One of my earliest UX wins was for Mac System 7. The Finder team wanted to truncate files names with '…' if it wouldn’t fit. I argued that too much critical info would be lost and suggested it be in the middle instead. The Finder team loved it and implemented it later that day. They were so easy to work with.
I'd totally forgotten about it until I overheard someone commenting it was an example of Apple's attention to detail. I'd didn't say anything at the time but yeah, that was me ;-)
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What I so enjoyed about the Finder team was that there was no string utility to remove the middle of the string. They had to write it themselves. It was extra work they just took on. I never heard a peep from them about "implementation complexity".
It's experiences like this that have spoiled me. When I hear over (and over) that UX needs to "work within business goals" I think back to this experience where I just had an idea... and they did it.
Why was it so easy then, and so hard now?
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@scottjenson I noticed this detail a long time ago and thought it was nice indeed. Great to hear it was you! Nice work!
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@scottjenson thank you! I love this feature every day. @jovermeulen
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@scottjenson Thank you.
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@scottjenson Circa 2007, I felt compelled to create a spreadsheet that showed various methods of truncations against strings like those in our app to convince the team to implement it. That was for myself too to make the choice and dial in some micro logic.
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@scottjenson I rebuilt (regrew?) the Finder team after most of the System 7 participants went separate ways - but the same. The Finder team - and perhaps all of Apple - absolutely devoted to delighting users - to ensuring user delight. At the time, I thought we were just a bit ahead of the rest of computerdom. Not so much, 30+ years later.
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@ronlichty @scottjenson
Apple back then listened to engineers instead of living in fear of Jobs having some shit fit over it.
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@scottjenson most hiring is done at a level of abstraction that didn’t used to exist
hiring goes for people that put libraries they know on their resumes and recruiters match on the libraries the business depends on
in the before times, there was just code and you could either code or you couldn’t
now, there’s people that use libraries (product) and people that write libraries (platform)
the people that write libraries still operate like the before times like you describe, but people that need a library can’t deliver a solution if it doesn’t already exist.
the library people are generally quarantined off from ux and the rest of the business as their customers are developers, so while they could do the thing, in practice, they don’t know problems exist until another dev surfaces it, which doesn’t happen
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@scottjenson it's so hard now because the designers who care either can't budge the org to do it or get no funding to make their own :(
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@scottjenson
Thanks for sharing this look behind the scenes!
I’m a UI dev, and sometimes it seems like Product Owners do everything they can to keep UI from talking directly to UX. Earlier in my career, some of our best work, and most enjoyable work, was when I could just walk into the UX lead’s office and brainstorm.
Now there seems to be less focus on “Let’s build the best experience we can” and it’s more about “Stay in your lane and build with the blocks we give you.”
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@inaction_figure @scottjenson Often that's because management has bad UX as an explicit goal.
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@scottjenson managers have to justify their existence by questioning every improvement and quantifying them to death.
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@scottjenson Filed a feature request for KDE Plasma’s Dolphin. :)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497664
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@frumble @scottjenson i had the same thought!
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@irina @scottjenson It’s now implemented! \o/
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@irina @scottjenson They already had it in 2019 but reversed it in 2020 due to complaints of (presumably) devs. This truncation scheme is more suited to naturally named files than tech files.
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@frumble @irina that's surprising to me as the key information you're losing with end truncation is a) file extension and b) any version number. Both of those seem very dev friendly
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@scottjenson @irina It was even conserving the file extension:
https://phabricator.kde.org/D19471
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@scottjenson is there a way to disable it?
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@shram86 @scottjenson get a bigger screen? ;)
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@puck @scottjenson spoken like a true apple developer
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@shram86 @puck no there is no way to disable it. Not everything needs to be a setting (I realize this is a deep belief in the FOSS world). It's a complex topic
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@scottjenson @puck spoken like a true apple developer
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@shram86 No need to be snarky. I acknowledged your point! Can't we disagree like humans?
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@scottjenson
System 7! Good times...
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@scottjenson Interesting, with KDE Plasma/Dolphin, the file names are always truncated at the end. I'd never noticed that.
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@scottjenson @xssfox this, along with the adjustments to tracking to squeeze in more characters are touches I appreciate every day!
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@scottjenson nice. thank you!
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@scottjenson Thank you for thirty-some years of that obviously correct way to do this.
What do you think of recent changes and trends in the MacOS UI/UX? I've found many of them difficult to see as improvements.
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@scottjenson nice.
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@scottjenson @vmbrasseur Thanks!
Your insight has inspired the same tactic elsewhere to good effect.
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@scottjenson There's a discussion on how to add this to CSS here: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3937
Sounds like there's lots of interesting little details to figure out.
There's also a CSS trick that (ab)uses text direction to get a similar result with the existing CSS text-overflow feature: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3937#issuecomment-496688096
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@scottjenson I have seen an attempt of a middle-ellipsis CSS hack in the wild on GitLab, but it's IMHO a bit flawed because it results in extra left-to-right mark (U+200E) chars when copy-pasting the filename.
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@rkaravia This is very cool! Thanks for sharing
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@scottjenson oh!!!! thank you, that was a great feature. we wish modern stuff did it.
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@scottjenson reminds me, I submitted a request to github to move the ticket# to the front of the string instead of the end, because it gets truncated in displays of tickets with long titles. They rejected the request. Morons.
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@scottjenson @dan Thank you 🙏
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@scottjenson That lesson wasn’t taught to everyone. 😉 But it’s good to see some great old ideas are sticking to this day!
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@scottjenson My character limit on posts isn't high enough to thank you enough for this great idea.
But, thanks 🙏🏻
My first Mac ran System 6, so I've benefitted from this UX gem from the beginning 😊
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@scottjenson thank you — I’ve had to ask for this sort of fix in so much enterprise software and I always point at Finder as the model
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@scottjenson Oh, thanks a lot! Some critical info in the last couple of characters in many of my file names for sure!
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@scottjenson thank you!
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@scottjenson I was just grumbling about some interface that doesn’t heed this recently.
Thanks!
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@scottjenson And I love that the Finder still has functionality all these years later.
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@kevingamin yeah! It's kind of shocking
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@scottjenson if only OSX had stuck with Finder info instead of adopting file extensions to determine file UTIs. System 7 was a beautiful release.
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@scottjenson thank you and appreciation for your service.
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@scottjenson I also love the multi rename tool, shame it doesn't allow for wildcards…
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@scottjenson Thank you! This is what I notice first when using file managers that don‘t have it.
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@scottjenson
that was you? 😮
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@scottjenson I’ve always loved this tiny detail about the Mac and honestly I notice it almost every time I use the Finder, which is every day. I almost never have had to resize a window to be able to select the correct file 😀. Thank you!
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@scottjenson @kalleboo thank you for this. I far prefer it over truncating at the end 👍
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