Scott Jenson, a former Apple UX designer, writes about interface design, simplicity, and where computing is heading.
HN commenters engage with his design views on simplicity and general-purpose computing, and note his Apple background and Human Interface Guidelines work.
Computers are not a kitchen. They are clay, they are Lego, they are jungles of imagination. It's true that our current trajectory devolves their universality to a set of discrete isolated applications == multiplexing a set of appliances on one device.
That's an economic win sure, but it's tragic if we fail to unlock more of their flexibility for "end users"! IMHO that's the biggest unsolved problems of computer science: that it takes so much professional learning to unlock the real potential (and even that fails us programmers much of the time! How frequently do you say "I'll solve it myself" and the time invested is actually worth it? In the words of Steve Krouse we've not quite solved "End-programmer Programming" yet.)
I do want FOSS to follow through and offer live inspectors for everything, but no, I no longer believe users should "learn to code" as the salvation. We're nowhere near it being worth their time, we actually went downhill on that :-( Conversational AI and "vibe using" will play a role, but that's more like "adversarial interoperability", doesn't cover what I mean either.
I want cross-app interoperability to be designed in, as something everyone'd understand users want. I want agency over app state — snapshot, fork, rewind, diff etc. I want files back (https://jenson.org/files/), and more¹. I want things like versioning and collaboration to work cross-app. I want ideas and metaphors we haven't found yet — I mean it when I call it unsolved problem…
Simplicity is really difficult.
The more powerful machines have become, and the larger the screens we work with (I am writing this on an LG 49" ultrawide), the easier it becomes to jam a bunch of stuff in there.
A good exercise for Keeping It Simple, Stupid (KISS), is to write firmware for fixed displays, or mobile device software (although mobile devices are starting to look more and more like full-sized computers, these days).
I learned religion from Scott Jenson's excellent The Simplicity Shift[0]. It was written before the iPhone.
Most of the tips in there, could be applied to desktop/laptop computer software. I used to use his "triage" methodology, in the days that we wrote host software, at my old job.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
This same link was submitted 2 days ago. My comment there still applies.
LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base"
"LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t."
https://jenson.org/timmy/
Has anyone seen this implemented? Doesn't look like there is any code to try or links to a demo.
They mention a video but the paper didn't include details but a quick Google found this (which I vaguely recognise now as having been posted on HN before):
- https://jenson.org/text/
- https://youtu.be/_9YPm0EghvU?si=NU3SDrKxAK7_5FQW
OT: Since the author is a former Apple UX designer who worked on the Human Interface Guidelines, I hope he shares his thoughts on the recent macOS 26 and iOS updates - especially on Liquid Glass.
https://jenson.org/about-scott/
Related writing: https://jenson.org/tesla/