Chris’ Corner: Liking Things
I went looking through my saved links the other day for posts that are actively someone liking something. Article like 5 things I love about Astro or Anatomy of my favorite API. I found suspiciously little of it, which makes me think there is suspiciously little of it being written, as I’m the type that would save links like that with vigor.
It might just be, ya know, the world. People aren’t feeling particularly positive generally and it makes them not particularly feel like writing positive things. Maybe that’s part of it. I also think there’s never been a huge culture of writing positive stuff about tech.
There is plenty of “how to” and “here’s something new” with a kind of enthusiastic neutrality. We’ve got GitHub Issues but no GitHub Tissues, am I right? I’m still workshopping that. I’m just saying I would be happy to be on the record saying we should write positive things when we feel like something deserves it more often.
I found one! My Favorite Firefox Features by Matt Cool. This is exactly what I mean. Giving software a good shout when it does stuff you like. Matt mentions how it syncs tabs in an interesting way, where the open tabs from each synced device are kept in a menu. I’m noticing those nice looking side-tabs as well, and popping videos out when you leave a tab with a playing video is a great touch. All stuff from Arc, I might add, but I will not digress.
Weird twist: I don’t actually mind the opposite of a post like that. A post about all the things you dislike about something. If it’s mean and personal, then I do mind, but if it’s an honest take about a technological thing, that can be a good read. I recently had a conversation based on someone’s general dislike of the DevTools in Safari. I happen to agree! I don’t love them! But in the end, the conversation wasn’t particularly useful as nobody named anything usefully specific about what, exactly, was bad about them. If someone were to write up into a blog post (that wasn’t mean or personal) all those specific things, that would be a good read and probably quite appreciated and useful to Safari, as well.
If you’re going to hate on something without being particularly helpful, I suppose you might as well just be absolutely full-throated about it. Like how Michael Bierut hates ITC Garamond:
The most distinctive element of the typeface is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibilty, but only in the same way that dog poop’s creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.
But he knows it’s just raw emotion.
I’ve come to realize that I don’t hate it for any rational reason; I hate it like I hate fingernails on a blackboard. I hate it because I hate it.
