One thing that I'm noticing with the app is something I experienced from my days of DVD programming. It is not clear which mode is currently active with the toggle buttons. It is not obvious if the flag is showing you the current mode or if the button needs to be pressed to get the indicated mode. To toggle the weather, do you click the clouds to show cloudy mode or to view clear view or vice versa. It almost feels inverted to me.
I'm also having the same issue on a current project. There's a set of +/- buttons that control the size of a time range window. Clicking the +/- buttons increase/decrease the size of the window, but for the start time + makes the time seconds value smaller, and - makes the seconds value larger. For the end value, it is exactly the opposite. But for the window size, both sets of buttons do what one expects. So it's a matter of perspective that needs to be clear to the user.
This is what I hate most about modern UX-- especially on TV apps. A menu with two items: one is bold white and the other is bold black. What am I about to click?
The youtube captions toggle is guilty of this too. It toggles between black on white and white on black. I just have to click it and wait until I see someone's lips moving with no captions then try the other icon mode.
It's like the move to touchscreen erased everyone's common sense for stateful positional input feedback.
Not sure about common sense and touch screen as it's been around for much much longer. It's also something easily not considered when one is not trained in the ways of the UI. However, it is something that is easy to understand once it is pointed out to you and you are the one under the microscope for it.
For example, in this specific app, the flag/no flag is easier to discern its use compared to the cloud/sun icon. It doesn't follow the same logic as the flag/no flag. It could be cloudy/not cloudy cloud or sunny/not sunny, and then it follows the flag. Consistency between buttons is important
While I've seen similar problems the captions toggle hasn't been one of these for me. On desktop it uses a red underline when activated which is very clear that it's currently activated. On other platforms, I've seen the button's background toggle between translucent button with outlined icon to white button with filled icon, which I find intuitive but I guess others might not.
There's a streaming service in Australia called Binge, and their UX makes me feel something like road rage.
There is a horizontal row of elements for the Seasons of a show, and then below that is a horizontal row of thumbnails for each episode in that season.
The only way you know whether you are currently focused on the Seasons or the Episodes row is that the element you are focusing is perhaps 2.5% larger than the other elements.
There is no border, no shaders over the element - nothing to tell you where you are without arbitrarily moving the focus around just to gather some context.
This is a very fair point. I think I got hung up a little on making it look like a control panel rather than making the UX good.
And you certainly aren't going crazy either, I shipped a last-minute bug-fix where I got the cloud icon the wrong way around compared to everything else
Does it blip planes when the radar scan rolls over them and they stay in a static position but fade until the next sweep? That would be so cool.
Would also be amazing to look at device current gps altitude and location to determine the visible skyline per azimuth based on openstreetmap buildings and hills/elevation around your current position and altitude... then you can show it on the map as a radar occlusion [1] - like a fish finder when you go over a log, or ship radar occluded by another vessel.
I'm sure you'd cause some industry people to scratch their head and wonder how the phone is doing radial scanning
Here are my thoughts I left as a comment on the blog:
I've got ideas! As a parent of a toddler myself, I felt that comment about picking the color... For sure the most important.
Anyways, here is a feature list of things you may have considered but haven't implemented because this is just a fun side project!
1. Live view. Use the phone's camera and iPhone's AR capability to display a dot in the (general) area of the aircraft. I've done some coding on how to calculate this based on the user's position and ADSB info if you are interested!
2. Mark an aircraft as "seen" or "missed"* which would go into the next suggestion.... (*could even digest this feedback in somehow and fine tune what is displayed?)
3. Badges/Stats! If your daughter is anything like mine, she loves getting badges in apps. Maybe create a local DB of previous sightings so then you can track things like "number of different airlines", "number of different aircraft types", "farthest flight time spotted", "shortest flight time spotted" etc etc (Note: I understand and totally appreciate the possible issues around gamifying apps meant for consumption by children.)
> If your daughter is anything like mine, she loves getting badges in apps
This may sound curmudgeonly, but I try to drill into my son's awareness that he should aspire to be a producer of technology, rather than just a consumer. We face regular discussions about why he shouldn't spend $30 on Robux or some other digital currency. I try and explain that these digital currencies don't have real value like, say, a tennis racket or a pair of shoes.
As such I also try and give him the tools to fight against gamification, and not to be sucked into grinding for hours to get some badge or other worthless digital artifact.
So my 2 cents would be not to add features like this to an app aimed at kids. Let them see that there is a such a thing as a non-gamified, non-ad infested app that adds real value to their lives.
> We face regular discussions about why he shouldn't spend $30 on Robux or some other digital currency. I try and explain that these digital currencies don't have real value like, say, a tennis racket or a pair of shoes.
I’m not sure I agree. Value is a deep and multi-faceted concept. It’s very likely that your child would value the games they can purchase with Robux(it’s my understanding that Roblox has a bunch of games that can be purchased?).
Devil’s advocate: is it possible that Robux teach children to contribute financially to the ecosystem’s they participate in? FOSS is famously not “free-as-in-beer” yet we have created the expectation that virtual goods including software do not have financial value. Could being raised on Robux create an incentive to make modest financial contributions to software projects?
Yeah, that is why I included the note at the end. It is an important lesson for adults to teach children right now. I'm also working on teaching my daughter this lesson while we design/create our own "game" for fun on the weekends.
The idea of the badges is to teach things to deepen a child's understanding of planes (planes fly all around the world! At all heights! They are many different sizes!) instead of driving "Average Active Time Spent In The App To Get Special Widgets To Spend In The Radar Flight Store."
Who here in the HN crowd would be up for porting this to Android as a sort of open-source crowdsource project? Any takers? At a guess (about licensing) I would say that whoever sets up the initial GH repo uses this quote from the author " waiting for an enterprising Android engineer to port it themselves—I’ve placed enough detail in these posts! You’re welcome to do so, just make it free for everybody."
Thanks for the suggestion to do something like this! I've never made a mobile app but would love to learn how. Even if it's not to contribute to a high quality Android app for this radar thing, choosing to spend some of my time porting anything like it which also falls into the "An app can be a home-cooked meal"[0] paradigm likely means that grokking the code will be easier than with because it will be programmed with a singular vision/paradigm and lack bloat/adware/tracking/etc which would complicate reading and understanding the existing code.
This suggestion may put me on the road to find some renewed joy in programming.
Honestly I was hoping to inspire something like this; where someone wants to learn to build something interesting that isn't just another todo app tutorial
If you do want to build it, I'm happy to share the iOS source with you!
Slightly off-topic but a question I've been wanting to ask: as someone with a terrible sense of direction, the most important feature in a phone for me is the accuracy of the little arrow on the map that shows me which way I'm facing. I'm an android user, and it kind of shows a blue "cone of uncertainty" when it isn't sure which way its pointing, and occasionally asks either to move the phone in a figure of eight or to point at nearby building to calibrate.
What is the limiting factor here, technologically? Are iPhones better than android? Is it the hardware (accelerometer?!, compass?), the GPS signal, the software? It still, quite often, seems to get confused and show the cone in the wrong direction. It's so important to me that I would almost switch to iPhone if it definitely works better.
Glad you said this - I actually made the same observation in the original post!
I assumed maybe there was some kind of GPS limiting factor, but the CoreLocation orientation delegate perfectly returns your orientation, at least at my device's 120Hz frame rate.
I think it could be about hiding the level of accuracy. I remember sometime back learning that there are many cases where sounds are added back for comfort and the expected experience that customers are used to, so perhaps this is one of those cases where they have continued as a company to mask their true power and just like with everything they do, they cannot appear to be a monopoly so they need to fake the accuracy defects and all that while behind the scene they are actually tracking it all ..... who knows.
As someone using both equally often, I am kind of certain Android passes through the raw sensor readings while iOS has some form of debounce delay and guesstimation implemented. Both are equally often off in their readings. But that's just based on usage experience, not a hard fact.
>I'm an android user, and it kind of shows a blue "cone of uncertainty" when it isn't sure which way its pointing, and occasionally asks either to move the phone in a figure of eight or to point at nearby building to calibrate.
Apple products and animations generally have more smoothing and hysteresis; my presumption is that the accuracy is hidden from the user in an effort to make sure that the arrow doesn't fluctuate wildly, whereas the android UI is more likely to show artifacts from the 'noisy' GPS/IMU fusion and inherent magnetometer inaccuracies.
'Slow arrow' was one of the things that kind of drove me crazy in iOS back in the old days now with faster hardware I notice the 'twitchy' arrow more on other platforms.
tl;dr: Most modern hardware is pretty equal as far as being able to determine its' place in space and time with decent accuracy now , but not all navi software is equal in terms of dead reckoning accuracy and pose estimation given the current data and the user expectation of noise filtering while handling the phone.
>As always, it’s uniquely gratifying to create something my daughter wants to play with. I look forward to her developing many more interests — with any luck, soon she’ll get super into platforming games or heavy metal.
I got into heavy metal because of the Tony Hawk games (THPS3 - Motorhead's "Ace of Spades", THPS4 - Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast"). So there's a potential breadcrumb trail.
Readit News
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908 My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar (1304 points, 56 days ago)
I'm also having the same issue on a current project. There's a set of +/- buttons that control the size of a time range window. Clicking the +/- buttons increase/decrease the size of the window, but for the start time + makes the time seconds value smaller, and - makes the seconds value larger. For the end value, it is exactly the opposite. But for the window size, both sets of buttons do what one expects. So it's a matter of perspective that needs to be clear to the user.
The youtube captions toggle is guilty of this too. It toggles between black on white and white on black. I just have to click it and wait until I see someone's lips moving with no captions then try the other icon mode.
It's like the move to touchscreen erased everyone's common sense for stateful positional input feedback.
For example, in this specific app, the flag/no flag is easier to discern its use compared to the cloud/sun icon. It doesn't follow the same logic as the flag/no flag. It could be cloudy/not cloudy cloud or sunny/not sunny, and then it follows the flag. Consistency between buttons is important
While I've seen similar problems the captions toggle hasn't been one of these for me. On desktop it uses a red underline when activated which is very clear that it's currently activated. On other platforms, I've seen the button's background toggle between translucent button with outlined icon to white button with filled icon, which I find intuitive but I guess others might not.
There is a horizontal row of elements for the Seasons of a show, and then below that is a horizontal row of thumbnails for each episode in that season.
The only way you know whether you are currently focused on the Seasons or the Episodes row is that the element you are focusing is perhaps 2.5% larger than the other elements.
There is no border, no shaders over the element - nothing to tell you where you are without arbitrarily moving the focus around just to gather some context.
And you certainly aren't going crazy either, I shipped a last-minute bug-fix where I got the cloud icon the wrong way around compared to everything else
Would also be amazing to look at device current gps altitude and location to determine the visible skyline per azimuth based on openstreetmap buildings and hills/elevation around your current position and altitude... then you can show it on the map as a radar occlusion [1] - like a fish finder when you go over a log, or ship radar occluded by another vessel.
I'm sure you'd cause some industry people to scratch their head and wonder how the phone is doing radial scanning
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Occlusion-percentage-for...
I've got ideas! As a parent of a toddler myself, I felt that comment about picking the color... For sure the most important.
Anyways, here is a feature list of things you may have considered but haven't implemented because this is just a fun side project!
1. Live view. Use the phone's camera and iPhone's AR capability to display a dot in the (general) area of the aircraft. I've done some coding on how to calculate this based on the user's position and ADSB info if you are interested!
2. Mark an aircraft as "seen" or "missed"* which would go into the next suggestion.... (*could even digest this feedback in somehow and fine tune what is displayed?)
3. Badges/Stats! If your daughter is anything like mine, she loves getting badges in apps. Maybe create a local DB of previous sightings so then you can track things like "number of different airlines", "number of different aircraft types", "farthest flight time spotted", "shortest flight time spotted" etc etc (Note: I understand and totally appreciate the possible issues around gamifying apps meant for consumption by children.)
This may sound curmudgeonly, but I try to drill into my son's awareness that he should aspire to be a producer of technology, rather than just a consumer. We face regular discussions about why he shouldn't spend $30 on Robux or some other digital currency. I try and explain that these digital currencies don't have real value like, say, a tennis racket or a pair of shoes.
As such I also try and give him the tools to fight against gamification, and not to be sucked into grinding for hours to get some badge or other worthless digital artifact.
So my 2 cents would be not to add features like this to an app aimed at kids. Let them see that there is a such a thing as a non-gamified, non-ad infested app that adds real value to their lives.
I’m not sure I agree. Value is a deep and multi-faceted concept. It’s very likely that your child would value the games they can purchase with Robux(it’s my understanding that Roblox has a bunch of games that can be purchased?).
The idea of the badges is to teach things to deepen a child's understanding of planes (planes fly all around the world! At all heights! They are many different sizes!) instead of driving "Average Active Time Spent In The App To Get Special Widgets To Spend In The Radar Flight Store."
Wondering if I can get my hands on a vision pro for #1 :)
This suggestion may put me on the road to find some renewed joy in programming.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423
If you do want to build it, I'm happy to share the iOS source with you!
email in my profile
What is the limiting factor here, technologically? Are iPhones better than android? Is it the hardware (accelerometer?!, compass?), the GPS signal, the software? It still, quite often, seems to get confused and show the cone in the wrong direction. It's so important to me that I would almost switch to iPhone if it definitely works better.
I assumed maybe there was some kind of GPS limiting factor, but the CoreLocation orientation delegate perfectly returns your orientation, at least at my device's 120Hz frame rate.
I think Google Maps might just be bad.
Apple products and animations generally have more smoothing and hysteresis; my presumption is that the accuracy is hidden from the user in an effort to make sure that the arrow doesn't fluctuate wildly, whereas the android UI is more likely to show artifacts from the 'noisy' GPS/IMU fusion and inherent magnetometer inaccuracies.
'Slow arrow' was one of the things that kind of drove me crazy in iOS back in the old days now with faster hardware I notice the 'twitchy' arrow more on other platforms.
tl;dr: Most modern hardware is pretty equal as far as being able to determine its' place in space and time with decent accuracy now , but not all navi software is equal in terms of dead reckoning accuracy and pose estimation given the current data and the user expectation of noise filtering while handling the phone.
I got into heavy metal because of the Tony Hawk games (THPS3 - Motorhead's "Ace of Spades", THPS4 - Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast"). So there's a potential breadcrumb trail.