[conspire] the flashing 12:00 problem (Re: Twitter successors)

[Nick Moffitt]

On 19Mar2024 03:23pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Michael Paoli (michael.paoli at berkeley.edu):
> [...]
> > 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