Upgrading to Emacs 29.1 worked like a charm. There’ve been a couple of small neat additions next to all the big changes like native tree-sitter support – and there’s one in particular that you could say I almost hate. When I compose email and decide to discard everything, I’m politely being asked whether I want to kill (aka ‘close’) the buffer and discard all changes. This applies to all other buffers that haven’t been saved, too, but I mostly run into this with email.
In my opinion, the new section headers of NSMenu don’t have enough top margin. In the WWDC 2023 example, there are no “descenders” in the menu title typo of e.g. “Section 2”. (Descenders are e.g. the lower-case g or p going below the baseline.)
On the Mac, toggle or switch widgets aren’t very common, yet. On iOS, you don’t see lots of checkboxes. This article on UX Movement points out that switches are for immediate actions while changes to checkboxes require a submit button to be pressed.
Now I think about preference panes in Mac apps. They usually perform changes to NSUserDefaults immediately. But using switches on a Mac still feels wrong. Maybe just because I’m not used to it, but still.
macOS’s Notification Center has a switch to toggle “Do not Disturb”. It works, but I don’t use it a lot, so there’s not much opportunity to get accustomed to it.
A beta tester of TableFlip suggested I make the table grow automatically when one navigates to the edge of the table and presses the arrow key in direction of the edge. I am conflicted about this proposal. On one hand, being able to grow the table easily is important. Spreadsheet applications usually present you with an infinite canvas. This is behavior people know (and maybe even expect).
In a recent usability post of Raluca Budiu, the common mobile app pattern of sliding menus is criticized: when the menu button is at the left edge and the content slides away to the right, then hiding the menu again requires the user to move her hand, and reading the menu items requires her to move her finger out of the way. With fat fingers, this is even more of a problem.
