A Lovely 10C Site!

@variablepulserate I think there is definitely a trend element; I don't see it so strongly that way because UIs don't seem to have been around long enough for us to observe the cyclical nature that we see in fashion (slim fit -> baggy -> slim -> baggy). In UIs the major styles that come to my mind are

• CDE: beveled (some attempt at 3D), colourful
• Windows pre-XP, Mac Platinum: very grey but still with clear window borders, buttons look like buttons.
• Early mobile: whatever could work on 320 pixels.
• Windows XP, Mac Aqua: very colourful, loud, 3D-esque with gradients (scrollbars on XP and Aqua, the close/minimise/maximise buttons on Aqua, 3D dock and Time Machine from Leopard onwards). More 3D emphasis in Vista, pulling back in Windows 7.
• Early Android, iOS: pretty skeumorphic (I think iOS 7 was the peak?)
• Mac OS Lion: the old scrollbars are replaced with thin grey lines; every version of Mac OS after that seems to get progressively flatter.
• Windows 8: the tile design seems to mark the start of the flat design era; Windows 10 and Windows 11 seems to continue this trend.

So we haven't gotten to the point of developing on, for example, the CDE-style buttons-look-like-buttons approach or the loud (almost maximalist) Windows XP/Mac Aqua style yet. It looks like flat design is here to stay for the moment.

All off the top of my head though.

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

@matigo In all the wrong ways…something about coloured aluminium just doesn't work for me in the way the plastic cases did.

matigo.ca.

@variablepulserate My (completely unproven) idea is that we had louder interfaces back then because the boundary between "online" and "offline" was clear; there was a "real world" and an "online world". So we could have UIs that were more fun, but also more fatiguing (in terms of colour for example) because we weren't immersed in them all day. In an always-online world, the UI needs to be in the background and that either means flat/bland design or getting used to living in a bubblegum themed world.

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

The announcement of the discontinuation of the iPod has made me very nostalgic for mid-2000s Apple: bright, colourful designs that popped and made you feel a bit of magic every time you sat in front of the computer.

The days before flat design (shudder).

I have often wondered though whether the more bland style of design we see today was inevitable: the loud designs of Aqua and XP would be too fatiguing in an era when most have lost the distinction of being online and being offline; those people need UIs that blend into the background rather than UIs that try to make you feel something special.

I get the impression this 2013 Mac Pro handles JS-heavy stuff faster than the M1 Macbook Pro.

Not that Excel is a great experience on Mac locally or in the browser when it comes to shared files: locally, even moving between cells can take a few seconds; in the browser, it's little better.

Terrible experience overall.

The problem with having a headache during the day is that I inevitably get a burst of energy when it clears — at night.

@matigo Sound treatment is woefully underdone in most dwellings.

// @variablepulserate

matigo.ca.

@variablepulserate Take your voice down as low and soft as it'll go, you'll end up with a croaking sound that…kind of sounds like low-frequency humming from an electrical line…. Vocal cords aren't vibrating "normally" in this position. There seems to be more women than men who speak with a lower-than-average-for-their-body voice — I've heard it suggested somewhere that it's related to assertion of power.

The Brummie accent actually was a consideration when I was looking at Birmingham and Manchester. I think I could find a way to live with Mancunian English, given a nice enough house with sufficiently sized gates to keep them all out.

// @hazardwarning

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

@variablepulserate Definitely keeping an eye on freehold properties in the UK. I don't think prices are coming down anytime soon though.

variablepulserate.10centuries.org.

My dream life over the last year or so has been what I once saw described on Hacker News as the "Victorian gentleman": enough passive income to be comfortable without necessarily being extravagant, spending my time working on productive hobbies that might or might not bring extra income, being with friends, taking long walks….

It's amazing, really, how much growing up in one of the world's most expensive cities has shaped my perspective — the idea that that's an impossible dream, that I'll be grinding away until I'm too old to be hired just to afford a single home, etc.

Whereas I'm actually in a situation where I could, in theory, go to somewhere like Birmingham and buy a small-ish apartment almost without a mortgage….