I think he's wrong in his assumption that navigation transitions are being used just to emulate native apps. They are being used because they provide a usability benefit. A navigation transition can demonstrate a lot to a user about hierarchy and flow [1]
While I agree with your point that computers should do the most they can to take the work out of things for the user, the flight search example used in the article is exactly the sort of thing that at some point you're likely to need to input. It's a plan that the user has that they want to action. While you could use voice recognition or call a person to do the same, some people are probably going to want to type it into a flight search or calendar app or similar, so the GUI for that is necessary.
"Making rounded corners and gradients is easier than making something useful. that's why it gets so much attention"
It's not about it being easier, it's about making it obvious that the user can use it. Following established design conventions for buttons by gradating backgrounds or rounding borders, however right or wrong they may be, can help a user to know the intention behind something without needing to think about it.
Look at the last frame, "Title Your Guide". The website/app doesn't provide it's own keyboard wudgut. Why the fuck does it have 3 wudguts to enter a date?
Depending on the length of the list, if you need to encourage correct spelling and have a list where the user knows the answer without needing to look at all the options (eg a country) then typeahead (autocomplete) functionality can work well here.
Problem with PayPal is that they ban people (I lost my account years back, still do not know why) and also of course not available in all countries.
I was thinking something along the lines of some sort of new HTML "payment" tag so it could signal to the browser things such as "product details, price, available/preferred merchant payment method"
and then the browser would pay from an in browser wallet containing stored credit card numbers, or bitcoins or prepaid/voucher codes, or bank account information
Some browsers could outsource this by starting a separate wallet program altogether, sort of how some links on mobiles open up other apps like maps
Someone above mentioned bitcoin links, that be a very good example of how to do UI payment flow nicely, especially nowadays that
Eitherway I think credit card forms are anything but user friendly, even the cleanest of forms such as Stripe would dumbfound new internet users such as my mother who rightly asked before "is it safe for me to be entering my cardcode on the internet"
Pre-filled credit card information would be great - if it could be stored securely. PCs are basically far too insecure for this to be accepted by the payment processors, it would just be phished to death.
Apple Pay would be the right solution if it weren't so proprietary.
Apple Pay uses industry standard payment tokens, just like Google Wallet, there is nothing stopping any company out there from using the technology. The only thing about Apple Pay that is proprietary is the TouchID fingerprint verification.
"...so, curiously, not only is water necessary for life, but life may well help retain water on planets."
An interesting thought. So perhaps old planets that still have water are more likely to contain life. We can detect water in some forms on exoplanets already [1] so soon we may be able to predict how common life is in the galaxy?
There are a few chemical signatures that are likely to indicate life. Oxygen would be one (though there are cases in which it can exist by other means).
Spectroscopy (how signatures are detected) is more qualitative than quantitative, so it's very difficult to get a good sense of how much of something exists, as I understand. Though it's tremendously sensitive and can detect atoms or molecules across light years, and for plants, the range is ~30-300 or so from hazy recollection.
Water's almost certainly a weaker signal of life than oxygen, but it's a good sign all the same. And a strong water signal from an older but small (e.g., Earth-sized) rocky world would probably show that life does, or at least did, exist.
In the EU, incandescent bulbs were banned as part of a directive [1] to reduce energy use, as only 10% of the energy put in was converted to light. That sounds like a sensible move to me rather than lobbying.
In the UK, CFL bulbs were also subsidised and/or given out free to households by the energy companies before incandescent bulbs were banned.
I'm all for decreasing energy consumption, but the last two flats I've rented have come as-built-new with dimmer switches which do not work with newfangled fixtures.
One was a set of many small ceiling fixtures for which only LED lamps could anymore be bought in shops, and those flickered because the switches were dimmers (which themselves would save energy, because most of the time 50% was enough).
The second flat had a $200 electronic dimmer switch, again as installed by the builders, and a halogen fixture with some sort of ballast or whatever you call it these days. This also flickered constantly, and worse, it burned out the dozen tiny $5 halogen bulbs every week. The fixture had to be replaced; the new one takes standard-size halogen bulbs and has no ballast thingy to make them flicker.
It has become quite unpleasant to move into new buildings and find that the electricals are not compatible even as built. And most shops won't sell some of the bits I need to fix it, because the government told them not to...but other less-convenient shops still do sell them.
The LED "bulbs" I had were dimmable, socket type MR8. The thing is, they still flickered. I think it was something about the dimmer switch itself being unhappy--the flickering was not constant, but it was impossible to stop completely, even at 100% brightness on the dial. My point is, these things have given rise to all sorts of weird incompatibilities that we didn't have before, and I am tired of it. Anything like "Well there are bulbs that will work but you just have to order them from this one guy" is not really a solution--we're talking about lights in a house, not the International Space Station. :) The government has forced us into using technology which is not ready for true mainstream use (as opposed to geek use).
Amazon. I have about 4-5 different brands because I bought several different ones to test colour tone (most "warm white" leds are too cold white for me to want them in my living room).
Factor in the energy cost of making CFL/LED bulbs (including the additional electronics and mining the required material and all the shipping it requires) and the energy costs of dealing with the toxic waste they contains, and now this doesn't seem as much like a sensible move.
When you compare retail prices and actual lifetime you notice that the new bulbs are significantly more expensive than the now banned traditional ones while having overrated life expectancies and now you understand that the manufacturers are getting more money and faster, suddenly this overpriced incompetence has a feel of greenwashing followed by an aftertaste of lobbying
Factor in the energy cost of making CFL/LED bulbs (including the additional electronics and mining the required material and all the shipping it requires) and the energy costs of dealing with the toxic waste they contains, and now this doesn't seem as much like a sensible move.
I know of no study that agrees with your conclusion. Among others, Umweltbundesamt (German government), BUND (German NGO, parts of Friends of the Earth), Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science) have come out in favour of CFL bulbs.
I can't believe we're still having this discussion in 2014. To add to cygx's point, a quick break even sum:
A 60W equivalent costs around $1.50, and using ~12W of energy. Even if we use the lowest electricity cost for the US ($0.08/kWh), and assume the incandescent bulb was free:
cost of bulb / power difference * cost per Wh = break even time
1.50 / (60-12) * (0.08 / 1000) = 390 hours
So you only need to use a bulb for 390h to recover the total purchase cost. You can argue all you want about lifetimes, equivalence etc, but these are not marginal figures, especially when you factor in that real EU electricity prices tend to be 2-5x the figures I used-- with German or Danish electricity you'll have pay back times well under 100h.
Those like you and ekianjo make a good case for regulation. The EU banned incandescents, the world did not implode.
In EU you can very easily walk into any shop and still happily buy incandescent bulbs without any problems - 150W, 100W, 60W -despite the ban. Manufacturers very quickly caught on the fact that while incandescent bulbs for home use were banned, "specialist" bulbs were not and cannot be banned for a variety of reasons. So if I go into my nearest supermarket, I can buy a 100W incandescent bulb that is designed for "traffic lights use only, not for home use". Of course no one cares that everyone uses it at home, but it's perfectly legal to sell.
> In the EU, incandescent bulbs were banned as part of a directive [1] to reduce energy use, as only 10% of the energy put in was converted to light. That sounds like a sensible move to me rather than lobbying.
If it makes economical sense, let consumers judge for themselves. The cost at purchase of LEDs / CFLs is way higher than traditional light bulbs. Everyone should be able to have access to cheap lights.
Haha. We are not going to consume LESS energy in the future, unless you want to live in poor conditions. The working assumption is how do we create more, cheaper and in a cleaner way. There's a bunch of papers out there on how energy consumption and level of life are closely related.
Maybe you should have read what I wrote. I certainly do not advocate conserving energy no matter the cost.
I'm saying that at the present there is no economic incentive for consumers to save electricity large enough to make them switch to less energy intensive means of lighting.
We certainly won't maximize our standard of living by senselessly wasting energy. When there are two ways to light a room, yielding the same amount of light, but one uses much less energy, it is the superior one.
The tricky question is how to make it the economically sensible one for the consumer, as well.
When there are two ways to light a room, yielding the same amount of light, but one uses much less energy, it is the superior one.
Not necessarily. What about manufacturing costs? If manufacturing a CFL/LED is more labour or capital intensive then it's production uses resources that could have been used to produce other goods. If that's the case then a ban on incandescent light bulbs has a hidden cost.
You shouldn't look only at the visible effects but also at those invisible. A great essay That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen [1] by Frederic Bastiat comes to my mind. It explores this kind of situations.
Do you have any evidence that supports the possibility of LED beings more labour or capital intensive, or is this a hypothetical, "well maybe it could be worse" in an effort to confirm your existing opinion?
Then why are we banning inefficient engines and impose huge tax on ones with large emissions? A car without a DPF costs less to buy and maintain than a one with it, yet no one makes the argument that "everyone should have access to cheap cars"?
Personally I would buy the car that has the most reliable and most powerful engine - even if it was a 6.0L V8 - but huge taxes on such thing are stopping me from buying it.
I think that the problem of pollution, and other externalities, can be best handled by Pigovian taxes, not by explicit bans or heavy-handed regulation.
My father also runs one of these to help people learn Photoshop (mainly for editing family photos). It's surprising the topics that can be learned though these groups
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/design/spec/animation/meaningful-tr...