Adam Z. Lein

Image of 16 internet messaging apps on an Android phone with the text "The Messaging Mess is Stupid"

The Messaging Mess: Why it’s stupid to use non-standard electronic messaging protocols

On July 19, 2022 By Adam Z. Lein In Features, Tech

“Too Long Didn’t Read” Summary: Managing too many messaging apps can cause cognitive overload and contribute to burn-out. It’s smarter to focus on the one publicly democratic system that works with everything everywhere there’s internet, is completely open for you to control/customize on your own within the largest messaging ecosystem on the planet, and is already built into 99% of the electronic devices in use by 100% of humans with internet access. Collaborative Diversity Type …

General User Experience Design Guidance

On July 18, 2022 By Adam Z. Lein In Design

This page lists design guideline suggestions backed by logical reasoning that has often been proven in usability studies. Many GUI designers either ignore or don’t know about many of these basic rules that should probably be common sense. Make it “Easy to Learn” and “Easy to use” Always label buttons with text by default Enable theme capabilities and system theme integration Enable customizable interaction methods Avoid splash screens at startup Human-Computer User Interfaces in General …

The Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra is still my favorite phone as a photographer

On July 30, 2021 By Adam Z. Lein In Tech

For the past decade or so, my primary criteria for choosing a smartphone has been its camera capabilities. For numerous years after the Nokia Lumia 1020 was released, there was no innovation in smartphone camera capabilities. Happily we’ve finally reached a point where smartphone cameras are better than ever, and here’s my current favorite. If you’re already familiar with my writing on Pocketnow, you’ll know that I love to use smartphones for photography, especially when I …

Explaining Windows 11’s Bad Design

On July 21, 2021 By Adam Z. Lein In Tech

Now hold on… when I say “bad design” here, I’m talking about bad design in the context of user experience and human-computer interaction design not the beautiful new immaterial background wallpaper graphics. The new background images and semi-opaque Vista-like windows look great! Human-computer interaction design generally has two important approaches; “easy to use” and “easy to learn.” There’s also the “easy to look at” approach to design, and that seems to be more what Microsoft …

10 Ways Delta Chat is Better than WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram

On February 13, 2021 By Adam Z. Lein In Tech

With Facebook finally changing how WhatsApp works so that they can profit off of the users (as expected), many people are choosing to switch to other internet messaging apps like Signal & Telegram. We’ve already talked about how naïve that is given there isn’t really anything stopping Signal & Telegram from changing their policies or adding anti-features in the future (they have already). If you haven’t had your ear to the ground in places like the Fediverse or Free …

Stop being naive when it comes to things like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.

On January 17, 2021 By Adam Z. Lein In Tech

The trend today has been to stop using WhatsApp ever since the policy was updated to allow sharing your personal information with Facebook. Some are recommending switching to other centralized messaging systems like Signal or Telegram, but there’s a problem with that too. Read on to learn how to recognize when a messaging app is out to profit off of and control you versus enabling better communications between people. Personally, I specifically never became dependent on …