Over-and-over again 3-D User Interface design was heralded "dead". The flat 2-D screen is a natural fit for orthographic projection of flat imagery like 2-D spread sheets, tables, lists and linear text. On the other hand, much of what is shown on a (2-D) screen is projected 3-D content, be it from computer games or from movies. Most human beings navigate and move in the physical world, and the brain makes sense of this world by encoding it as a 3-D space, the brain is hardwired to process, remember filter and associate information in context of a 3-D world. That's why I think that UX/UI design will benefit from using 2-D for data representation and form input, and closed-space 3-D for navigation through the application.
The title was a click-bait! This article will actually try to explain five instead of three important notions in Shake. These are: Rules Keys Values The Build Database Actions This short blog post was inspired by the hurdles with my Shake based build, after the new Shake version was released, which had breaking API changes. Jump to the next section if you are not interested in the why and how of this blog post. Shake is rule based build system much like GNU make. Like make it is robust, unlike make, it is pretty fast and supports dynamic build dependencies. But you knew all that already, if you are the target audience of this post, since this post is about me explaining to myself by explaining to you, how that build tool, I used for years, actually works. Although I used it for years, I never read the paper or wrapped my head around it more than absolutely necessary to get the job done. When Shake was updated to version 0.16.x, the internal API for custom rules w...