Too humble to mention that you're the creator :) thank you Ben! In my opinion, Slack is the application that really popularized the command bar/palette in the mainstream.
Popularized, probably true. But now I wonder which (maybe default?) keybinds I had for this in tiling window managers before Slack existed. And no clue when and how OS X introduced cmd-space.
(author here) Thanks for posting! I need to update/post a follow-up with a couple of notes since I wrote that post:
* Ben van Enckevort, the original creator of the Slack quick-switcher with Ctrl/Cmd-K, showed up in the StackOverflow thread to tell us the choice of "K" was fairly arbitrary: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/153937 . Thanks AJ Montoya for pointing it out too :)
* Dean Jackson pointed out TextMate as the predecessor to Sublime, including fuzzy search jump-to-file
* Amit Patel suggested Emacs as a potential originator, which led us to find Richard Stallman's manual for Emacs 150 (1980) which does have the Meta-X "extended command" that is very similar to today's command palette. A 1978 TECO manual doesn't mention this, so right around 1980 would be the right time frame.
I'm very excited to be interviewing people who are creating interesting things with software for upcoming blog stuff at digitalseams.com !
As I've grown older, I've found myself more interested in people and their stories and motivations - especially as I know a bunch of people who are technically skilled, but feel unable or unworthy to create instead of consuming. So it's inspiring to hear really great creators talk about those same burdens and how they overcome them.
If this sparks your interest shoot me an email at bobbie @ (site above in comment)
Back when I was applying to college, there was the idea of "yield protection": a college might decline overqualified students to optimize for their "yield" (the percentage of admitted students who accepted). The yield might affect college rankings.
I'm not sure whether yield protection is actually practiced vs. just a paranoid student meme, but it was the first thing I thought of here and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the article.
My thought as well - the infra already exists through MTurk, as well as the ethical and societal questions. You can already pay people pennies per task to do an arbitrary thing, chain that into some kind of consensus if you want to make it harder for individuals to fudge the results, offer more to get your tasks picked up faster, etc.
I'm a mise en place hater personally, since I make a lot of things that are essentially stir fries or stews where some ingredients need significantly more time. Sure, go for it on more complicated recipes, but it's really overkill for lots of daily cooking.
I hear ya there, it’s not necessarily time-optimal when you’re not multi tasking and one step takes much longer than others. I’ll often start my onions and then go get my mise on.
But there’s something zen and satisfying about good mise.
There are lots of people pretending to be Google and friends. They far outnumber the real Googlebot, etc. and most people don't check the reverse DNS/IP list - it's tedious to do this for even well-behaved crawlers that publish how to ID themselves. So much for User Agent.
User agent has been abused for so long, I forget a time when it wasn't.
Anyone else remember having to fake being a Windows machine so that YouTube/Netflix would serve you content better than standard def, or banking portals that blocked you if your agent didn't say you were Internet Explorer?
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