Why some apps use fake progress bars — a brilliant example of how psychological factors influence design, trading efficiency and speed for trust.
Tag: Ephemera
Is there a limit to scientific understanding?
A brief piece on the limits of science, the inadequacy of understanding science as a simple "building": "phenomena with different levels of complexity must be understood in terms of different, irreducible concepts"
Goodbye Uncanny Valley
An exploration into what happens when you are able to create visual stories that are indistinguishable from reality: post-truth, post-cinema, theoretical photorrealism.
How Hans Zimmer and Radiohead transformed “Bloom” for Blue Planet II
The financial market is an algorithm gone rogue
Financial markets are the first rogue AI […] Somebody planted the idea that shareholder value was the right algorithm, the right thing to be optimizing for. But this wasn’t the way companies acted before. We can plant a different idea. Tim O’Reilly – Algorithms have already gone rogue
The Open Web, Fuck Yeah! | hueniverse
Is your new thing so fucking amazing that people are going to install your app and give it a chance? Statistically speaking, unless you are best friend with a famous celebrity or Apple decides to feature your app in one of their top categories or search results, you are pretty much fucked Source: The Open… Continue reading The Open Web, Fuck Yeah! | hueniverse
The app boom is over – Recode
The mobile app boom kicked off in July 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store. Now it is over.
Even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They’re not looking for new ones.
The challenges of formatting currency data
Localization and internationalization of an app or site it’s a challenge that’s not specially hard on the technical side, but that it can ceirtanly become difficult for social and behavioral aspects, such as our own etnocentrism, lack of standardized standards, or even standards that conflict with actual use or user expectations.
The development team at Etsy identified three attributes that affected currency formatting: the currency, user location and user language. Their post on How Etsy Formats Currency shows how to correctly format currency and some of the practical decisions that are involved in the process.
Using OAuth2 to make authenticated calls to WP REST API
This will probably come in handy on a few weeks, so I better save this for later…
Sigmund Freud’s couch
99% invisible tells the story of how Sigmund Freud’s couch came to be the symbol of psychoanalysis… even if it ceased to be as widely used as one might think based on movies and cartoons.