The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level.
Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.
It is a personal blog. I would not apply the same kind of criticism to a personal blog, even though it does sound ironic. Moreover, turning off JS was an easy solution. There is no solution right now for apple's UI mess (except not updating).
Personal blog or no, I think the UX and usability critiques are equally valid.
Whether or not the author cares will certainly be influenced by the fact it’s just a personal blog. I wouldn’t expect them to change anything for that reason alone, but the criticism stands nonetheless.
An author of a personal blog does not have to care about judgements of usability vs what they find appealing. A personal blog is a place of self-expression firstmost, not a public service nor a product that targets users. When usability is not the primary goal, you may take unconventional design decisions. If the author likes snowflakes all over the canvas, snowflakes it is. They put an easy way to disable them, I did it in <1 second through disabling JS before I even noticed there was a switch, that's all. Similarly, I would not care about the design choices of apple if I could just disable them even if it took me 5 minutes to do so.
I agree that the author has the right to self express. But in this case, I think the point being made is that it's less about what the author cares about, and more about the author's topic. They're writing about usability and design, while using (arguably) poor judgment and taste for both. It would be a little bit like an extremely out-of-shape person criticizing a marathon running program as being too hard on someone's body, or a homeless person writing that active investing is better than Vanguard's low-fee indexing model. The person's context doesn't make their arguments right or wrong, it just lowers their authority and believability.
> It would be a little bit like an extremely out-of-shape person criticizing a marathon running program as being too hard on someone's body, or a homeless person writing that active investing is better than Vanguard's low-fee indexing model. The person's context doesn't make their arguments right or wrong, it just lowers their authority and believability.
it absolutely would not, it would be more akin to someone wearing a fat-suite for a joke and criticizing someone for running with bad form
but you are taking this so seriously I can't quite tell if you're joking anyway
Yeah. I immediately went to the snowflake icon at the top of the page thinking it would turn the animation off. Instead, it changed the background color :-(
I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.
It change the background color AND turns off the animation.
(TBF, it slowly fades the animation out, probably for aesthetic reasons, to avoid a jarring sudden stop. I do agree, though, that a sudden stop would probably be more appropriate in this context)
Ohhh thank you! I thought the same as the parent comment: I expected that button to turn off the animation immediately. I guess the author wanted the yellow background to "melt" the snowflakes?
Hah, that's a blast from the past! You've reminded me of "Ameko", which added a little cat to the Amiga Workbench, walking around over the windows. I think I had it from a magazine coverdisk.
A personal blog is not the same as the UI of an operating system. More expressiveness is to be expected in a personal blog. That said it’s so easy to turn off that I was distracted for less than 5 seconds. How easy is it to turn off icons in the menu bar in Tahoe?
In my opinion, I can be a worst UX expert in the world, and I still reserve the right to criticize bad UX elsewhere: the fact that you are a bad "creator" does not mean that you are a stupid "user".
Yes, it is a bit hypocritical, but you can look at the content of the message and judge it without judging the presentation of the message, even if it talks about usability of interfaces in computer software.
Sure. But as Ray Dalio suggests in Principles (https://www.principles.com/principles/633d5d13-8610-425f-ad6...), you will be more likely to succeed at your task if you believability-weight the information you receive. When considering a military strategy, you should probably weigh the advice from a 4-star general who's served in similar circumstances over the advice of a 4-year-old boy who is relying on his experience watching Paw Patrol.
As the worst UX expert in the world, you can obviously feel free to criticize others, but you're probably going to lose a lot of people after the first sentence if you're using 2003 MySpace-style blinking text and animated GIFs to make your point.
But, if a 4-year old boy finds "there's more of them with bigger guns", and a general has a personal interest in hurting someone without you knowing that, you'd be unwise to not consider the words of the boy as you prep your military strategy.
Note that you were careful to establish hard-to-prove circumstances ("served in similar circumstances"), which seems to say that you don't want to discount what the non-expert is saying too easily either.
Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!
This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this, author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.
Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes disappear, and the background changes from blue to yellow. I haven't bothered to check the foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I suspect that, although the yellow version will have less contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a net benefit to readability for the average person.
I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.
> Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation?
It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it's still not as egregious as Apple's Tahoe design!"
It's a shame the author didn't test on mobile, but I think we should cut them some slack. It would be understandable for this particular article's audience to mostly be viewing on desktop.
Even if they were being hypocritical, I think the impact of briefly-bad UI on someone's blog post pales in comparison with bad UI in a product of macOS scale.
I don't know, I figure with a billion dollars Apple should be able to do much better at being awful than this. More proactive rather than accidental awfulness. Something that isn't just bad but capital intensive at the same time. Anyone can build a bad UX on a few menus, or a whole system incrementally over time. But to really lean in? Maybe commission famous artists with eye watering fees for each icon, truly over the top marketing campaigns, really get the cash-fired furnaces going. Really just go full-potlatch on things.
Author seems to enjoy writing posts that get lots of votes on site that I would describe as eye-rending, especially the "normal" yellow color scheme. It's aggressively unpleasant to read.
It's easy to justify: it's cute. Just like the other options up at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual hamburger as the icon for the menu.
It also immediately eats 5% of the raw compute on my RTX 4080 Super, which is more than a dozen tabs in chrome and 3 active youtube videos running, run in each of Chrome, Firefox, Edge-- all combined, which was 3% before loading this page (which is 5% on its own) up to 9% total.
That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
I was starting to wonder why my iPhone got crazy hot. I’m using reader mode and it appears to continue running the web page and animation in the background… crazy.
I found this kinda funny. The content of the page is something I strongly agree with. But then the page itself was just so distracting. I saw the snow flake icon so I tapped it but it just turned my snow into the dreaded yellow snow.
> including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.
Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off hadn't worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off a bunch of times before i got it
Can people actually read it with the snowflakes? The motion draws my eyes and makes it extremely unpleasant trying to read the underlying text. Very poorly thought out decoration.
And yes, I did think "this is terrible, there must be a way to change it", clicking the snowflake icon. The colour changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn't seem to change, so I just clicked back.
Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I didn't realize until seeing your comment.
It's fun. Looks neat. It's an extremely poor idea for a site trying to convey textual information.
:-) and while doing this, the background turns yellow — why? how annoying it would be if something like this existed in real life - turning off the fan switches on the lights, and turning off the lights switches on the fan.
Hot take: The snowflakes are fun and when blogs integrate fun things they make me feel joy like when I was throwing marquee elements all over my geocities site in grade school. In an era where most of the content I read is written by AI, the more personal a blog feels to me, the better.
It takes over 10 seconds to turn off fully. I had to go back and try it after your comment, because I thought that button just turned the page yellow, which was worse than the blue.
I ended up using reader mode to read the page. The whole site design undermined the point being made. One of the first things mentioned is not to be distracting. Yet they went out of their way to make their own site distracting. "Do as I say, not as I do."
I literally didn't notice that the snowflake icon turned it off:
1. I scrolled through the article getting more and more frustrated with the snow
2. I scrolled all the way back to the top and saw the snowflake icon
3. I clicked the snowflake, saw the hideous yellow, said WTF and clicked again to go back to blue
4. **I never noticed** that the snowflake *does* stop the snow, but *only* stops *new* snow, so the existing snow continues to fall across the screen
5. I clicked several other things, then came here to complain and saw this thread
FWIW, while I'm complaining about this site I'm actually adding a nice easy-on-the eyes particle system in the background of a point-and-click online game. You don't put it in front of the content or behind text people are supposed to read.
This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their own design. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Came here to say the same. Not only is it redundant and distracting, destroying the reading experience, it even makes the fucking fan turn on and make noise because apparently it’s a lot of work for the video card. A presentation of valid arguments destroyed by something completely superfluous and ironically the same kind of stupidity that’s the target of the criticism made.
A hint to the site developer: add an option to purchase the Weather Control Pack Platinum Pro+ to get to choose your site weather any way you like. It would fity nicely next to that 'Personal Information' section. Who knows, someone might even 'purchase' it since that seems to the thing to do in the Cult of the Fruit.
