Doesn’t have to be a commercial solution to change the game. There’s a lot of room between the commercial product and ‘Our end users… current "system" is Excel.’ Especially if the market moves towards making useful APIs at the ERP and vendors endpoints.
And how would the outcome be different after a couple of years than the internally built Excel file with VBScript, Access and VB6 apps built by non developers back in the day?
I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.
While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.
Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).
The stories of online-only service failures are legion. And yet if you can get face to face support, even one person can do so much. The gap is infuriating.
I didn’t notice, do you have a Brick and Mortar Apple Store you can visit? I can’t help thinking this as I read the post.
Of course this is not a physical hardware issue. Where a store employee could just hand you, say, a new phone. This is on the level of getting a slot on Tim Cook’s day planner, though I imagine the person with the ability to fix this is an underling many levels down Cook on the org chart.
Yeah. I have a dis-a-bility. It’s now 2200 and I’ve been working since 0830. My eyes are tired and these 8’s look like 0’s, 5’s look like 6’s. What a tool.
MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.
> “…uncomfortable: the more integrated a tool becomes, the harder it is for people to form a mental model.”
Some of this sounds like reinventing the wheel. This conclusion, for example seems obvious, other than the uncomfortable part, which is what users might use to describe their experience with an unfamiliar model and no clues from the software. How is this insight different than, say, how a programmer feels about an unfamiliar API or custom classes?
If there is a design to the software then some explanation might be needed to give users the keystone idea. After that I would argue it’s UI and UX design working to communicate to the user what is possible, and how you go about doing it.
Speaks to me same as, programmers rely heavily on documentation and pattern (not anti-pattern. lol…people rely heavily on words and syntax to communicate).
The story of the 1990s web with the introduction of Macromedia Flash, saw a world of fantastical UIs. Some were brilliant, some were obvious, others were inscrutable puzzles. The backlash with Web 2.0 washed all that away, and it all became _familiar UI metaphors (tabs, …)_.
Knowing what I know today, I wonder if the key to an advanced workflow isn’t a hybrid of scripting and UI. Most great ideas arrive ahead of their time.
> “…are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources…”
I don’t know the answer, but the op’s answer does point to corruption. This reminds me of early 20th century reforms in the meat industry in the United States a hundred years ago.
The immediacy is you are looking at the data. What you’re going to do with it may not yet be known Is it the right data? What are the values? What are the features?
I write scripts at work and tell colleagues if they want my help they should first work it out in Excel and write an outline of the details. If they can’t do that, then the problem may not be a candidate for _script automation_.
Our pipeline is not fully automated, but that’s how I describe it. The rest is Excel Carpentry.
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