The example of Pages from the article has actually since been changed to do the same thing.

Red "Delete" on the far left, then on the far right a gray/neutral "Cancel" button, and an orange (the app's primary color) "Save"

Agree. And I've been flagging double negatives in PRs for years (e.g. `not undead`). It makes me feel like the Ned Flanders of programmers.

But RuboCop detects `!!something`, and I actually like that idiom, because I prefer to convert into true boolean types before passing them to a method, since it makes the intention clear in the code.

I agree that such forced choices are insulting. It's about the same as also including a disabled "No" button with hover text that reads "disabled because fuck you".

Remember in 1990 (the pictures are from around then) there wasn't unlimited fast disk space. There was a good chance you were saving to a floppy disk which not only was slow, but might not be in the drive all the time. At least in 1990 you could assume a hard drive - but you couldn't safely assume there was enough free space on the drive to save anything, since 40mb drives filled fast.

35 years latter we live in a different world where you can assume an unlimited fast data connection to a data center. Saving and allowing undo is possible today.

In the world of 2TB SSD’s, it does seem silly to risk inadvertently deleting an important ~2kb word document.

Aspirin had (though this is increasingly dated) unique cultural currency as a headache medicine for quite a while after it stopped being the overwhelmingly dominant first-line OTC remedy.

Pretty sure "causes Aspirin sales to soar" is an attempt at cleverly saying "gives people headaches"

"Maybe later..."

Rip John C. Dvorak, writer of the Abort/Retry/Fail column from PC Magazine.

On a different note, never underestimate the value of a modal dialog that gives you a chance to retry an IO operation that failed. Loose USB cables and network shares over Wifi can make those happen a lot more often.

As I remember, standard operating procedure was to retry 4 or 5 times, then turn off the computer and walk away in frustration.

For a site about usability, I was going to gripe about the tiny font, low contrast, and unresponsive layout until I saw that. It does look more suitable at 1024x768.

Good year