Post

@scottjenson That’s a great talk, thank you very much for your work.

@scottjenson brilliant. Thanks :)

@scottjenson Fabulous, even for a layperson such as myself.

And, in addition to text editing, I've often opined that the onscreen keyboard experience is utterly terrible, and yet Apple seem inexplicably happy with it (judging by how it never improves).

Many thanks.

@scottjenson I've already watched it, very interesting talk!

@scottjenson excellent talk, thanks!

@scottjenson "KDE saw my post and fixed it"... And we should be talking about why we put Gnome stickers on our kit.

Gnome UI is like one of those sock monkeys where at first you notice that the mouth and one eye is missing, and each time you come back to it a hand or a leg or something else is suddenly missing. They are aping MacOS sleekness without supplying the kind of "advanced tab" or option-key advanced features that keep the Mac UI powerful. Their main dev ethos is to lop off something if it presents any kind of maintenance challenge. To add insult to injury, their env is roughly the same size as KDE.

@scottjenson I have an interest in making experimental window managers for Linux, but I'm under the impression such a project is a significant undertaking in engineering effort. Is that generally correct? Is there a way forward for small time hobby experimentation, or is this sort of thing pretty much the exclusive territory of large organizations now days?

@scottjenson thanks for the talk. some of it reminded me how we can't really rely on drag for as much, specifically on desktop, because of the divergent ergonomics of mouse vs trackpad (which a huge % of users now have in place of a mouse, and dragging is usually markedly worse).
having to support practically everything and be deeply multi-paradigm is such a formidable constraint and it makes it harder to make the kinds of exciting bold commitments that uncover promising new directions.

@scottjenson "There isn't anything left to copy!"

…

Looks at #HaikuOS …

😒

@scottjenson Thank you for the great talk!

I am not at all an expert on user interfaces. But I recently thought that Linux is so versatile. It runs on mobile phones and web servers. The difference is the user interface.

Our state government is currently moving to Linux and I thought - why don't they build a specialized Desktop that fits their special needs?

E.g. people aren't supposed to save files on their device anymore. But how do you integrate "the cloud" in a way that it seems to be locally, and you hide all the local stuff.

And they have their special eFiles system. How do you create a UI around an important application?

I wrote some loose thoughts about that in my blog (German), hoping that someone might pick them up: https://kaffeeringe.de/2025/12/12/ein-modernes-betriebssystem-fuer-die-arbeitwelt/

@scottjenson seems interesting. Maybe put it in PeerTube too? (So I can watch it)

@scottjenson

Hi Scott,

Just watched your talk, awesome. I love UX, I have loved computers for so many years, and I am so disappointed at everything we lost since the original Mac.

I am also the author of MacFlim (https://www.macflim.com/macflim2), and I was stunned when it came on screen when you talked about the original Mac! (screenshot attached).

I don’t know if it is random or on purpose. MacFlim was created as a joke, and as most joke it is about a very serious point, exploring a possible future where we still use those Mac and continued exploring what they could do. MacFlim 1.0 is an hommage at the original Mac user interface, with multiple windows, etc. MacFlim 2.0, which is a couple orders of magnitude more sophisticated and a real movie player, steals from the future by implementing a Netflix-like user interface. I think we regressed. There is so much more we should be doing with the monsters we have under our desk on in our pocket…

Anyway, that made my day, thanks!

Btw, the “the click doesn’t bring the window front because it could be the start of a drag” comes from NeXTstep. It infuriates me that we forgot that in so many desktop UIs. Or the subtle way one should manage the launched of an application to be sure it takes focus if the user waited, but doesn’t steal it if the user interacted with another app..

@scottjenson This talk shouldn’t be needed. But somehow it is. So, thanks for pushing this!

@scottjenson This was great, thanks!

@scottjenson This popped into my YouTube feed two days ago, loved it!