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Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

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51–60 of 83 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#51

Paint shop pro version 5.0 (by Jasc). I don't know when it was made but it still sits on my desktop till today and is more useful and handy than any image editing software I've used. It can handle almost all image formats, loads up in less than 1s and everything is so fast and breezy. The Ui is super intuitive that I've never had to once search for help.

Thought I was the only one! :P It's from the late 90s. I myself use PSP6 instead of 5. I don't really remember what the differences were anymore. My only complaint about it is it doesn't do transparent PNGs well (or at all), whether it's reading or writing one. As far as features/functionality/UI though, I like it more than anything else (Photoshop, Gimp, Pixlr on web, etc.). For example, I can never figure out for the life of me how you rectangular-select an area, and just move that area in all those other programs (they always try to move your selection and not the content inside the selection; whereas the default move operation in PSP is to move the content). But then again I'm a dev, not a designer, and I do pretty simple stuff with a graphics program.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#52

Ableton Live. The way the UI design packs tons of control into a simple, flat interface. The way everything happens in realtime. The way everything can be routed and automated and chained. Even though I'm a shitty musician, I love this program so much.

I'd argue Bitwig is even better designed. It was started by some employees at Ableton who split away from it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#54
post #17

In terms of UI, it was the FrameMaker desktop publishing program. A beautiful implementation of the idea of "progressive disclosure".

Was that on classic Mac OS? I’ve long wanted to take a look at FrameMaker. I wonder if it’s easily available in abandonware somewhere for an emulator tryout.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#55
post #19

Pivotal Tracker. It's opinionated, but because it can rely on those assumptions, it strikes this incredible balance between information density, on-the-ground usability, and the ability to have a birds-eye-view of the risks of a software project. A diligently updated Pivotal project is a thing of beauty and confidence and inspiration. One size does not fit all (and certainly, if you want to give your team the opportu…

Nailed it for worst category. Roughly a decade ago when we 'computerized' student orientation program signups, I was in a meeting on collecting payments through that system. There were about a dozen programs new students could sign up for (kayaking trip, etc) and the prices varied from $50 to $5,000. Since these weren't classes and students hadn't started yet, these couldn't be made into classes or there'd be problems with transcripts, GPA computations, having to creatively edit academic programs and so on.

Best proposed solution by people intimately familiar with the system was to have students purchase fake parking spots which were price-equated to match a workable unit to cover the wide range in prices. In other words, choosing to build with Habitat for Humanity was one parking spot, and trip to Ecuador was 100 parking spots. To enforce class size limits, they proposed to make one virtual parking lot per program and assign their number of available parking spots accordingly.

We didn't do it that way.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best-designed software you've used?

#56
post #17

In terms of UI, it was the FrameMaker desktop publishing program. A beautiful implementation of the idea of "progressive disclosure".

Was that on classic Mac OS? I’ve long wanted to take a look at FrameMaker. I wonder if it’s easily available in abandonware somewhere for an emulator tryout.

It was on an SGI workstation, IIRC.
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