Ilya Birman

In Eastern Europe, a lot of computer-savvy people write with em dashes. I see two reasons behind that: 1. There is a highly popular Cyrillic keyboard layout with an em dash made by design educator Ilya Birman – https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout. 2. His colleague, Maxim Ilyahov is the author of an extremely popular book on writing good copy. Somehow, this book was a bestseller for years and was read by all kinds of common folk. I once saw a janitor reading it on a break!

Ilya Birman's work is greatly underappreciated. His Moscow Metro map proposal[1] was pretty cool, and his commuter rail map[2] summarizes the routes much better than its predecessors. [1]: https://ilyabirman.net/moscow/metro/map/2016/ [2]: https://ilyabirman.net/moscow/rail/

Yeah, remember good old Norton Commander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander) - not that newfangled clone Midnight Commander, the original? Or the Borland text mode IDEs (https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/ui-museum-turbo-pascal-7-1/), complete with windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, file dialogs etc. etc.?

Do yourself a favour and use typography layout https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout/

I’ve built a custom layout for that (and a bunch of other symbols I frequently use). ⌥ hyphen for en-dash, ⌥ ⇧ hyphen for em-dash (and ⌥ M is for minus): https://typo.ale.sh/ (The idea isn’t new, of course: the default macOS layout’s 3rd layer is absolutely bonkers. I think Ilya Birman was the first: https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout/)

Also, it seems like his work is actually being used. He designed all the street plates for Chisnau, the capital of Moldova and they look pretty cool. https://ilyabirman.net/chisinau/

They most definitely could do a lot[1]. There was also overlays[2][3] and extended memory (EMS/XMS) which made it possible to use quite a lot of memory. [1]: https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/ui-museum-turbo-pascal-7-1/ [2]: http://www.oocities.org/~franzglaser/tpsrc/overlaytxt.html [3]: https://secondboyet.com/articles/publishedarticles/theslithytove.html

The future repeats the past. This looks much like the back-end systems I used to design on TurboPascal in the late 1980s / early 1990s. https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/pictures/tp-80.png

The (centrifugal) layout's cool, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Moscow_metro… Or this alternate take: https://ilyabirman.net/projects/moscow-metro/map/2016/i/[email protected]…

Ahem. https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout/ It has been available for 20 years. To use combining characters (and client-side font layout and rendering), type the letter, then one of available dead keys two times (e. g. `a, AltGr+Shift+6, AltGr+Shift+6` gives â). To get the single code point (if it's available), type modifier once, then the letter (e. g. `AltGr+Shift+6, a` gives â). I've been touch typing em dashes for years, and can't imagine it any other way. It seems that corresponding Russian installers are more up to date. You can gently nag the author to update the English version, or just take the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, and do it your way. Be aware that certain silly applications use hard-coded keyboard shortcut handlers that bypass the system, and therefore misbehave if system layout is anything else but default US English. Windows also sometimes likes to resurrect the deleted default layout until the last process that used it exits, or something like that. It has been said multiple times that the absence of proper typography on personal computer keyboards is just laziness, ignorance, and lack of leadership. There are no technical reasons for that — just look at keyboards for European languages.

You can read about why projections still very much matter for large scale (which is what I think you meant; small scale would be something that shows you whole countries and not used for road navigation) maps in the article I linked. Google Maps tried out an alternative projection back when it was still Keyhole and ran into problems with angular distortion when zoomed in. The original post is sadly lost to Google shutting down their product forums, but here's a quote from a Google Maps engineer on their use of Mercator and why it matters: The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality. While [Mercator] distorts a “zoomed-out view” of the map, it allows close-ups (street level) to appear more like reality. The majority of our users are looking down at the street level for businesses, directions, etc… so we’re sticking with this projection for now. Sourced from https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/map-and-reality-distortion/, but there are other citations of the same quote as well.

How many other user interactions are generally considered objectively bad practice? Sure, there may be a time and place, but what is frequently overused? Toasts: - https://maxschmitt.me/posts/toasts-bad-ux - https://youtu.be/LeCKu0HqGFQ?si=xKApVFSqdzLGF0SD Modals (being a special case of modes): - https://modalzmodalzmodalz.com/ Modes: - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/modes/ - https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/all/timed-modes/ What else?