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UI-Design: View 2-D, Navigate 3-D?

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.
Recent posts

Keys, Values and Rules: Three Important Shake Concepts

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

erlangs gen_fsm with queueing

OK no time for a full blow, polished blog post; When using gen_fsm I realized that often I want some sort of queueing. Two reasons promote this: to reduce the complexity caused by {States} x {Events} to implement some kind of asynchronous command execution processing model I usualle encounter both reasons and I ended up with two useful function that I copy into every gen_fsm I build: deq(State = #state{evtq = []}) -> {next_state, ready, State}; deq(State = #state{evtq = [Msg | T]}) -> ?MODULE:ready(Msg, State#state{evtq = T}). This requires one adds evtq as a field to the #state{} record. The function deq/1 will be used to work of events(one could say commands) until the queue is empty and finally rests in the state ready . This function is called at the point where one would return {next_state, ready, State} So instead of transitioning directly to ready we call the deq function which will process all defered events. On the other hand there is a

My minimalistic xinitrc, xmonad.hs and xmobarrc

put this in ~/.xinitrc ck-launch-session # start trayer to contain apps like nm-applet trayer --edge top --align right --SetDockType true --SetPartialStrut true --expand true --width 5 --transparent true --tint 0x191970 --height 12 & kmix & # some cool effects xcompmgr -c -f -F & # Set the background color hsetroot -tile /home/sven/Wallpapers/abstract-bluelights-1280x800-.jpg xset b 100 0 0 xset r rate 190 90 dbus-launch --exit-with-session xmonad put this in ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs import XMonad import qualified XMonad . StackSet as W import XMonad . ManageHook import XMonad . Hooks . ManageHelpers import XMonad . Hooks . DynamicLog import XMonad . Hooks . ManageDocks import XMonad . Hooks . FadeInactive() import XMonad . Hooks . SetWMName ( setWMName ) import XMonad . Layout . NoBorders ( smartBorders ) import XMonad . Layout . Tabbed ( tabbed , shrinkText , defaultTheme ) import XMonad . Layout . LayoutHints ( layoutHints ) imp