Spammable UI

I'm generally in favor of efficiency and precision, but sometimes it's just easier to spam adjustments till it's right.

Many things are already designed this way, such as volume controls. On touchscreens there's sliders which jump straight to the correct amount, but buttons adjust in increments because it's most likely you want a relative adjustment. You notice that something is too loud, not that it's at 10 ticks instead of 5. It's good to know what the ticks are for reference, but that's not what you need in the moment.

Up or down, as much as you need until it's right.

Microwaves are great at this. +30s buttons work instantly from zero or while running and take a single press. Impeccable for muscle memory because you only have to find and press one button a few times in a row instead of finding multiple depending on the time and pressing them a different number of times.¹

The area where I can't stand the lack of spammability?

Timers.

If a timer doesn't let you quickly spam remove time, I find it intolerable. I set timers because I want to stop thinking about something until the moment I have to think about it. Every second spent editing and thinking about a timer is aggravating.

Changes to timers (beyond deletion), are almost always relative. I don't find out that the world has changed and I now have ten minutes for something after I've already set a timer, I find out something is running ten minutes late, or worse, ten minutes early. When that happens, I want to update the timer as quickly as possible and stop thinking about it, because the longer I have to think about it the more likely I forget. Spamming a button a few times, or even several dozen times, for that case of getting the change out of my head, is better than having to do the thinking to calculate the new time and input it. Early timers are annoying (hence the proliferation of snooze), but late timers are disastrous.

Some things I can accept simply don't exist or aren't implemented the way I want, but a timer which supports quickly adding and removing time doesn't exist.²

So I made my own, with exactly the features I need and no more. It's not big, 500 lines of code which is 80% UI boilerplate. Because I had to write it all myself anyway, I made the details to my exact preference, but I could sacrifice most of them. I really don't recommend you do things from scratch yourself unless you are already so inclined, it's a massive timesink for mild benefit.

But knowing what specific features are make or break, what to look for and how you might work around it, saves a lot of workflow headaches.

- Rew

Nightly Notes

The technical worm has taken hold of me once more. Had to cut so much minutia today.

I could write about what I want to see from the world. I could write so much more about why I want to see it, and why I think I won't.

But, I set the rules for this blog already.

I think it's good for me, to step out of the design and programming headspace, to stop trying to make a thing which can be prodded at independent of the life which surrounds it. I don't know if I want to spend more time on actionable ideas, or silly thoughts, or philosophizing, or something else.

I know this isn't what I expected when I started.

But it's different, and I think it's helping.

- Rew