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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?

#971

Post by erezsh »

cjtoth wrote: post #837
erezsh wrote: post #765

"Ever" is a tough one but .. Python is still the best-designed language I ever used, warts and all. It's often grouped with Javascript because they're both interpreted and "duck-typed", but imho the gap between them is huge. Svelte is amazing for UI logic. It makes hard things feel easy and simple, and really hard things to feel possible. QBasic was a horrible language, but its IDE (if you can call it that) was incre…

It feels pretty disingenuous to write off all real world design as trivial or impossible to make an impression. For instance, aluminum cans are a great example of quality design https://youtu.be/hUhisi2FBuw

I'll rephrase it - programming is the only field I know deeply enough to be deeply impressed by the accomplishments I'm seeing.

I'm sure I interact with well designed entities all the time, without even knowing it. One of the properties of really good design, imho, is that it's not meant to be easy to notice.

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

#972

Post by feanaro »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #961
feanaro wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would and do highly recommend to my friends and family to stay away from Apple. Computers are meant to be interoperable and not locked into a single monopolistic system which then had the power to make your life awful. The attention to detail is also overstated when Apple cannot get basic things right. I have an iPhone for testing stuff and recently a numbered badge appeared on one of those built-in music related a…

> The attention to detail is also overstated when Apple cannot get basic things right. I have an iPhone for testing stuff and recently a numbered badge appeared on one of those built-in music related apps. It wasn't obvious what the number referred to, and to find out, I had to dig deep on the web on some user forums. The reason turned out to be that Apple pushed some kind of updates (e.g. new sound effects or someth…

> I'm actually really curious what this was.

It was something in GarageBand. I went to check after I wrote that because I was bothered that I didn't name the application.

> I also wanted to share a tip with you — you can turn off app badges in Settings -> Notifications -> Some App.

That's a cool tip, thanks. Even though my iPhone remains on the desk serving only as a test device, my OCD will probably find this useful at some point if I ever encounter a similar issue.

> With iOS 15, you can also create a 'focus mode' where app badges are disabled, and just have it scheduled to be on all the time. If this sounds appealing, let me know and I'll walk you through it.

It does, though as I said I don't envision myself using an iPhone as an actual phone. In general, I'd love seeing more devices/software having a dedicated focus mode though.

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

#973

Post by Diesel555 »

walterbell wrote: post #140
Diesel555 wrote: post #84

My most useful watch for daily life and my job (pilot) has been a Citizen Navihawk JY8035. I have many styles between the Apple Watch and a Garmin Fenix to a 5$ Casio. The functionality is amazing both day and night. Features I wanted: Automatic time updates to the second Analog face Digital second readout Solar Visible at night Secondary time without any button presses (I use UTC) I list it because it is the best de…

Is there an option for leather or metal watchband, either from Citizen or aftermarket?

I use an alternative band for it. https://www.borealiswatch.com/store/#!/Borealis-Vulcanized-R...

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

#975

Post by technobabbler »

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.

This would cripple home internet connections, where the upstream is usually a tiny fraction of the downstream bandwidth. Most of the stuff people download is created/hosted by big companies. Let them pay for bandwidth instead of individual home users (looking at you, Blizzard and other game companies who like to use torrents to distribute patches).

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

#976

Post by technobabbler »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #228
zinekeller wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame. I hope that this comment won't be interpreted harshly, but their familiarity with mainly American measurements really handicaps them elsewhere. It's not really their fault, but counterintuitively from where I am it's still miles better than other (domestic or international) suppliers for smaller quantities.

What do you mean familiarity with American measurements? Unit conversion is a solved problem.

Tell that to NASA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

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

#978

Post by thth »

hunter2_ wrote: post #869
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 gr…

On 1: the dedicated play/pause button doesn't have delay and can't be double-clicked for full screen.

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

#980

Post by MrDresden »

codingclaws wrote: post #935
MrDresden wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do native (Java/Kotlin) and Flutter development, for 10 and 2 years respectively. Just this year moving into the Jetpack Compose territory, and enjoying it immensly. Regarding the question about what you should choose, well that really depends on the problem space and the end goal you have in mind. If the application is generic, will not really leverage platform specific capabilities and will be made for both Andro…

Thank you. Follow up question if you have time. For these native Android apps, I'm interested in building apps that have good backward compatibility and thus low maintenance costs. Is backward compatibility easy to achieve with Android apps? If not, what tips can you provide?

Again that depends on how far back you are thinking to be backwards compatible.

Every year the number of users on older apis reduces, and these older users then either jump forward almost to the front (new phones, many low cost versions available today) or at least somewhat to the front (buy newer used or refurbished devices).

As Google has done quite a bit of work to try to solve some of the issues with core OS updates on third party decices (Project Treble for instance), over time the fracturing is getting better (for instance the latest API releases are bringing with them changes to how 3rd party OEMs can bundle their own Linux kernel modules so that the process is simpler and so could extend the possible software update cycles).

But there will always be some fracturing in some respects.

With that out of the way, I have not made apps with lower API requirements than 21 in the last 4 years and starting on one now I set the limit to 23.

This does not bring with it as many headaches as say when I was supporting API 15 onwards.

Google has put a lot of effort into creating tools that take care of much of the biggest headaches (for instance WorkerManager for background task execution and scheduling).

It also really depends on what parts of the platform you are going to use. If you do netwark calls, local data caching and display only then you wont have any problems that need handling.

There is sadly still this lingering sense in the dev community that Android developers need to deal with massive amounts of fragmentation. I would say it is no way as bad as it used to be, and only ever becomes apparent at the edges.

Just follow the guides that Google supplies. They are excellent and take care of explaining each possible pitfall and nuance you might need to take care of.

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