Hard disagree. It's incredibly distracting and the constant movement of text, the introduction and disappearance of images within the medium makes it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the message.
It screams 'look at me, I'm really smart with all these neat effects'. But you know what interface for articles like this has served us pretty well for > 1000 years? Just the words. Please, just display the words rather than this conceit.
— Apple HIG
In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto "A word is worth a thousand pictures.
https://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html
Linked from Daring Fireball back in the day.
But in UIs you usually have to have some text equivalent somewhere, on hover or long-press or in a menu or just as text for screenreader users, so you don't generally get to avoid translation even if you take visible labels away.
And that's assuming you're lucky enough to be using a UI that clearly marks what's interactible instead of being maximally flat.
I'm currently stuck on LTE due to a power outage. The page is horrible to try to read due to most of the images being either in the process of being loaded or not loaded at all.
The style and emotional feeling of the page is the message. An article consisting of only words is not an "article like this", and if you are starting from that premise you already totally missed the author's point.
And for many people, that message is, "go away, this is not for you".
Which is a valid take if that's what the author intended, but generally speaking, when people take time to pen manifests, they expect them to be read and heeded.
You don't have to agree with the author, but I don't see any irony here!
Reader mode is a standard feature on all major browsers on both desktop and mobile. Given you're so vocal about how articles should work by just "displaying the words", I'd suggest that you acquaintance yourself with the one feature that does exactly that.
Thanks to reader mode, you get to concentrate on the message. And we get to keep our joy.
"Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied. Then came terminals and command lines. Physical knobs turned into typed commands—more powerful, but our digital world became less embodied."
I stopped reading after that. There are also missing full stops, which means it's difficult to understand what's happening.
Plus the longer paragraphs, confined to the height of their parent image, are cut off on my iPhone mini, leading to sections reading e.g.:
> controls with GUIs—graphical user interfaces. We skeumorphed the heck out of our screens, with digital switches, flat sliders, and folder icons. But we kept some of the the functionality in the physical world, with slots to stick disks into and big
What I find hilarious is that I cant tell if this took years to draw and compose or if it was 5 minutes worth of prompts. Did they knit everything? I sometimes see my art on low effort articles, I'm 99% sure they think it's AI.
The only detail I really liked was how the arrow representing the computer communicating to the user has a ring on the back so that the user can be roped in like a whale.
I totally agree with OP that the 'flat' visual style is appalling. (And gray-on-gray text is an obscenity.)
And what do you mean, disconnected from physical reality? I listed the examples where I pay with my wrist, squeeze my earbuds, draw with a pencil. I also snap photos and take videos, record with voice memos, send a pin with my location. I track AirTags, I identify plants by pointing at them, I learn constellations by aiming at them. Computing is more connected to physical reality than ever.
Another good experience was shaking my phone (an Android Motorola) to turn the flash light on and off. Another great natural movement is taking my iPhone and transfer the playing music to an Homepod by tapping on the two together.
For almost everything else I loathe touch devices. While older ones may be clunky visually, they are far more ergonomic. Yes, my phone can do a lot of stuff, but the whole process for a specific one is always clunky and companies go out of their ways to block you from altering the UX.
It would be sad if in 10,000 years we evolved to lose our tactile senses.
I'll also add the buttons and switches and knobs are not all that tactile. They are a modern human creation.
> buttons and switches and knobs are not all that tactile
But they are, though. You can touch them without pressing, and, once you get used to them, they have different textures.
I quite like force feedback generally, I have a ffb steering wheel from fanatec and a joystick from moza.there is definitely a market for this sort of thing and a mouse that had feedback if only vibration might be interesting. Usually more complex signals are where the value comes in, having a spring/rubber push back on pedals is better than nothing but vibration at multiple frequencies adds a lot and then actual motorised pedal feedback is a whole other level again.
Edit: or even img2img of rough sketches.
> Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.
I find a lot of interfaces INFURIATING. My car wants to do things with touch screens while I want to feel because I want to keep my eyes on the road. My iPhone won't capitalize the letter I and will change not just the word I'm typing but the word previous to it making swipe style texting painful to use. Speaking of the iPhone, it's 2025 and there's no universal back. I still don't know how to exit the YouTube popup asking me to activate my free trial of premium other than swiping close the whole app and reopening[1]. Or I scroll through an app with threads (e.g. Twitter) and I move slightly left or right and bam I'm on a different tab and when I move back I'm not where I left off but somewhere completely new.
You may say "well that's a 'you' problem, I'm happy with the way things are" and my point is that humans are all different. There's no one size fits all. Maybe that swiping thing happens because our thumbs are different sizes or our phones are different sizes. Maybe you like light mode and don't open any websites with the lights off. But that difference is what makes us human. The problem is that things are converging to things that are bad for everyone. Design matters a lot and getting used to a design is very different than designing things around people. A well designed product needs no instructions (obviously not absolute), just see the "Norman Door."[2] We shit on backend developers for making shitty UIs (as a 'backend' person, I agree, this deserves criticism) but I don't think the front end people are at all concerned with design now a days either. There's a special irony with Apple, considering the magic was the interaction between Jobs and Woz. The magic is when the good backend meets good frontend. Yet now we're just doing both like it is a competition of who can create the worst thing the fastest.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News
[1] I now use Orion browser. The video quality is lower but it is better than dealing with this bullshit.
[2] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...
This is about "senses" as in "the five senses".
Not "senses" as in "they've lost their senses/mind".
The author is making a pun on the latter, but the article is about the former.
The artwork on those is stunning. It's hard to imagine someone would spend so much time and effort illustrating an article with so little content. (the other articles on that page are similarly well illustrated)
If this article were created 5 years ago, I would be downright impressed. Sadly, I've defaulted to assume the artwork was generated by AI those days. (even though I have no evidence of that)
It doesn't help that the author claims they "empower devs with AI" in their home page, and their older webpage from 2019 [0], while still very beautiful, isn't illustrated to the same standard.
I just wish authors were upfront that they generated the artwork with AI (with a little caption, footnote, something; the same kind of thing newspapers use to credit their photojournalists). I really have nothing against using AI for this kind of thing and regardless of whether AI was used, the author of the article for sure has a lot of artistic merit for the composition as a whole.
But I couldn't disagree more with the premise. It complains that computers have been reduced from physical, tactile, hulking mainframes to neutered generic text interfaces, but I've watched the opposite happen over the past two decades.
My phone is physical -- I swipe, pinch, and tap. It buzzes and dings and flashes. I squeeze my AirPods, I pay by holding my wrist up to a sensor, I tilt my iPad to play video games and draw on it with a pencil.
Everything the article complains about, we've already solved. All of its suggestions, we already have. It wants "multi-modality" but we already have that too -- I can change the volume on my iPhone with physical buttons while I dictate. I can listen to music while I scroll.
Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.