keyboards and power users

Last week I wrote on my blog and facebook:

For years I've been digging using a laptop on my workdesk with additional monitors hanging out above it - I like how so much remains constant whether I'm on at the desk or on the go, and most external keyboards don't make it easy to put a trackpad as close at hand, or rather close at thumb, as a laptop.
However I seem to be in a minority at work, and most of my peers use some kind of external keyboard, either with the laptop closed or perched above as another external monitor.
Back in the day, developers used desktops, and so this was a moot issue, but I feel like external keyboards are more popular among developers now than they were 5 years ago or so. (I might be wrong on this.) And I wonder if it's just the heat issue - laptops, especially these thin ones, run hot, and it's not always the most pleasant thing to have on your fingertips.
Heh, at least for now, developers using external keyboards even with their Macbooks means the famous MacPro touchbar is even more useless, unless Apple makes a special keyboard  that has it. (I got a new laptop with it and have to take care not to accidentally brush its virtual esc key... Douglas Adams warned us about this!)

A talented FB friend of mine, Seneca Menard wrote in the comments

I can't stand laptop keyboards for many reasons: 

1-the keys are not deep thus it's very easy to hit multiple keys on accident plus you get less tactile and audio feedback when you're successfully hitting the keys, which lead to further errors.
2-the laptops usually don't have a numpad, a good set of keys for ins, del, pgup, pgdn, etc and even the arrow keys often get a terrible position and size and so you get user errors when using them without looking.  All of those keys are precious to a hardcore PC user like me that has thousands of hotkeys and so they have to all physically exist, and have a specific position and size. :p
3-the "function" key is horrendous. I almost never use those yet they're then responsible for moving around all the vital modifier keys like alt and Ctrl and whatnot. So my production speed gets destroyed because all the keys I'm dependent on were destroyed (in my subconscious memory of where which keys are) by a key I'll never use! Ughhhhhh.
4-most keyboard designers don't put enough importance into the position and size of high priority keys like enter and backspace. And so these keys that you press more often than any other keys on the keyboard end up getting mis-clicked by the user and thus slow the user down
5-every new laptop gets a different keyboard so you're always going to not be up to full typing speed because the keys are moving around every time you buy a new PC which is quite often
6-most keyboards have poor F-key layouts. I like my keyboard because there's a space between every 4 keys and so I can easily feel my way around them without looking or quickly jump to a key visually without reading the labels.  As if their size and spacing wasn't important enough to me, when I heard the new MacBooks now don't have any physical f keys at all it blew my mind!  Do these people not even use computers for work when they're making design decisions like that?!?!  :(
7-Then there's extra random stuff like how I like a calculator button or a play pause button (and these exist as standalone buttons so they easy to find without ever looking), or how some keyboards have palm rests, or how I like that my keyboard is not built into a flat laptop surface and is instead raised off of my desk so I can easily get my hands into proper typing positions without looking at the keyboard by feeling for the bottom left front corner of the keyboard and then my fingers all fall into place.  Or how some users like having split keyboards for wrist ergonomics, etc etc etc.
I go crazy whenever I'm slowed down by the input device(s) I'm using so that's why I use an ancient keyboard and *only* that keyboard.  It's over 20 years old and still working great and I have a couple of others as backup if it ever did die.
So hopefully that explains why a number of us don't use laptop keyboards.  :)

It was fascinating reading this mini-rant. It sounds like folk like Seneca are really working needing a flowstate, and so being comfortable with the hardware is critical. 

I can only somewhat empathize, being a little more superficial in my interactions - but I know how painful it is when there's overall system lag when using any computer - eventually it builds up and manifests as a kind of physical tension.

smilie when you say that, pard'ner

On my company's blog, Shayan wrote about Text and Emoji analysis on CarGurus text and chat.

hot hands hot hands

For years I've been digging using a laptop on my workdesk with additional monitors hanging out above it - I like how so much remains constant whether I'm on at the desk or on the go, and most external keyboards don't make it easy to put a trackpad as close at hand, or rather close at thumb, as a laptop.

But I seem to be in a minority, and most of my peers use some kind of external keyboard, either with the laptop closed or perched above as another external monitor.

Back in the day, developers used desktops, and so this was a moot issue, but I feel like external keyboards are more popular among developers now than they were 5 years ago or so. (I might be wrong on this.) And I wonder if it's just the heat issue - laptops, especially these thin ones, run hot, and it's not always the most pleasant thing.

Heh, at least for now, that means the famous MacPro touchbar is even more useless for developers, unless Apple makes a special keyboard with it included. I got a new laptop and have to take care not to accidentally brush its virtual esc key... Douglas Adams warned us about this:

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wavebands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

 Considering he wrote that in the late 70s, he was amazingly prescient - about these touchbars, and about all these gesture interfaces...

making the ipod and the iphone

The Daring Fireball podcast "The Talk Show" briefly mentioned Pixo - they made the OS that all the classic iPods ran. I can't find many videos focusing on the OS in action, alas, but it had such a beautiful look, and was so elegantly merged with the famous iPod clickwheel that it's almost hard to believe it wasn't from Apple itself.

It's easy to forget how amazing "1,000 songs in your pocket" was. Certainly that was something my PalmPilot wasn't doing then! And when the main competitors of the time were a skipping CD-man with like 12-20 tracks, or a linear tape system with the same kind of limitations where you can't skip tracks, really... it's stunning. (Also stunning is how relying on local music storage of any kind indicates you're a bit of an old fogey...)

Researching that, the super-crude prototypes for the first iPhone also make for some interesting reading... both are as astonishingly ugly as the iPod was beautiful!

Also: here's a cool but old  video about "The Future of iPod". I love these attempts to predict the "next" iPod or iPhone, made way back when.  Some are clearly parodies, but others are serious, and some more or less land on the simplicity the first iPhone offered - and then there are ones that presume the scroll wheel was a critical identity element, so they throw in a virtual onscreen version.

WAVEing to accessibilty

https://wave.webaim.org/ - WAVE is a useful - and VERY fast - tool, showing possible accessibility issues on the site. You can get a browser plugin for chrome or firefox.

It's a little unfortunate that it doesn't have a sense of relative importance of various transgression - a slight "boy who cried WOLF!" effect is definitely present - but still, it's a great free starting place. (Especially in this age where public companies have a legal responsibility for good a11y, and are at risk for lawsuits when they are out of compliance.)

(Heh, and for one of the first times, I find it easy to empathize with this kind of thing-- my 40-something year old eyes are slowly developing low light contrast issues and losing a bit of the close up focus they used to have...)

not overthinking: block specific AJAX Urls in chrome needs no special tools

Just recording a moment of duh for myself --

at work a page that is broken on my developer box (with an Ajax request failing) pointed out that the way we were displaying Ajax errors might be borked, but I wasn't sure if the error reporting borkage was "my fault" -

I assumed I would need a plugin/extension/app like Postman or Charles "Tamper Chrome or what not to recreate the error state when I was, but actually Chrome's Developer Tools Network tab handles it easily enough - just right click on the specific call and "Block request URL"

on blogs

https://kirk.is/2019/07/09/ - a few thoughts on how blogs kind of encapsulate many different types of personal (and public) data recording grew into something sort of interesting. To me. (Which is a pretty low bar to meet)

link: first mobile

https://zenorocha.com/the-technology-stack-i-used-to-build-my-first-mobile-app/

run less software

https://www.intercom.com/blog/run-less-software/  as I get older (and so therefore dumber and wiser (hopefully/probably not too much of either) I really appreciate the idea of reducing cognitive load...

Same energy: http://boringtechnology.club/

...see also Joel on Software's old article Fire and Motion, both the parts about how some mornings it's tough to get going, and the importance of not being distracted by Flavor of the Week technologies...

note to self: google map's api got expensive and using openlayers as replacement

A while back Google decided it was being too charitable with usage of its Maps API so it cranked up the fees (the most common figure is "by 1400%") to monetize it better.

So I found usage on Porchfest days was costing me a couple hundred bucks for the month. Whoops!

This page has some alternative APIs. Unfortunately, the most obvious candidate to replace it, openlayers doesn't have the friendliest documentation, and gets pretty complex - it's a tool built for serious power-usage, and the examples page is flooded with tons of semi-esoteric things you can do - frustrating when you just want to throw some porch locations on a map and have a little info box pop up when you click one.

The example on https://www.festinosolutions.com/blog/ seems to pretty much cover it (though the way it's the only thing at that URL gives me pause - I posted its working example at https://porchfest.info/temp/festinosolutions/ )

Of course going down this route  will point out the hundred little things I learned to do acceptably well in Google Maps and need to relearn - details like icon sizes and default zoom levels and what not.

FOLLOWUP: Googling a bit more, https://leafletjs.com/ comes up a lot - it seems to cover that "map with marker icons that open informational popups" sweetspot pretty well...

MORE FOLLOWUP: Yeah, Leaflet really is the sweet spot for this kind of thing! The only thing in my usecase that wasn't covered by the first two quick start tutorials is having numbers on the icons... this page on simple numbered markers with leaflet has the solution I like best. I think the only changes might be adding a line-height: 25px; to the CSS - and I might double back and do a 2x icon for it.

jony ive out, and monitoring the monitor situation...

Gruber was one of the first to note that Jony Ives was leaving Apple and his opinions influenced my views.

I agree with him that, that while he has a singular vision (and was interesting seeing his relationship with Jobs as a bit of Lennon/McCartney) to the extent that he was responsible for thinner at all costs including this keyboard mess, it's good to move past that.

The other thing is how I never would have guessed that the "we will still partner together" - but I think I have to play wait and see given the coverage I've seen elsewhere.

When Jason Snell was on Gruber's podcast, they got to talking about the Pro Display XDR and its $5000 price tag and infamous $1000 stand - and for the tiny but prestigious audience Apple is courting, that is probably a good deal.. but they pointed out that there's another market that's underserved right now - there's no good, medium-cost Apple-centric desktop monitor, either for people looking to dock a laptop or for Mini users.

They mentioned Apple stopped that collaboration with LG -  and also disabled the old ability for an iMac to be chained in as an external display (ignoring its own built in computer, so to speak) And that there's a division with what the majority of PC folks want - that gaming generally looks for fewer pixels or at least always greater refresh speed, and what a programmer or designer would be hoping for...