I like PostgreSQL, especially when you include documentation, software development and release process in the definition of design.
Their commit messages are the golden standard of commit messages.
Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#12Unix… but the definition of "well-designed" may differ from person to person.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#13Consumer products: Foursquare, iA Writer, Dropbox, Basecamp, Tinder, Tweetbot, Citymapper, Fantastical, Instapaper, Hotel Tonight, Cash App, 1Password, youtube-dl, Mailbox RIP :'(
Dev products: Postgres, Heroku, Elixir, DigitalOcean, Tower (git GUI), Sentry
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#14TCP/IP.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#15Datomic, Rich Hickey's postgres killer http://www.dustingetz.com/:datomic-in-four-snippets
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#16Ableton Live.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#17In terms of UI, it was the FrameMaker desktop publishing program. A beautiful implementation of the idea of "progressive disclosure".
Was that on classic Mac OS? I’ve long wanted to take a look at FrameMaker. I wonder if it’s easily available in abandonware somewhere for an emulator tryout.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#18Mysql8 and Oracle workbench.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#19Pivotal Tracker. It's opinionated, but because it can rely on those assumptions, it strikes this incredible balance between information density, on-the-ground usability, and the ability to have a birds-eye-view of the risks of a software project. A diligently updated Pivotal project is a thing of beauty and confidence and inspiration. One size does not fit all (and certainly, if you want to give your team the opportunity to work on more difficult-to-spec, research-oriented, or experimentation-dependent projects, it's far from ideal), but for typical web applications, it's industry-defining.
Worst-designed software: Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions - https://www.google.com/search?q=peoplesoft+campus+solutions&... . A case study in "how many workflows can we fit into one infinitely customizable software product without hiring a UX or UI designer to give any thought to a single one of them? Oh, and how can we make it as non-performant as possible to do the most common tasks?" I understand the siren call of "an interface that works for every workflow imaginable" - but unless you build design-customization tools on top of it, it will be a hated monstrosity.
Fun story: my undergraduate college used this, and I got a highly competitive internship after an interview where I spent the majority of the time ripping apart exactly how bad this software was, and how I would fix various aspects. I imagine no person motivated enough to solve those problems has any desire to work for Oracle, so the problem will persist for at least another century.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?
#20Hands down, Rhino3d (https://www.rhino3d.com/)
It is an amazing piece of 3D modeling software. After having used it, other 3D modeling software seems software seems clunky in comparison.
Rhino3D is the best mixture of command line, auto complete, and a mouse based interface that I have ever seen. Lots of CAD software combined the two, but Rhino does an incredible job. The commands are also incredibly well named, to the point that you can often just guess what you want to do, and the command is right there.
If you mean well architected, the RTOS that ran on the Microsoft Band is some of the best code I'll probably ever have the pleasure of working with. The lead architect on it reviewed every single code submission to ensure consistency in quality and style. Imagine hundreds of thousands of LOC with all the variables being well named, the same conceptual layout of code in every source file, all written against an incredibly well designed run time. The abstractions in the RTOS were all pure and consistent, you didn't run into surprises.
In terms of UI, a lot of specialty software actually falls into this category, it just has a learning curve, but the software is all driven around a single purpose and once you have learned it, that shows. Photoshop is actually like this, once you have learned it, the UI is incredibly powerful and the different abstractions used are at the right level of complexity to get the job done. (No idea how that code base looks though... :) )
The WPF Framework in the .NET Micro-Framework is another bit of good code. I think I am one of a handful of people to ever use it, but wow, is it a nice graphics API to write against. (Super limited, but that is kinda the point, it kicks butt at its one job!)