Andrew on Nostr: So the new profile hovercard thing doesn't annoy me as much as I'd have guessed, but ...
So the new profile hovercard thing doesn't annoy me as much as I'd have guessed, but it does of course suffer from the perennial issue with hover interactions of not knowing when to end.
See here how I've highlighted the boundaries of the link you need to hover over and the card that appears when you do — there's a button in the card, but to click it you have to move your mouse from the top red box to the bottom one without passing through the rest of the page. If you build up enough movement speed you can clip through that gap, but nobody should need to do speedrun strats to use a UI.
I think this one solves that by adding some coyote time, so you can spend a few frames outside the red boxes without despawning the card, but still, every time a UI starts doing this stuff you end up in the sort of "fudging things and tweaking values for hours to make everything feel nice" devwork that is great for making tight platform games but just not how I think UIs should be built.
Like, people can and do build nice UIs this way, but it's *so much work* to get it right compared to just having a link to the profile, and that'd before you start considering adaptive tech (which this does tbf) that I just can't believe this kind of thing is ever a good use of time if there's literally any other feature on the backlog.
I have to wonder if big tech firms are deliberately trying to steer UI norms towards having lots of custom components and complex interactions precisely *because* they take so many resources to build well, to prevent indie devs from creating anything that "feels like a real app".
See here how I've highlighted the boundaries of the link you need to hover over and the card that appears when you do — there's a button in the card, but to click it you have to move your mouse from the top red box to the bottom one without passing through the rest of the page. If you build up enough movement speed you can clip through that gap, but nobody should need to do speedrun strats to use a UI.
I think this one solves that by adding some coyote time, so you can spend a few frames outside the red boxes without despawning the card, but still, every time a UI starts doing this stuff you end up in the sort of "fudging things and tweaking values for hours to make everything feel nice" devwork that is great for making tight platform games but just not how I think UIs should be built.
Like, people can and do build nice UIs this way, but it's *so much work* to get it right compared to just having a link to the profile, and that'd before you start considering adaptive tech (which this does tbf) that I just can't believe this kind of thing is ever a good use of time if there's literally any other feature on the backlog.
I have to wonder if big tech firms are deliberately trying to steer UI norms towards having lots of custom components and complex interactions precisely *because* they take so many resources to build well, to prevent indie devs from creating anything that "feels like a real app".