Software Wishlist / UX Gaps - Recent History is Underrated

Here's a short rant / feature request / app-idea for anyone so inclined

 

Problem Statement 

Currently, all too often, too many apps + tools are so "future focussed" that they neglect to show *what happened recently*.

Examples:

* 1) Weather apps by and large only show the forecast for the upcoming 24 hours. 

   Of the ones that do happen to show what has happened recently (e.g. Metservice NZ), they only show what happened up till Midnight on the current day. Which means, as soon as the clock ticks over midnight, you have no idea what happened over the last few hour.s.  The main use-case for something like this is answering the question:  "How 'bad' was the weather while I was asleep / outside doing something?"   (i.e. how hot it got, or how cold it got overnight, or how windy, or how heavy was the rain?)

 

* 2) Event Listing Sites

   AFAIK, *ALL* of the event listing sites here in NZ these days only really show events that haven't started and/or that you can still buy tickets for. There is no way then to find out what that random event you passed by on the way home was about (so that maybe you can try to get tickets next year, or the next time it is on). 

   While I can understand that they may do this as they make their income from showing things they can still earn money for (*), they are really reducing their utility by doing this!   

   (*) I also understand that they might not want to keep paying for hosting of all such things indefinitely may not be a worthwhile expense either!  However, surely leaving things up for at least 24-48 hrs after the scheduled end of an event wouldn't hurt, right? 

  Therefore, for this case, I put them them the proposition:  Your sites are meant to fuel the fire of "FOMO" (Fear of Missing Out), leading to people paying for tickets to flock to these things. By refusing to show people "what they have missed on on", you're leaving a whole lot on the table (i.e. all the potential customers who didn't even know what they have missed cannot have had any fear of missing out, as they by missing out, their "fear potential" has been actualised already!) 

  Or to put it in other terms: These sites are neglecting to "play the long game by seeding future demand"! 

 

Proposal

For anyone considering:

A) Doing updates to these services, OR

B)  Creating a startup, but looking for an idea

 

Please seriously give a thought to building a version of these services that shows you the recent past! 

Linux Annoyances Rant - Solutions for Rough UX Sought

This post covers 3 main annoyances I'm currently working on solving across various Linux machines I have to use. I'm mainly only talking about the issues that I haven't got solved on other machines I used...

 

1) Taskbars - Fully un-grouped windows, absolutely not ordered or grouped by window, and able to be freely reordered.

NOTE: I have long had this problem solved on Windows (i.e. using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker), and also on KDE (yay!  Those guys rock!), but on the RH 9 type Gnome-based Linux we're in the process of migrating to?  That's the one I'm currently seeking solutions!  Of course though, all of these could've been solved if everyone didn't do the stupid thing that they learned from Windows 7, OR perhaps they learned that from Apple first?!  Whatever...

2) Gnome Button Ordering

3) Kubuntu (Auto) Update Checks on Resume from Sleep

  

Linux Setup - Partitioning Editor Feature Requests

Based on my experiences today, I'd like to offer the following feature requests to Linux install tool partition editor UI devs:

1) If you have to use MiB, just give us an alternative units drop down for MB (defaulting to MB), and do the necessary calculations / conversions under the hood

2) It's high time to add the option to do a "Standard multi-partition install" equivalent of the "Erase Disk (and create single partition install)". This would essentially ensure you have separate root and home directories (*), with swap + anything else needed all getting auto included too. All of these would be set to default sizes relative to the available disk space, that can then be tweaked as desired (ie mainly OS vs Home dir split).

(*)  In this day and age, that would seem a sensible default choice, given how many OS's need reinstalling every few years anyway, whereas your personal files are often a lot more persistent (i.e. you really don't want to have to keep restoring those from backups all the time)

3) Lower priority, but could we also get the option to reorder partitions we're newly creating / don't exist yet. Makes it easier to figure out how much space we can play with?

EDIT:  Turns out most distros use the "calamares" installer. Hence, I guess these feature requests should be directed towards that project!

Draft Feature List for Aligorith's Unnamed/Hypothetical Programming Language - 2019 Edition

Perhaps it is finally time to think about creating my own programming language? It would be that long-term passion project that I can truly have complete control over, with the potential for truly minimal dependencies, and in which I can finally build that proper "property system" + "node evaluation engine" + UI toolkit" that will fully work the way that I want it to, and then use this as the basis for all the projects in my backlog which will require similar structural/framework support.  (I could also formalise that documentation system I've been using on all personal projects - the one I documented here once many years ago).

I'm not that crazy yet...   yet!

Then again, I have been thinking about these matters more and more over the past year, so it's highly possible that this may still happen. If I can muster up enough time/energy away from everything else I'm working on (OR if external constraints expedite this process for whatever reason).

So, if I was to write my own programming language/environment, what can you expect it to have. Here is an incomplete list of the important things I'd do.

Additional Workflow Issues in Blender - Followup for Previous List of Limitations

After mulling over this for a few days, I realised that there were a number of items which I'd actually left off my initial list. So, here goes...

Learnings from Promo Video Project - Improvements Needed for Blender

In this post, I'll go over some of the problems I encountered while working on the promo video, along with some proposed solutions for some of these. As always, this process has only highlighted the need for developers to seriously use the software they (and/or their fellow devs) write: it's only through such exercises that we can really pick up on things that are a pain in actual usage (vs any largely hypothetical assumptions we may hold/have held).

NOTE: At least one of these improvements is now in trunk. Namely, the "reverse" option for the Build Modifier (5c74ac2). More details later...