March 9, 2019

Retro Computer Terminal

I’ve always been fascinated by these old terminal when playing Fallout. In reality I’ve only ever seen them once or twice in my life. Most of the images I find on the web are 3D renders.

So I’ve been thinking about building one myself, DIY style. Right now I have a few spare parts available, an old AMD 5600K CPU-Mobo-Ram combo and an old IBM ThinkVision L150 monitor. All I need to build is a housing to put they all inside.

Problem is, I only own a few primitive hand tool, and my skill with them leaves a lot to be desired. Creating those curves probably gonna be quite a challenge. Not to mention the engineering works.

So maybe something like this SVM Commander 3D render?

Or maybe one of these real models?

msVDLL5

The possibilities are endless. Argh I’ve been losing sleep over these.

December 12, 2018

Supporting Firefox

With the news about Edge switching to a foundation using Chromium a lot of the conversation has centered on browser engines slipping into something of a monoculture. I believe these fears are coming from a good place – a monoculture certainly is not desirable, and a persistent challenge from competitors keeps tech at its best. Compounding this news was also a link floating around stating that Mozilla Firefox was staring at a market share of below 9%. What gives me pause, however, is that much of the advocacy for Firefox seems to stem from the fact that it’s not Chrome. The pure logic of such a strategy is clear, but is it particularly convincing as a technique?

Speaking more broadly for a moment, we as a society apply a lot of pressure on people to do stuff – to save the planet, and make the world a better place, and all the rest of it. Much of it is advocated through what I would describe as almost ‘fear-based’ language – kind of “do x or y will happen” type scenarios. To be fair, much of it is set up that way. There’s no real selfish benefit to e.g recycling, its pretty much about the altruism. In fact, if you read the news, the stakes are pretty high it would seem. For me, the conversation around Firefox strays too close to these heavy ultimatums. I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform – almost as hostages, rather than excited participants.

It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises. For instance, it’s arguably easier to avoid tracking with Firefox if that’s your speed. I’m sure there are other things – does Firefox beat Chrome out for speed? Or is it better featured in some areas? Perhaps Firefox is lacking things; I’ve been using WebSockets a lot recently, and Chrome’s frame-by-frame view of a WebSocket connection is invaluable. As far as I’m aware, Firefox doesn’t have this (yet). These aren’t concrete suggestions, but maybe ideas of where the conversation can go.

I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome – personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience.

Firefox is a fantastic browser, and the need to grow its market share is more pressing than ever. By making people excited to use Firefox rather than wary of using Chrome, I believe we can more effectively galvanise support for Firefox, and improve the health of the browser ‘market’ all round.

December 11, 2018

What the f*ck is Moca?

So if you live in Vietnam and use Grab, you’re probably aware that they recently ditched GrabPay (their internal payment gateway) for a 3rd party, Vietnamese based solution. While that didn’t come as a surprise since they were pressured by our government for a while already, what did come as a surprise is their choice of provider: Moca.

I thought for sure they were misspelling Momo or something, as it stands they are the largest digital wallet app in Vietnam as we speak, and is an obvious choice if you’re looking for a service like that. Surely Grab, a multi billion dollar company wouldn’t choose a non established name right? But nah, they gonna go with Moca, a name most people have never even heard before in their life. But that’s ok, competition is always good for the end users, provided that the competition is, well, competitive. Let’s go ahead and check them out. A quick google search bring me to their homepage:
image
What the fuck is this shit? The English website is damn near empty, with nothing but an address and a Facebook Fan Page plugin. It’s amazing how that logo still managed to clip some of the minimal amount of content this page has
Ok that’s a little alarming. But surely you can’t judge a mobile app by the absolutely pitiful look of their desktop website. So let’s fire up Grab and check out the real thing:
dumb moca
Ok what the fuck is this shit? You ask me for my name, I enter my name, then you validate it as a motherfucking pin? What the living fuck is wrong with you? Hire a fucking UX person, hire a fucking QA team. You want to build a product, get a fucking team to build a product. Jesus fucking Christ.
Sorry for this rant again. I’m okay with beta software being buggy, I’m very much not ok with production software that millions people use on a daily basis being buggy.
December 11, 2018

What is that sexy font Google uses in all their products?

So as I was watching the official announcement of Flutter 1.0, I once again notice that all of their typographic designs used in their product used that same font: Product Sans. It’s slick, I have to have it.

Unfortunately the only thing that Google has on its official website is basically a short message saying  ‘Nah, you can’t have it, mofo’

But in all my years as a graphic designer, I’ve never let something as trivial as a licensing statement from a multi-billion dollar company deter me from trying to get my sticky fingers on the font.

So here we are:

Could this be Google Sans?
November 26, 2018

The best way to install and manage your fonts (even without admin rights)

If you’re a font hoarder like me, you’re likely to have a folder somewhere in your cloud drive that has hundreds of thousands of TTFs, OTFs. However, the process of installing fonts had always been a daunting one.

Normally, on Linux, the poor UX ideology means you have to resort to the terminal to get things done, a most unituitive way. On Windows,you can just type the word ‘Fonts’ in the Run dialog and get access to the font folder, while it’s not ideal, it’s still far better UX than OS X and Linux. However, on Windows, there’s one major obstacle, you need admin right to get access to the system font folder. At least on OS X and Linux, you can install the fonts locally.

Historically, people had to resort to a dirty workaround, that is to install PortableApps.com. It’s a messy hack as this app wasn’t specifically designed for this purpose.

Thankfully now we have a more elegant solution.

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November 19, 2018

Path of Tencent

So recently I sent an email to Grinding Gear Games regarding recovering an old guild that me and my friends created 4 years ago. It was a lengthy email explaining my situation. I was very disappointed when it was declined, not because my request wasn’t granted, but because the response I got was a generic response that was most likely generated by a bot. Back in the old days, any request sent to their support address was handled by actual human beings, and the whole experience feel human.

Now all I got are these trashy, automated responses

I used to think being bought out by Tencent was actually good for GGG’s future, boy, was I wrong. No wonder why people call this game Path of Chinos these days

#sad

November 10, 2018

Zeplin Desktop client for Linux

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, we now have an excellent tool for screen design to work on right there on Linux. But what about design handoff? With Figma, normally you have 2 choices for handoff: one is Avocode, the other is Zeplin. Most people would prefer Zeplin since Avocode is a subscription based abomination. But there’s one problem for Linux screen designer: Zeplin does not have a desktop client for Linux. Now this isn’t much of an issue like other softwares because they have a webapp, but you can’t integrate Figma with the webapp, unfortunately.

After looking around, I realize Zeplin, like many other great web-based apps, was built on top of the execellnt ElectronJS framework, that means porting it is fairly trivial. After murking around, I came up with this, let me know if it works:

Download zeplin-linux-x64.tar.gz

Made with nativefier

So now that we’ve managed to make desktop client for both Figma and Linux, it should be trivial to integrate them right? Well not really, turns out the folks over at Figma currently only has the integration option enabled for their Windows and Mac client. If you’re a designer working on Linux right now, and need Figma & Zeplin integration, consider spamming their support blog for this feature. I mean, we did that hard part, creating the desktop clients for them, right? All they need to do now is enable integration between the 2 apps.

November 6, 2018

Sites with Bad UX Ep01

Skype:

• Chat screen disabled while the app load latest message.
What the actual fuck, I just want to scroll up like 3 lines to copy a phone number that I forgot to jot down, motherfucker. Why I have to wait for the latest message to load?
• Instance of the app embedded in Franz or Station won’t be able to view full sized image unless you have Skype Web logged in AND get this, open in a tab in your browser! Who the stupid fuck thought it’s a good idea?

Microsoft:

• Toast message uses an arrows instead of the timeless cross symbol, holy motherfuckingshit, one of the biggest tech companies in the world and still couldn’t afford a single UX designer.
• If you use Windows 10 you know they come with a malware masquerading as an AV called Windows Defender. Since it’s an OS-bundled malware, it’s worse than other malwares in that it cannot be removed, only temporarily disabled. Just like their stupid motherfucking Update prompts (I guess, because I’ve never personally been bothered by one of those prompts before, but I’ve seen people raging about it on the Interwebs)

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