In the early days you set your browser to show pages (all of them) how you wanted to see them, much like the font and color settings in the OS that were supposed to apply to everything (although those have problems too). But as soon as it started getting commercialized, the companies all wanted to make pixel-perfect designs like they would with print brochures, and it’s been mostly downhill from there.
Not that smoothing design is bad, but the way it’s been done to be hard to override or nonfunctional if overridden is. At least there’s some more accessibility than in the heyday of Flash-powered sites with mystery meat navigation or frames with tables of sliced images.
I don’t know if this is an option for you but I’ve found that using email filters to automatically bucket emails into different folders has been a lifesaver for my productivity.
I have super aggressive email rules to try to route a minimum into my inbox. Other things go into highly organized folders. This way I can concentrate on the most important things (those things that actually end up in my inbox) versus the distractions (most everything else) that I read with less urgency.
Furthermore some of these folders have rules to automatically clear out anything older than 1-2 weeks going on the assumption that if I don’t get to them, then they aren’t worth reading. These are things like mailing lists or automated emails so they really aren’t critical or necessary to retain. (This also helps when I go on vacation - I can just wipe these folders and get a fresh start.)
If I didn’t do things like this, I’d probably end up with 1000 emails a day in my inbox and I’d never be able to catch up and important stuff would get missed.
It’s triggering to me when I see my colleagues with thousands of unread emails, or when they get into the kind of email debt where they will say things like “if you need anything re-send it because I’m just wiping my mailbox”.
I don’t think I can do that. I use Thunderbird because I can use about:config to block the blinking cursors. But I get hit by a lot of animation if I try to set up mail filters. So I would need to find and set up another mail app without either animation.
P.S. Org software like Devonthink or EagleFiler might allow a work around, if it works with Thunderbird and has decent accessibility options.
I wish Outlook had a way to make a rule to automatically clean out folders. At work I get thousands per day due to all the automated notifications (which I’m never going to read), and while I do have have most of the worst offenders siphoned off into folders by the rules, I still have to go in and manually delete them every so often or whenever the computer gets too slow and unresponsive. I use a mac with an older version of outlook and that’s not an option in rules or preferences that I can find. And the inbox still gets random spam and ham.
So I’m one of those people with thousands of unread emails and for whom it’s best to message me if there’s actually a relevant email for a change that I should be searching for in that mess. That’s pretty rare - usually only once or twice a week, if that. Most of our communication goes through Slack, which has its own problems, but at least it’s easier to put most of the spam in separate channels and just ignore or unsubscribe them.
You can set up auto archiving per folder, and have it permanently delete after a period of time. If you use Exchange, you can set up retention rules for folders and have them auto delete. I (ab)use these to auto-purge folders from the server side. Some folders are as little as 2 weeks.
@marjae is your email provider Gmail or Exchange based? If so you can set up rules on the web site and avoid the email client configuration.
One is, but it’s not standard, so all the instructions assuming a gmail email include gmail, login systems assuming that, etc. are … unhelpful.
After asking for alternatives to avoid the animation, I was recommended Quickfilters, and tried it, and got hit with even more animation.
P.S. This setting is supposed to control the sheet animations, but it doesn’t: Apple Developer Documentation defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.0001
P.P.S. defaults write -g NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false does it. With both the standard dialogues and most of the QuickFilters ones.
It’s because you always have to use the lowest common denominator tool in any office because most people aren’t computer literate enough to learn to use a new program.
When every entry in a hundred-volume series is listed by (1) series title, (2) not by volume number, (3) by the year of publication of the 1st volume.
For example:
I think that volume covers Sherman’s campaigns to Atlanta and Savannah. William’s report notes how many refugees, mostly escaping slavery, accompanied one corps on the march.
I was watching Hanna on Amazon. I had just discovered the show, so was still on series one.
Midway through the show, I paused it to make some tea. This takes longer than a minute, because good tea takes time. The TV’s screensaver kicks in and when I return, pressing play resumes right where the TV thinks I left off-- the beginning of the first episode of season 2. Arghh!
The US weather service’s radar animation has used Flash for like 15 years. I kept sending emails asking for them to upgrade, but never got an answer. And I abandoned Flash when I got a new computer in 2017. Of course it never worked on any Apple products, like my 2013 iPad.
Wow. That is terribly terribly bad. Especially in a vehicle control system. For eyes-off, hands-on use, the controls need to be touch-sensitive in the sense that the user can tell what they’re doing by touch, not that the machine just does random things whenever you touch it. And if you lost one dial/gauge/lamp, that was just one control or instrument. For the touchscreen version, if you lose one thing it’s all gone.
In the early 90s, as a teenager, I used to play those Microprose flight sims - the ones with the big cardboard keyboard overlays to show you which keys did what. I had a cool futuristic vision of some future keyboard that was actually a flat touch-sensitive screen, so each program could relabel and recolor the ‘keys’, or replace unused ones with sliders, dials, etc. to fit the controls it needed.
Many years later, the first time I used a touchscreen I realized what a dumb idea that was. And now touchscreens are everywhere. It was so funny when Mac started replacing keys with the ‘touchbar’, which was so disliked that they’re removing it and replacing it with keys in the new ones.
