@enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
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enkiv2

@enkiv2@eldritch.cafe

A pig in a cage on antibiotics.
Ex-Xanadu, resident hypertext crank.

"Under electronic conditions, there is no escape" -McLuhan
Elsewhere:
@enkiv2 https://mastodon.social/@enkiv2 https://oulipo.social/@nkiv2 https://me.dm/@enkiv2

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enkiv2, to random
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old tech storytime: SMIL is a w3c standard XML dialect for mixed media and vector graphics animations from 1997. it was developed by apple, microsoft, and realmedia -- the owners of the three biggest software media players (quicktime, windows media player, and realplayer). a SMIL page is about as interactive as a DVD menu -- not exactly turing-complete but potentially substantially complex -- and the SMIL standard contains all of the media control elements later added to HTML5, the whole of what later became SVG plus animation controls, and a bunch of other features that have not yet been brought into other standards. had it taken off, most of the things people used complex javascript+css hacks for in the early naughts (back when it was called 'DHTML' and was largely graphical flourishes like animated menus) would become trivial in SMIL, as would most of the things web developers used embedded flash for (such as videos). so why does nobody know about SMIL now? why don't our browsers have SMIL support? because microsoft released a deliberately-incompatible implementation of SMIL built into internet explorer the day before the standard was finalized in order to fragment the SMIL user base & sink the product, basically just as a way to waste apple & realmedia's time and effort (a replay of what they did to IBM a couple years earlier with the OS/2 project). most of webtech for the past 20 years has consisted of reinventing SMIL poorly instead of just using SMIL.

enkiv2,
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@alcinnz
nope. when i first got into it, more than a decade ago, there were no working full open source implementations that ran on modern OSes

enkiv2, to random
@enkiv2@eldritch.cafe avatar

'hey enki, why the fuck are you still on twitter?' well, because so long as i have ad blockers on, every byte i transfer between me and twitter costs elon musk money. praxis is that you and your two thousand closest friends all run scripts that upload 3 minute gifs of 4k-resolution white noise every 2 seconds.

enkiv2, to random
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Bad idea of the day: fediblock every instance with more than one user

misc, to random
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Are there good examples of FOSS projects led by UX designers? If the answer is "obviously yes" or "that doesn't make sense" feel free to shoot me down, I'm ready.

enkiv2,
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@misc
there are definitely FOSS projects with a UX focus (ex., all the smalltalk flavors) but I don't know if anybody involved has a background in institutionalized UX...

enkiv2,
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@misc
(having a UX expert doing UX on an open source project feels sort of like having a corporate HR manager doing all the organizing for your revolutionary vanguard cell: it's applying skills that have been highly specialized for a commercial / standardized context to something that can & probably should be more flexible.)

enkiv2,
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@misc
i'm sure some of those exist, but i'm also sure they're rare

it's basically the same problem that all the "non-technical entrepreneurs" on HN looking desperately for somebody to do the coding, but without the promise of potential profit

open source projects that aren't spun off from corporate close-source projects tend to be one-person projects for a long period (often forever), so whoever is the "lead" initially needs to wear all the hats until the thing is functional enough to organically attract new contributors. during this phase, if the dev can't do something or can't do it well, and it's not absolutely necessary, then it doesn't get done. but a lot of devs also have a UX background of some kind, so i'm sure there are some projects that were started by people who can code but prefer not to, and who hand over all the coding work in favor of focusing on UX once the project gets big enough to have an actual team behind it

video game projects are a little more likely to involve non-technical people at early stages, so if you want to find a case where the project lead can't code, take a look at open source video game projects done by small teams. (katawa shojo was like this if i recall, though that's complicated by the early history of development)

enkiv2,
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@misc
there are a lot of software projects run along the lines of some non-technical person having an idea & then paying contractors to do technical work out of their own pocket. (this is the norm for VN development outside of japan, for instance.) but such projects don't tend to be open source, because of the up-front costs of commissioning any kind of work

enkiv2,
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@misc
oh, in that case, yeah a lot of projects have UX designers involved. i'm at a loss to name a specific notable one, though. maybe look at projects that started in academia?

enkiv2,
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@misc
xanadu's almost the same as what you suggested -- ted is extremely ux-focused, and doesn't do any of the coding, but defines most of the project. it certainly changes the way everything gets approached.

a whole bunch of things from xanadu have been open sourced, but xanadu is in theory supposed to eventually turn into a business (we've been waiting since 1965). also, ted's ideas about what constitutes good ux are (like doug engelbart's) very unconventional

enkiv2,
@enkiv2@eldritch.cafe avatar

@misc
yeah, ted's attitude is "reading, writing, and taking notes should combine forking revision control and rigorous citation culture with the hair-trigger high-speed hotkey controls and flashy animations of a video game", an extremely niche position that nevertheless shows in every single demo

enkiv2, to random
@enkiv2@eldritch.cafe avatar

This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer's specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.

enkiv2,
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Hey since this is blowing up let me remind all of you that I literally wrote a book on this & related subjects.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1718167423

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