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Showing posts from February, 2021

Gray Patterns

You may have heard of dark patterns, where technology is designed in intentionally malicious (or, dark) ways. But what about when it's unintentional? There are a ton of habits I have developed over the years purely to account for bugs I have encountered in software I use. These bugs may be fixed someday, but for now the defensive habits remain, sapping precious energy and time from me. Here are some examples. I have multiple monitors, and in Windows 10 there's an option to have a taskbar on each monitor and to only show open windows on the taskbar of the same monitor as there the window is at. If you focus a program on one monitor, then focus a program on another monitor, both programs stay focused on both taskbars even though only one is truly in focus. Clicking in the blank area of any taskbar fixes the display issue. So, I now have a habit of clicking to focus a program, clicking in a blank area, then refocusing the program again, just to avoid this distracting visual bug. W