esiste. Interessante come esempio e lunga lista di cose da non fare se volete essere rispettati dai vostri utenti.

Chris Coyer ha raccolto alcune opinioni sulla direzione che sta prendendo il web, per chi il web lo fa. Ideare, strutturare e sviluppare un sito web per ‘pagine’ è per esempio un modus operandi che abbiamo ereditato dal lavorare su carta — riviste, giornali, etc. La fluidità del web, la necessità di funzionare su device e schermi completamente diversi, […]

Rands in Repose: In the history of keyboards, I have never been as inept as I’ve been with the Touch Bar keyboard. I’ve been finishing this piece for the last hour and I’ve been keeping track of the number of times I’ve accidentally hit a Touch Bar button, and that number is nine. The total […]

Provate a visitare il sito di Ryanair con javascript disabilitato e, sorpresa — non solo non funzionerà nulla, ma nemmeno apparirà nulla. La ragione è che il sito di Ryanair è stato rifatto, due anni fa circa, completamente in Angular ignorando buone pratiche come il progressive enhancement: javascript, invece di migliorare le funzionalità del sito, è essenziale affinché funzioni. La stessa […]