Re: the flashing 12:00 problem (Re: Twitter successors)

Nick Moffitt <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.org.user-groups.linux.cabal
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 19Mar2024 03:23pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Michael Paoli ([email protected]):
> [...]
> > Now, maybe a conventional oven might be useful ... but I'd bet that still
> > <<5% use such on a conventional oven to set a time to start and stop
> > cooking something in the oven.
> 
> But both conventional and microwave ovens will continue to reliably include
> 50¢worth of digital clock circuitry, out of fear that some purchasers will
> prefer another unitl on grounds of "features".

This began largely because a microwave oven already has need for a display that can show the time remaining for the current cooking job.  In the original "Radar Range" years, this was an interface not unlike an egg timer: you twisted a knob to the printed duration desired, and waited for it to slowly twist its way back to zero.  But by the 80s, it was cheaper to use a combination of seven-segment displays and individual LEDs, along with a quartz clock circuit.

At some point it became too expensive to get a clock timer component that *didn't* combine wall-clock functionality with the countdown features, especially if you already needed a microcontroller for some of the more elaborate microwave-specific modes.

All this is just a race to the bottom, as parts of your design become commodities with a number of affordances and confounding UX infuriations built in.

And yes, modern touch-screen interfaces are a more recent version of this.  Our induction hob is fantastic, and cooks more cleanly, heats faster and more evenly, and costs less to operate than the antiquated gas monstrosity¹ that the previous tenants had installed.  But modern stoves all insist on a single pane of glass for the cooktop surface, which means that when a pot boils over, it can splatter on the control area and turn off the stove entirely.

That said, it's *far* easier to clean than our old one was: a couple squirts of windoline, and it's like-new.  I just wish I could control it when my fingers are wet, and that setting a baking sheet on the wrong part didn't send it beeping and screaming at me.


¹: In before the gas stove maniacs complain: https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54

_______________________________________________
conspire mailing list
[email protected]
http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.