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Search - "stack layout"
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!Rant
Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.
Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.
"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...8 -
If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.
For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.
Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.
its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.
other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.
all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.
this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.8 -
A few months ago I ranted about how my first encounter with Assembly was hopefully the last one
Here I am, again, with my second Assembly encounter. However, this time I'm able to read and understand it more, such that I'm even able to compute stack layouts. I don't even hate it that much anymore.
I guess I'm walking the path I couldn't defeat
*cries in %rax*6 -
My brain literally hurts after today. Client gave me a task to make some fucking masonry like layout, but he wanted to sort items manually and also he wanted to manually stack two items one above another. That was so fucking hard to make, I can't remember anything harded. Shit...
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The networking group at my day job, hooooooolly crap I have some unprintable words. But keeping it professional:
* Days to turn around simple firewall whitelisting requests
* Expecting other teams to know the network layout despite not sharing that information anywhere and going out of their way to not share it
* Adding bureaucracy in the form of separate Word doc forms despite having a ticketing system - for no justifiable reason
* Breaking production systems multiple times per month
* Calling in with problems that are clearly network related, being told it’s our systems, and then the problems magically go away even though they swear they didn’t touch anything
* Outright verifiable lies or vague non-answers when they’re not talking to someone at the director level or a vendor from an outside company on conference calls
* Worse packet loss and throughput on our LAN than my home ISP
Doing anything with these clowns is my single biggest source of stress right now. I can’t wait until we get a full SDN stack set up and then we won’t have to deal with them for day-to-day needs any longer.
My boss swears it’s better that we’re not managing the network directly, but I’m pretty sure my friend’s dog could be loosed into the data center to chew on fiber, and eventually the pairs would be connected in such a way as to improve performance.1 -
Sadly I have to work on MS Windows at work .. and i just had to go to stack overflow just to remove an annoying keyboard layout .. user friendly my ass ..
https://superuser.com/questions/... -
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On content:
Never type something again that you can copy paste!!!
Use your bloody concentration on getting the layout right.
We are not I medieval times and you work on a computer not a stack of paper.
Jesus.
NEVER AGAIN!
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I'm starting with native mobile development to create an app with a lot of potential.
Since I didn't know a lot about this field (being a full stack web developer) I started doing some research about what technologies I should choose.
The app, having the need to be cross platform, I needed a cross platform toolkit. Although the app could make a move on to truly native code (Swift + Java), it would take a long time; hence I would require a faster short term solution.
The best option was Xamarin (for native code). However, due to certain app requirements, I would have to write a lot of platform specific code; defeating Xamarin's purpose.
The next option was a hybrid mobile app. Ionic2 was the best option here but I don't like ng-2.
In the end I came upon the realisation that a web-app was the only true cross-platform solution.
As I delved deeper into mobile app development, I found out that the webstack lacked a lot. My conclusion was, that for a truly great (cross platform) experience, we need to improve the web domain.
HTML elements can become better (more XAML like). A native templating API, to forgo the need for libraries like ReactJS or VueJS.
Better layout models. Flexbox is good but can improve. CSS should be more like Sass/stylus.
And lastly we need a better way to make our web app dynamic. JavaScript is fine, but I like the way Swift/Xamarin work. It makes things more formal.
NOTE: These are just my opinions and I'm probably wrong in many places so forgive me.