https://www.mcmaster.com/ Fast, snappy, responsive. No banners or cookie prompts, doesn't ask my to sign up for a newsletter or an account to continue and see more selection, it doesn't load in megabytes of JavaScript to show me products. Plus, responsive as all heck, and there isn't any bullshit prompts like "click here to see our selected offerings" or "check out our value products here" Like, from. The short url,…
Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
461–470 of 994 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#46220+ year old farm equipment. They are easy to use, simple to maintain, often repairable by the farmer on-site (with perhaps a trip to the store to buy a small part). I often found myself marvelling at the complex things that could be achieved by an arrangement of gears, such as the contraption on a square baler that wraps the bale with two pieces of twine and ties two perfectly tensioned knots that will hold the hay…
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#463Google flights is fantastic. Don't know if it is "the best-designed thing I've ever used", but it is on top of my mind as I just used it yesterday. Google doesn't get enough credit for the things that they did do well - including Search and Maps. Another is Macbooks - the pre-2015 ones at least. I haven't used the latest M1 ones, which I hear great things about. The Aluminum body, the flawless screen, magsafe, great…
I must disagree with you on maps. Google maps is a fantastic geographic aware search. It is a horrific map. On any given screen there is an 80% chance that the major road I'm interested in is not labeled. Finding the name of a relevant cross street is a nightmare. I feel like it used to be better. Way better. I think the map aspect has been dropped entirely as a real feature now that they supply directions (search) p…
I have tried to help out here by adding business in my area but the process of slow. Not sure who is in charge of approvals. Google, on the other hand, almost defaults businesses to being on the map even when they don't want to be. (My wife ruins a small business that doesn't have a bricks and mortar store - it's just online. Since it's registered to our home address, she absolutely didn't want it in Google Maps, but it took a good bit of clicking to get it off the map. Hence, they're reliable A.F. for finding businesses, even if they don't want to be found
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#464Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a pull handle , and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.
I see so many glass doors designed like that. The doors usually have a sticker that says “PUSH” on the push side, however the sticker is invariably printed with a transparent background so you can read it from the pull side. I don’t notice when I am reading something backwards/mirrored, so I am always pushing on the pull side…… Arrrrrrgh!
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must disagree with you on maps. Google maps is a fantastic geographic aware search. It is a horrific map. On any given screen there is an 80% chance that the major road I'm interested in is not labeled. Finding the name of a relevant cross street is a nightmare. I feel like it used to be better. Way better. I think the map aspect has been dropped entirely as a real feature now that they supply directions (search) p…
I agree with this 100%. And there needs to be something in the design to allow you to zoom the text size. It's comical to witness myself trying to read too small text and reflexively zooming only to have the same sized font.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
p.s. I started (after BASIC) with Turbo Pascal, in the 80s. That was so awesome for its day.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#468I had an OP-1 for a number of years but I could never progress beyond 2-4 bar loops. When I bought my Deluge I made a full track in my first two hours with it, and I was pretty proud of it. I own a number of groove boxes now, but have only ever managed to completed tracks on my Deluge.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have this Fiskars model, but I haven't used it in more than 5 years. I had to chop up 2 huge cherry trees and this thing was useless. For splitting wood, I now always use this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ochsenkopf-OX-3509-Log-Splitter-Rot... Now THAT is really good design.
> Now THAT is really good design Perhaps explain why it is better? A personal opinion is not as useful as an insightful explanation. > was useless You haven’t said what was wrong with it. Also I think your wording is awfully close to breaking site guidelines: "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Disclaimer: not a mod, I’m just a…
Re: Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
#470One example of quality design which I gleaned from reading Don Norman's "The Design Of Everyday Things" is the metal plate I've frequently seen on doors which are meant to be pushed. The only affordance of such a plate is its push-ability, and the fact that someone actively installed a metal plate (instead of just relying on the door's natural flatness), as well as its location at the point of maximum leverage (all t…
I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a pull handle , and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.