Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 994 posts

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

#541

Post by klntsky »

urbanmiffs wrote: post #515
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.

Qbittorrent client has a built in search engine. Add the jackett plugin and you can search every public tracker in one click. I haven't visited a torrent site in years.

This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider).

Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.

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

#542

Post by spoils19 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #520
jazzyjackson wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think they mean responsive as in it doesnt rearrange everything to fit on a screen 500px wide

I know what responsive means. I went from maximized window to narrower than many websites can handle and it adapts flawlessly. No idea how anyone could call this not responsive.

...the site is not responsive at all to fit to a mobile device?

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

#543

Post by dijit »

alok-g wrote: post #347
grech wrote: post #151

This may be a normie response - but Apple Airpods Pro are one of the best products I've used. After years of using several bluetooth headsets that get finicky (with connections that is), having a set that just connects and works every single time is refreshing. They really changed my behavior - I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone cal…

I hear the latency is high, which is a challenge for all wireless earphones. So good for music and calls, but not for videos, games, singing. Do I understand correctly? :-)

“It depends”, it’s not high latency enough to notice on calls, music is obviously fine- but it’s not going to be able to keep up with a graded DAC+Mic in a professional setting (like a recording studio).

I haven’t tried it for video editing, though I suspect it might cause your scrobbing to stutter because macos will “pause” media playback until the headphones have been instructed to play, so you don’t have desync issues.

But that’s not what it competes against.

There’s no noticeable latency when using the phone/iPad, Mac as a normal consumer, calls, music, video conferencing.

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

#545

Post by dalmo3 »

robocat wrote: post #271
eropple wrote: post #251

Earlier 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!

I also often fall for those signs that can be read from behind.

Also somewhat related, I hate road signs written on the road that read bottom up.

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

#547

Post by csomar »

stephenfin wrote: post #222

I'm amazed no one has suggested Chromecast. It just works. Click a button on your phone or laptop and the video or song you were listening to or want to listen to suddenly appears on the TV. Even grandparents seem to get it. Maybe Apple TV is a similar experience but Chromecast is as good as it gets

I hate mine with passion. It regularly fails and requires a turn-off/turn-on at best and a reset a worse.

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

#548

Post by spoils19 »

glandium wrote: post #525
idlewords wrote: post #326

Any Japanese bathtub. It's deep, you can fill it to the very top, and it's designed to overflow rather than deprive you of the top 1/3 with an annoying safety drain.

More generally, the Japanese bathroom, which allows that bath design (or, most probably, was designed around that).

Perhaps tangential, but it still astounds me how Americans scoff whenever I mention that we have floor drains in Australian bathrooms. "What, is your bathroom a locker room or something? snicker". Setting aside how it helps with potential flooding* and makes the floor tiles infinitely easier to clean, it also allows things like this.

*I've also had comments like "why would your bathroom ever flood???" as if nothing water related could ever go wrong.

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

#549

Post by quartesixte »

basmango wrote: post #461
palijer wrote: post #362

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,…

The UI is definitely not responsive and the website looks ugly.

That “ugliness” is beautiful because imo McMaster’s interface facilitates turning unknown unknowns into known knowns.

Having all the options and important specs laid out on one giant page lets you discover blind spots in your thinking. Need an tube adapter for a fluid systems? Open up that page and as your scrolling through, discover that you forgot to think about the pitch of threading when you find the size and psi rating adapter you were looking for comes in several thread pitch options. Not sure which? Open up the handy explainer at the top of the page that explains to you the different options available and what they mean.

McMaster is primarily a B2B tool whose goal is to facilitate their users finding what they need, buying it, and building in a manner that is fast, convenient, and informative.

McMaster is a masterclass in UX and understanding what is really important to their business model, and resisting the urge to switch to trendy, sleek designs simply because it looks prettier.

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

#550

Post by eloisius »

The EasyCard (悠遊卡) in Taiwan. It’s an IC card frequently added onto just about every other card, like bank cards, student ID, or you can just buy one at the convenience store. You can store value on it, use it to ride metro, trains, busses, ferries, rent a share bike, buy groceries, anything at convenience stores, pay for food at lots of places, badge into buildings, and I keep learning more things I can do with it. The card, of course, is just a card, but the network and the number of things you can use it for is amazing.
Post reply on HN