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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?

#881

Post by kevincox »

ethbr0 wrote: post #262
enos_feedler wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also getting to like 98% and not completing the download. Very aggravating

Does the BitTorrent protocol have an announcement / stored metadata of "recently highest percentage of file seen"? This seems like one of the biggest problems with more decentralized torrents (i.e. ones not backed by a community / core seeder), but also most a UX issue and seemingly trivially solvable.

QBittorrent will tell you if the swarm is currently missing any pieces. But it doesn't have historical data.

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

#882

Post by _inq »

fretn wrote: post #443
_inq wrote: 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.

to this day when I upload any photo from it people are asking me what exactly did i do in post and are suprised when i honestly answers there's no post besides cropping the frame. To this day this is my fav camera.

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

#883

Post by multjoy »

egypturnash wrote: post #784

When I was a kid, the tub in the bathroom had two knobs to control the faucet and shower: one marked with a red H, one marked with a blue C. Easy to understand, consistent with the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom sinks, easy to control. There was the little thing to pull up and redirect the flow from the faucet to the showerhead. Every tub/shower fixture in the apartments I've lived in and all the hotels I've vis…

Di2/Etap is going to blow your mind.

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

#885

Post by musicale »

bquest2 wrote: post #877
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…

Its an ok player, but its not designed well: - No stop button - No way to easily stop buffering - Auto pops open the mini player when you navigate away from the page - Autoplay being agressively enabled by default. All of these make it like an nightmare ex-spouse situation where all you want to do is have it stop draining your bandwidth to play videos but it won't let you go.

It may be designed well for Google, but not for users:

- need to right-click twice to get picture-in-picture on macOS

- obnoxious (and often unskippable) pre-roll and embedded advertisements

- no download button

- no audio play feature

- background play is unreliable on iOS

- unstable back end API that keeps breaking playback in VLC

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

#886

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

mkl wrote: post #240
japhyr wrote: post #134

If you split your own firewood by hand, a Fiskars splitting axe is insanely better than any standard splitting maul you'd find in a typical hardware store: https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/produc... For mechanical pencils, the Rotring 600 is the best thing I've ever written with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZWYUA4/

Speaking of well-designed Fiskars tools, I got this weed puller recently: https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/produc... Videos of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fiskars+weed+pu... It's been making difficult weed removal trivial.

I just got one of these on Friday. It’s so so satisfying

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

#887

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

patentatt wrote: post #803
japhyr wrote: post #134

If you split your own firewood by hand, a Fiskars splitting axe is insanely better than any standard splitting maul you'd find in a typical hardware store: https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/gardening-and-yard-care/produc... For mechanical pencils, the Rotring 600 is the best thing I've ever written with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZWYUA4/

I'm about to blow your mind: https://www.kindlingcracker.com/

A young kiwi girl Ayla Hutchinson designed that when she was only 13 years old - https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/1222-ayla-hutchins... pretty cool seeing something like that get to market

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

#888

Post by Oddskar »

wy35 wrote: post #814
Oddskar wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was very good about 5 years ago, and is still quite comfortable. However I would say that today this has largely been superseded by a myriad of better choices. For the adventurous type there's e.g. Dactyl Manuform. If one does not care so much for the keywell there's Lily 58, Iris or Kyria. For built-in tenting there's ZSA Moonlander, Redox etc. All of these have better customizability, repairability and portabili…

I own a Kinesis Advantage 2, a Lily, and a Corne, and tried a Dactyl Manuform. IMO the Kinesis still wins hands down. I’ve tried dozens of keyboards but the Kinesis is the one I will always go back to. Why? To be blunt, I don’t care at all about fancy keyswitches, or wirelessness, or portability. I’m simply looking for the most comfortable input device possible. If non-ergonomic rubber dome keyboards feel like plasti…

What do you think makes it different from the others then? Is it the keywell?

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

#889

Post by GoodbyeMrChips »

TomGullen wrote: post #660
toomanyrichies wrote: post #155

One 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…

Here in the UK a lot of bathrooms in pubs and other places have push to get in, and handles to get out. Never understood that, I'd like to push to get out once I've washed my hands!

> Here in the UK a lot of bathrooms in pubs

Wow! I've never known a pub with a 'bathroom'.

Whist those in the USA use euphemisms such has 'bathroom' (mate, where is the bath?) or 'restroom' (I don't need a rest, I need a shit), here it is perfectly acceptable to ask the butler in Buckingham palace where the toilet is, or the bog for that matter. :-)

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

#890

Post by vatotemking »

mprovost wrote: post #696
thiht wrote: post #656

I love my electric toothbrush. It cost me 20 bucks and it’s amazing. I analyzed it from a UX point of view and couldn’t come up with any designs flaw. - it’s waterproof, so easy to clean - it has a single physical button, nothing else - it has a small flat stand on the back, so I can put it somewhere horizontally and it won’t roll, and the brush won’t touch the surface - the heads can be easily changed, so we share t…

"I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience." - Mitch Hedberg

We use to call it "graceful degradation". Now its all just reactjs.
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