From Newsgroup: alt.comp.software.firefox
Mark Lloyd <
not.email@all.invalid> wrote:
On Sat, 5 Jul 2025 02:00:14 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Thu, 3 Jul 2025 22:58:48 +0200, Schugo wrote:
The ... icon for Extensions ...
A puzzle piece.
WTF does a puzzle piece remind me of an Extension or Add-On???
Thatós quite a common symbol. I remember seeing something similar back
in early Macintosh days. It indicates a piece that fits into other
pieces.
That makes sense when you already know.
I remember the early Windows ads that called it "intuitive", as if you already knew how to use it. Then they discovered that's not true. You need icon labels.
The lack of hover (to show labels that wouldn't fit otherwise) is one of
the major disadvantages of smartphones.
How is any icon intuitive without context? The red circle with a line
through it represents some type of hazard. What hazard is unknown
without context. Even knowing the icon represents hazard is something
learned, as is language. We learn how to speak through imitation.
Later we learn the notation used for writing where expertise grows with practice and experience.
Smartphones have crappy user interfaces. The screen is no where close
to using a mouse and keyboard. You can those user input devices to a
phone, but rarely does anyone tote around a mouse and keyboard to pair
to their phone. I could do it at home, but lugging around I/O devices
for use with the phone is just nothing something convenient to stuff
into a phone holster hanging on my belt. Despite how they have improved
over the years, I still consider phones as toy computers: convenient for
mobile computers, but lacking decent user I/O, and still low-powered to
be running robust programs on desktops.
Perhaps a major consternation with phone apps is the almost complete
lack of useful documentation. Not like you can look at a web browser's
Help to see a map of all objects in its UI to provide description of
each, and detailed descriptions of what each does. Documentation became
a lost art among developers. With phones and apps, we're supposed to
divine the operation through trial and error, and perhaps upon the
experience of others already having to suffer the tribulations of the
mobile platform.
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