71–80 of 102 posts
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something in one of chrome, ghostery, disconnect or adblock removes that, fwiw (and maybe it's just because it's timely, but it's actually one of the better posts i've read in this kind of thing).
I have adblock and ghostery. It still appeared for me. Perhaps I should use noscript as well :)
The first comment on that page sort of made me face palm... but then it got me thinking. "Simplicity of usage should always win over simplicity of coding. The purpose of a product is to solve the end user's pain, no one should give a dime about the engineer's problem. IMHO that was the genius of Steve Jobs, he could take any pre-exiting product and increase its complexity by 50x while simplifying its usage by 10x." I…
Its a false duality. It assumes complexity is zero sum, either the user has it or the programmer has it. In my experience this is not true.
It's all subjective, and the design of the high level concepts (maybe mechanics?) influence the complexity at every level below it. The idea of a 'file' goes from the GUI down to the hard disc format.
Simple products are often easy to use, and document, which is one of the reasons Apple does so well.
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Just in case you’re not aware: the Fn key, in conjunction with the arrow keys or the delete key, let you type those keys. Though that’s certainly not as convenient as having dedicated keys. Also, you can remap different keys to those keys with the free software KeyRemap4MacBook ( https://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/index.html.en ). For instance, you can remap \ to be forward-delete and Fn+\ to be typing ‘\’.
That's fine and good, until you want to use key combinations that include the missing keys, particularly selection type stuff. For me, it comes up a lot in programming, writing, and file/photo management.
Good article, makes an important point about complexity. Just want to add one extra thought though: he or she will run reports against the usage data to find out whether a given feature is often used. That data can then be run past the product managers who can help decide whether it's sensible to just drop the feature. It's important to be careful here, and it's one of the traps that is very easy to fall into (see Gn…
Wow, that one really resonated with me. I hadn't really thought about how to put simplicity into perspective quite like that. One of the things that frustrated me about Windows was that there was always about 7 different ways to do the same thing (or get to the same place) and that lead to amazing time wasting discussions in attempting to support customers remotely. Google has (had? I suspect they still do this) comp…
For years, the two things that most frustrated me to hear from product managers were "how hard would it be..." and "can't you just..." It took me quite a while to figure out why I had such a strong, visceral reaction to these phrases. Oh, man. When it comes to my natural reaction to this, the words 'strong and visceral' doesn't even do justice. It took me a really long time to understand why I had such a deep-seated…
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The mobile experience on HN sucks.
Keyboard input on someone's phone is not something HN would be able to fix.
In my experience, practically everyone agrees that software should be simple, but not everyone agrees on what simple is.
Unfortunately, that hasn't been my experience. Everyone wants software to be easy , but most people (by which I mean clients, management, and anyone else who's ever asked me to build software) have no opinion one way or the other about simplicity: They want it to do exactly what they want, the way they want, regardless of how technically feasible or user-friendly that ends up being. Simplicity is an ideal I see a lot…