Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?

European style windows ( https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4kjsnp/european_win... )

Excel (before latest reskin which made it less productive because there is less space for user)

Pivot tables

I could probably list few mobile phones. Each were good for their time (nokia 3310, nokia e52, samsung galaxy s2).

Nintendo entertainment system (put the game and play...).

It is very practical if you want to use different colours for note-taking away from your desk.

I had my first one aprox. 40 years ago when I was a school boy. Its design hasn't changed since.

Dewalt power tools. Not absolutely perfect, but normally everything about them just seems right, and the durability over 28+ years so far has been perfect (with one exception: a jammed chainsaw motor).

My Bourgeat 24cm vertical-sided saute pan. When I moved from Seattle to Phila. in 1996, I drove 400 miles out of my way to pick this up from a tiny kitchen store on the Oregon coast. It is the best kitchen tool I have ever owned. 25 years later, it remains my go-to pan for more than half of my cooking. Encased copper base, stainless body, I can burn the shit out of something in here, and after a night's soaking it cleans up like new with almost no effort. Sadly, although Bourgeat are still in business, they dropped this particular model a few years after I bought it.

Sandisk Clip+ music player. This is far from perfect, but it's also so far ahead of almost everything else when it comes to portable music while exercising. No touch sensing, just physical buttons, usable with gloves of various sizes. Storage size limited only by SD card availability (I'm at 120GB right now, could go larger). Battery lasts longer than I tend to remember. Rockbox firmware makes it work better. Plays every format that matter, plus a few that don't. Tiny, weighs almost nothing. Not what I want to listen to at home, but if I'm out running, cycling, skiing, snowshoeing ... I've just never found a better device. Out of production.

Ableton Push 2 control surface for DAW workflows. The tactile quality is outstanding, the screen quality is gorgeous, the knobs have just the right level of resistance to turning, it's just a thing of beauty. But what makes it so much better is that Ableton fully documented every aspect of this beast, which allowed me to make it work with my own software. The documentation is almost as lovely as the Push 2 itself.

Wirewrap tools. They're mechanically simple, easy to learn, and let you create neat, dense hobby prototypes faster and easier than soldering.

Wago Lever Nuts. These let you join a wide range of wires, from 24 to 12 AWG, stranded or solid. They're quick: strip, insert and flip. They're verifiable: you can check that it's done right just by looking at it. They're reliable: the spring pressure ensures they never come loose, even with vibration and heat over many years. I'm never going back to twist-on wire nuts.

Ruby. The seamless blend of OO, functional, and imperative programming is beautiful. It can be dense without being obscure. irb and pry make it easy to explore code and data. The syntax is mostly conventional and easy to learn. The standard libraries are well designed, and have consistent interfaces. The documentation is concise and easy to scan. I won't say its "The Best", but of the dynamic, interpreted languages I know, Ruby is the most fun to use, and it starts with the clean, well-considered design right at its core.