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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?

#861

Post by DemocracyFTW »

papertokyo wrote: post #852
glandium wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are the other aspects of their bathroom design that are notable? (Never been but it's top of my wishlist)

The good ones are quite tiny and make out of a single piece of fiber, at least that's what they look like. All corners are round and there's a floor drain meaning you can make a splash and not worry about it. Their small size makes them ideal for hotel rooms and apartments alike where space is a premium. Since they are prefab you can also put them into the garden as standalone modules which some people prefer.

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

#862

Post by papertokyo »

ronyfadel wrote: post #736

It's amazing to see the Aeropress being mentioned so many times (11 so far), compared with the Kindle (8 times), iPhone (22 times), iPod (12 times).

I was thinking the same thing, but having travelled with my AeroPress for almost 7 years now I have to agree it's an amazing device.

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

#863

Post by asalahli »

bschwindHN wrote: post #392

The 1zpresso J-Max coffee grinder - beautifully engineered, very clicky and satisfying to use, and creates great coffee grounds. Airpods Pro - Again, the physical design and "sound" interactions when placing the buds in the case, closing it, opening, etc. all give a sense of satisfaction. The noise cancelling is great, and it's not fussy like other bluetooth earbuds. Pilot Frixion pens - I played with erasable pens w…

I've been a happy user of Frixion pens for the past 10 years and Moleskine notebooks for about 4. It's a shame the two don't really go well together however, at least in my experience

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

#864

Post by jessriedel »

ozzythecat wrote: post #841
jessriedel wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic of discussion isn't product performance, it's design. If a certain car model has a high top speed, this may be suggestive evidence that the engine is well designed, but the top speed itself is not considered an example good design. So it would be fine if we had something to say about the design of the Apple software that produced the reliable Bluetooth connection, but just the fact that something doesn't br…

> If a certain car model has a high top speed, this may be suggestive evidence that the engine is well designed, but the top speed itself is not considered an example good design. I don’t think this is a useful analogy. Top speed is a randomly picked metric, which presumably most car buyers don’t care for. Once you get into the exotic super car car segment, then one could say that a super car that only tops out at 60…

> I don’t think this is a useful analogy. Top speed is a randomly picked metric, which presumably most car buyers don’t care for.

My comment applies to any metric that is an unalloyed good, not just top speed. Saying "AWS has high up-time" or "This car rarely needs repairs" or "I never spill coffee with this cup" are suggestive that something has been designed well, but they are not themselves substantive comments about the design. For that you'd have to say how they achieved those things. It's the difference between a goal and the method.

> that’s the exact hallmark of not just a good but great design.

Talking about trade-offs between goals would be substantive discussion of design. That one metric got high marks without saying anything about how is not.

I don't think this digression into semantics has reached diminishing returns.

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

#865

Post by hermitcrab »

tim333 wrote: post #684
hermitcrab wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still using my ~10 year old MacbookPro pretty much every day. The little plastic feet have fallen off and I'm on my second power adapter (and that is looking a bit ropey), otherwise it still works great.

You can get new feet for not much on ebay https://www.ebay.com/itm/174018177659?_trkparms=ispr%3D1&has...

I tried replacement 'feet'. They fell off as well. ;o)

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

#866

Post by als0 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #50
guidovranken wrote: post #27

BitTorrent is amazing. It just works. Anyone anywhere can create a torrent of their files, dump the magnet link somewhere, and everyone else can reliably retrieve it. It is self-reinforcing; the more people using a torrent, the better the robustness, redundancy and download speeds. You can often get better speeds from downloading something via torrent than from a web server. It's an open protocol that is relatively e…

Wish browsers had built in support for it. Imagine if by default most downloads were through BitTorrent, and your browser would then seed the file for 1.5x the download size and time.

BitTorrent itself doesn't provide any privacy, which is critical for something like a web browser. If anyone in the world can query what you've downloaded, it can escalate into real issues.

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

#867

Post by GrinningFool »

mcherm wrote: post #630
GrinningFool wrote: post #613

My dryer door. It opens both horizontally (easy to take things out) and vertically (eaay to put things in). And it does so in a totally natural way, based on where you naturally grab it when you're coming into to load or unload it.

What model has this feature? I haven't seen such a thing.

LG DLE7300WE.

The rest of the features of the dryer are fine - it has wifi that I don't use, but it dries the clothes the way it's supposed to. But it was totally worth it for this door...

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

#868

Post by pxeger1 »

YouTube's video player (almost the entire rest of the site is beyond crap, don't get me wrong! I'm just talking about the watching experience) (assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should). Plenty of other video players have some of these features, but YouTube has almost everything.

- click to pause

- double-click to fullscreen

- customisable captions

- speed controls

- sensible keyboard shortcuts for practically everything (press ? to see them all)

- theatre mode

- picture-in-picture

- loop (on the right-click menu)

- dark theme

- all settings are saved and synced across multiple tabs (with the irritating exception of video speed, but that can be fixed with a browser extension)

- hover to preview

- drag to seek

- video chapters

- clear and subtle indication of video buffering

- auto-resume when you come back to a video after navigating away

- easy and obvious translation of all controls to live-streams and "premieres"

- pretty animations and obvious cursor changes that make it really obvious what you're doing (looking at you, Twitch)

- you can scroll in fullscreen

- "instant" page navigation that never gets out of sync with itself

- 4K support

- HDR support (not very good, but still)

- 60+FPS support

- 360° support

- all of Google's CDN resources behind it so it never lags

- excellent video quality detection that never picks an unnecessarily low-quality option when my computer could handle better, nor a too-high one that my connection can't manage

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

#869

Post by hunter2_ »

pxeger1 wrote: post #868

YouTube's video player (almost the entire rest of the site is beyond crap, don't get me wrong! I'm just talking about the watching experience) (assuming you have an ad-blocker, which you obviously should). Plenty of other video players have some of these features, but YouTube has almost everything. - click to pause - double-click to fullscreen - customisable captions - speed controls - sensible keyboard shortcuts for…

I have a few minor gripes:

1. Click (pause) and double click (full screen) interfere with each other. I don't really want pause to have more of a delay than it already has, but that's the only way to allow a non-pause double click.

2. I'd prefer if spacebar paused unconditionally. When focus is on other controls, it activates those instead, which I understand for a11y, but it's a bit annoying when other players do grab every space for pause.

3. I think used to nudge by a single frame (when paused) but no longer do?

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

#870

Post by pxeger1 »

raffraffraff wrote: post #501

Garmin Fenix 5s Sapphire: notifications from my phone with custom replies, 6 day battery life, buttons. No touch screen (operate it "blind" and in the wet), waterproof, scratchproof. You do need to pay extra for the sapphire screen. Swiss Army knife (they're sooo well made) Under armour underwear: no seams, last ages, extremely comfortable. Darn tough socks: extremely comfortable, last forever, never smell. Altra Lon…

What's your experience with Tailscale? Have you compared it to alternatives (ZeroTier, Nebula, OpenVPN...)?
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