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

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

#441
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminded me of my experience at a Japanese Onsen (hot spring) last week. While entering the Onsen, the sliding door is automated and slides to open on it’s own. While exiting, the automated sliding doesn’t work. It has handles with no indication of pull or push or slide. The design of handles suggest most probably pull. I kept trying to pull/push with no movement. Finally, realized I am supposed to use those handl…

Reminds me of this japanese comedy sketch https://youtu.be/ZkQNP2cqG2I Another tricky thing is figuring out how to flush the public toilets. The user interface is non standard on every toilet. The most surprising way I've encountered was to step on a button on the floor. (Remember to never press the big green button)

> Remember to never press the big green button

One of my greatest fears :p I saw someone do that one time actually, and the door that the button opened was really slow moving and irreversible until it had completed opening fully. This was on a train, with all of the passenger seats facing the door in question. The guy that did it had to quickly pull his pants up and then stand there awkwardly while the door finished opening so that he could close it again.

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

#443
post #52

- Canon 5D classic. Fits my hand perfectly and the way colors are popping is something that i chase in photography to this day - Older Intuos drawing tablets. Super sturdy, great experience to work with, and battery-less pen tech which for many years was offered only by Wacom products - iPod Classic. Great interface idea with the touch circle, nice metal back. - HHKB Keyboard. Something i use to this day and don't re…

Yes the 5D classic, that camera had something my other camera never had.

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

#444
It will only talk to Swiss people but we have an app called Fairtiq that makes taking a ticket for public transport super easy. You basically swipe in when you enter the bus/train/boat and swipe out when you arrived at your destination. It can be many changes or hours later and the right tickets are bought for you behind the scene.

On the topic of transportation, the official app for the Swiss transports (SBB CFF FFS) is also a joy to use: input your start and destination and you have your minute-by-minute travel plan with changes. It's fast, precis and tells you about alternative and delays if needed.

It sounds like a marketing post but I just realized how grateful I am to have to travel around. (I have no car)

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

#445

The Leatherman MUT. I've carried it clipped to my pocket every day for ten years now and it's still going strong. Carrying six two-ended driver bits, replaceable blades, and a hammer end has covered such an enormous percentage of my use cases it's unreal. Having a steel poking stick on you at all times is surprisingly useful.

I do have leatherman skeltool and I love it

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

#447

Turbo Pascal 7, then Borland Delphi 5 were the most productive programming environments ever. Very few bugs, wicked fast, and full proper documentation. Nothing since comes even close.

Not sure how similar they are, maybe extremely, but I really loved Borland C++ Builder 4. Making GUI apps was so painless. I tried XCode but it was so complicated to do anything I gave up after a couple of weeks of reading docs.

I looked at the C++ version, but after you built a form, and started hooking up events, there was orders of magnitude more boilerplate code staring you in the face, and it wasn't something that you could edit without breaking things.

In pascal, you could edit the form, or the source, and nothing broke. There were also far fewer lines of code required to do something.

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

#448
Honestly, android M was the peak of mobile experience and it has only degraded since.

The one plus 3t is the best phone I've ever used. Close second is the nexus 5.

It's a difficult question because you don't really think about things that work seamlessly in your life, you think of the ones that have UX sticking points.

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

#449
I just got a new pram, the Baby Jogger city elite (sort of a cross between a stroller and a pram but I call it a pram), as a general rule I find prams badly designed and this does have some things that I think could be improved, but two things are really superior on it: the locking mechanism, and the folding mechanism.

The Locking mechanism is the less impressive but still useful, most locks on a pram are done by the foot and you have to push down on a bar or some other lock near the wheels and then when you want to start you need to kick up on them. Fair enough, although obviously now you are putting your locking mechanism near the area most likely to get dirt and rocks in to wear it down, and other potential ways it can be damaged.

Furthermore since you are using your foot to lock and unlock it can be something of a hassle because let's admit it, most people are not very good at manipulating things with their feet.

The city elite locker is by the handle, you can pull it up to lock, pull down to unlock. That's nice. You can easily see if it is locked, because it's at hand level not down at foot level, you use it with the part of your body most people use for manipulating objects - the hand - and finally it is unlikely to be damaged because you ran over some big rock.

The folding mechanism is the impressive part, in the middle of the seat is a thick strap with some instructions on - I think it says 'Pull up to fold' but I'd have to go down to check the exact wording. When you pull up by this strap magnets on the sidebars of the pram are released somehow and the pram folds in half automatically.

Yesterday I had to take a taxi with it, when the taxi driver saw this action his eyes bugged out and he laughed and said "now that's smart" (in Danish though) he commented on how he had a lady the day before who could not figure out how to close her pram and mine was so easy. Indeed some of our previous prams have been so irritating to fold that my wife generally left it up to me to do. It is equally easy to unfold.

Everything has a downside, and this ease of folding means that sometimes you can be doing something with the pram and accidentally start the folding process, but because it is easy to unfold you can stop it as you feel it starting and put it back right. Believe me, this sounds more irritating and problematic than it actually is but I figured I should note it anyway.

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