September 29, 2020
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:
- Improve the dropdown navigation a whole bunch.
- Subsume the “secondary” navigation into the primary header navigation bar.
- 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.