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Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#41

Post by androidgirl »

Ah, definitely the suckless suite. Runner ups are probably spectrwm and Vagrant, possibly Ansible.

I absolutely love dmenu, and the suckless philosophy is great. Dmenu ties in great to spectrwm, which is a simple tiling window manager that has sane defaults and just lets me work.

Vagrant makes my life so much easier, likely it's saved me hundreds of hours of my time.

And I find all of the Red Hat documentation to be fairly good where it matters, even if I prefer using Chef over Ansible in complex cases.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#44

Post by m90 »

btown wrote: post #19

Pivotal 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 opportu…

Pivotal Tracker is so incredibly good, it's a shame it's kind of niche (compared to Jira).

When Jira gives you the mightiest of tools to postpone and reconsider everything into oblivion by discussing and custom-workflowing it in epic Cinemascope, Pivotal Tracker will give you just that little amount of space for collecting what you need, and then get things shipped.

It may be weird, but a company using Pivotal Tracker has a big +100 from my side when looking for a job.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#45

Post by 1_800_UNICORN »

Developer tools: Twilio, Heroku Consumer software: TurboTax

I know that TurboTax is a controversial choice because they are incentivized to fight to keep tax law complicated, but if we ignore the political context, their software works beautifully well. It never does anything I don't expect, when I need more time on a section it's easy to drop out and revisit later, and I always feel confident at the end that I've filled out my taxes correctly.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#47

Post by travisjungroth »

Garmin 430/530. It's an in-panel GPS NAV/COM for small airplanes. The UI is focused on predictability to the cost of style and even intuitiveness. It also has a level of reliability that makes a joke of any web app.

http://www.kingschools.com/otherimages/430_530_panel.jpg

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#48

Post by panic »

com2kid wrote: post #20

Hands 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 company behind Rhino, Robert McNeel & Associates, has also managed to stay small (http://www.mcneel.com/contact) and user-focused (from http://blog.novedge.com/2007/03/an_interview_wi_3.html):

> In the last few months, there has been a lot of talk in the CAD community about proprietary file formats and how companies protect them. I would like to know how a CAD system like Rhino was able to succeed with a file format that is open, documented, and free (OpenNURBS).

The CAD users need and want open high-fidelity data exchange. Unfortunately, open file formats are not in the best interest of investors. Investors would rather bet on companies that have a protected proprietary market. Unlike most CAD companies, we are not a public company nor are we venture capital funded with plans to be public. That means that our only customer (and source of income) is our users.

> Rhino users had to wait a few years between Rhino 3.0 and the new Rhino 4.0. In the mean time, they enjoyed a continuous stream of improvements and bug fixes delivered to their PCs by the Rhino automatic updating system. Based on how well this system has worked, are you considering moving from a release-based system to some sort of subscription-based system?

No. Again, those systems are usually in the best interest of the investors. Our users have the luxury of not having to buy upgrades until we provide something that is actually useful to them. In addition, all current users get to be involved in the development process are every stage, not just for a couple of months at the end. Since we don’t pay any attention to what other CAD companies are doing, we rely on the users to provide the direction for each new release.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#49

Post by digilypse »

sanityvampire wrote: post #40
brunosutic wrote: post #10

- Unix command line. - Vim's commands and keybingings interface (not the UI).

>Vim's commands and keybingings interface (not the UI). I recently decided to finally get good at Vim, but the UI, being text-only, can be charitably described as "awful." Solution: Sublime Text 3 with the NeoVintageous[1] plugin. Takes a beautiful, highly customizable, extensible editor and adds most of the Vim bindings. I can do all of my main development work in a gorgeous editor, and when I have to hop onto an un…

I will go far out of my way to avoid working with text in an editor without Vim keybinding options. Fortunately most editors (even Emacs) offer them.
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