The perils of self-translation.
I’m often baffled by the number of people who seem to think that you can translate from one language to another simply by pulling the words of one language from a dictionary and plugging them into the syntax of the other. It just doesn’t work that way, friends.
Read to the end for a wonderfully delicious twist in the tale.
Amadán.
John makes the point that unless you’re one of the big, big players, your native app is really going to struggle to find an audience. But that’s okay—a progressive web app might be exactly what you need.
In short, using native apps as a path to reaching a large number of potential customers and benefitting from crucial network effects is close to impossible.
But, in the meantime, the Web has responded to the very significant impact that native apps had on user behaviour.
For me, the strength of the web has never been about how it can help big companies—it’s about how it can amplify and connect the niche players.
A deep dive into the CSS declaration that Jen told me she wants on a T-shirt.
Following on from Ruth’s piece, here are some more thoughts on sound in UI from Roman Zimarev, the creator of icon sounds.
He makes a distinction between notification sounds and interaction sounds, as well as talking about sound identity in branding.
This article about a specific security flaw in voice-activated assistants raises a bigger issue:
User-friendliness is increasingly at odds with security.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. “Don’t make me think” is a great mantra for user experience, but a terrible mantra for security.
Our web browsers easily and invisibly collect cookies, allowing marketers to follow us across the web. Our phones back up our photos and contacts to the cloud, tempting any focused hacker with a complete repository of our private lives. It’s as if every tacit deal we’ve made with easy-to-use technology has come with a hidden cost: our own personal vulnerability. This new voice command exploit is just the latest in a growing list of security holes caused by design, but it is, perhaps, the best example of Silicon Valley’s widespread disregard for security in the face of the new and shiny.