interaction
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
A Brief Rant
Stop Drawing Dead Fish
The Future of Programming
How I Build
Intelligent arrows
Website Response Times
Now I get it
Like, just a post complaining that screens should be better
An Article by Matt WebbIt’s been 19 years since Pixar released Monsters, Inc. with all that CGI hair. Where are my hairy icons? Ones that get all long and knotted as the notifications number goes up.
Why can’t I feel my phone? I found that paper from 2010 (when I was complaining about keyboards) about using precision electrostatics to make artificial textures on touchscreens.
I should be able to run my thumb over my phone while it’s in my pocket and feel bumps for apps that want my attention. Touching an active element should feel rough. A scrollbar should *slip. Imagine the accessibility gains. But honestly I don’t even care if it’s useful: 1.5 billion smartphone screens are manufactured every year. For that number, I expect bells. I expect whistles.
Trees and graphs
A tree is a kind of graph, but a graph can be considerably more complex than a tree.
I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things.
Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city.