Buttondown’s newest mascot.

My latest of reasons for being bad at writing is the most adorable yet: Telemachus, my ten-week-old corgi puppy. He is a very sweet dumb fluffball, with some strengths:

• sleeping through the night in his kennel without being upset!
• walking around the neighborhood without laggardness or incident!
• being a sweet little angel who loves snuggles!
• not peeing or pooping indoors!

And some weaknesses:

• only interacting with the world through his very sharp teeth!
• realizing that barking is very cute and thus grabs our attention!

Anyhoo, Telemachus will probably not be making any further appearances in this newsletter but he is very cute and I wanted to share him with you all. (And if you see a lot more corgi-based placeholder photos…well, that’s why.)

The brilliant new writing interface.

I had some spare time to engage in proactive development (what do I want this tool to be like in two years) rather than reactive development (what fire needs to be extinguished right this second?) this past week, and I spent some time poking around the wild world of writing plugins.

I started out by looking at ProseMirror and Trix before landing on Tiptap, which is actually a Vue wrapper around the former. All of this is still in the ideation phase, and honestly choosing the tech I wanted to use was the easy part. I was suddenly struck by the rabbit hole of decisions I wanted and needed to make:

• Okay, so the new interface is going to be full-screen, like Medium or Paper.
• Which means all of the ‘annotations’ like broken links or typos can be in-line and we can have a floating box for actions, like sending or scheduling.
• But what does that mean for the subject input?
• I guess it can be subsumed into the writing interface itself. Paper does that and I think it’s quite nice.
• Okay, but what about the secondary navigation (Scheduled, Drafts, New Draft?)
• Well, that’s a bad affordance anyway; I want to subsume that into the main navigation.
• Oh right, I’ve been meaning to redesign the dropdown for a long time. It needs more stuff.
• Should I just get rid of the navigation hierarchy entirely, and move everything into the dropdown? That could be interesting, right?

…and so on. It’s hard to get back into a mode of proactive design after spending the past year doing a lot of small, piecemeal changes. I think the right thing to tackle first is the dropdown navigation, and going from there — but it’s clear that there’s a lot of design debt that I need to pay down.

A rough order of events could be:

1. Improve the dropdown navigation a whole bunch.
2. Subsume the “secondary” navigation into the primary header navigation bar.
3. Get rid of the ‘headings’ for each page

And then I have a cleaner slate to work with, which is probably what I’ll end up doing. Ah, redesigns.