> Rapidly translating UIs into code is a core skill for UX engineers<p>Maybe I'm confusing the terms, but in our company UX engineers main job is to "figure out" the user flow. It's kinda UI but with mostly boxes (colors, fonts, animations will be added by designers/coders later).<p>It's closer to product management than programming actually.
Here’s another challenge:<p>Create fun games to play in these flights.<p>The games available are usually poor and slow.<p>Is it a technical limitation such as too many screens and not enough processing power to go around?<p>Or maybe no good HID (Human Interface Device) controllers? Touch-screens should be okay, especially for turn-based games, but maybe continuously pushing your finger against the screen would make the person seated in front angry after some time?<p>Perhaps Management doesn’t realize that video games are a popular thing?<p>Or is this just too much of a first-world problem and not worth the effort from the airline companies?<p>I’d love to see games like Rogue, X-Com, Sopwith, Jagged Alliance, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Myst, Vampire Survivors, and so on, available to play at 30,000 feet.<p>Maybe the airline could have these games hosted on their wifi network for downloading and playing in the browser of your personal pocket computer instead?
A few years when my children were young enough , I was shopping around for couple of those backseat LCD screens to plug a dvd player or media player into for long distance trips. Eventually I used a Raspberry pi and HDMI splitter back in those days to run Kodi. I spent quite a bit of time editing XML on a Kodi theme to disable some elements and make the UI as simple as possible. A kodi or other media player UI theme like this would've been great. 10-12 inch touch screen displays are relatively cheap now. Finding a Raspberry Pi 4 at reasonable price might be hard right now. But there are cheaper alternatives to that as well.
Related hot take: your dev environment should work in airplane mode. It's a forcing function for better test encapsulation and being more deliberate about external dependencies.
A thing I have ben pondering on is whether in-flight entertainment is dead.<p>I have not used it for several years. I get a much more consistent and higher quality experience using my phone and my Nintendo Switch along with my noise reducing headset.<p>i am sure it still has value for some, but the value must be diminishing as more and more people can supply this entertainment themselves.<p>And I believe it is not cheap to fit and maintain an entertainment system on an airplane.
> <i>Slick draggable scrolling is a key part of many screens in Delta’s in-flight entertainment system (complete with momentum-based flicks, over-scroll, page-snapping, etc). Because I didn’t have access to a component library and hadn’t thought to pre-install a good drag scroll library, I ended up having to build my own.</i><p>Shouldn’t have been using <i>any</i> drag scroll library. This is very strongly something that you should <i>never</i> do on the web, because it doesn’t have the right primitives to make it anything other than bad. Scrolljacking is <i>always</i> bad.<p>The proper solution is to just use normal scroll containers. Seriously.<p>That provides what you want for touch-based scrolling, without ruining click-and-drag or scroll-wheel or keyboard scrolling. It gets you your momentum-based flicks, leaves overscroll behaviour up to the user agent (which will be bounce on some platforms like Apple’s I believe, a glowing indicator on others like Android I believe, and nothing on some if you’ve also hidden the scrollbar with `scrollbar-width: none`), and you can use CSS Scroll Snap to control snapping if you want (though frankly I think it’s almost always better not to try to control that stuff).
Fun challenge, but reminds me of my major pet peeve with the Delta inflight UI:<p>The landing page looks empty!<p>I frequently think it's broken or still loading. All it features is the "New Releases - View" box in the bottom. I would expect to see something else there. Images of the first three featured movies perhaps? Anything other than the blank blue background.<p>(Dear delta engineers on HN, please add some preview images to this page).
I love that Fearless is one of the in-flight movies.<p><a href="https://github.com/paulmand3l/delta-inflight/blob/main/src/assets/movies/posters/106881.jpg">https://github.com/paulmand3l/delta-inflight/blob/main/src/a...</a>
Here's a fun idea: ML model which takes an image of a UI (or mockup e.g. Figma) and recreates that UI in code. The ML model would infer callback/binding names, and any missing info like resize constraints, text / images / icons, buttons, etc.
html
width 100%
height 100%
overflow: hidden<p>Please don't do this. I would love to try it, but it's unusable on phone even on desktop mode.
This is awesome. Looks great. Let's push it to production.<p>-management of company I work at.<p>We have an agreement. We keep our POCs so minimal they convey that they will break on everything except the happy path.<p>As for designs, I believe we use Figma.
I think the minor gripe I have would be the demo does not handle the D-pad, which will be part of the user interface. D-pad will bring the extra challenge of performing spatial navigation.
This is a great idea for a challenge.
I generally like to burn an hour or two on a cross country flight making a simple computer simulation. Some good ones include: a triple pendulum, tidal forces, 3 body problem, sand piles, traffic jams...).<p>The UI actually comes together quite nicely when it is built with a powerful computer. On the low end inflight devices it is always so slow and clunky. A reminder to design for the actual device and not for the MacBook Pro running Figma.
> Slick draggable scrolling is a key part of many screens in Delta’s in-flight entertainment system (complete with momentum-based flicks, over-scroll, page-snapping, etc).<p>Then I'm going to have to fly Delta next month -- all the systems I've used have had such terrible latency that none of that was possible. I assumed it was crappy hardware.