Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
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 the way to the right of the door, in the door's vertical center), is a clear signifier for such push-ability.
Not only that, but it does its job without offering any other confusing affordances (such as a vertical handle which is also technically pushable, but which many would interpret as being meant to be pulled).
Whenever I need a relatable, succinct example of affordances and signifiers for my engineering comrades, I turn to this one. Anyone interested in design is doing themselves a dis-service by not reading Don Norman's classic.
I ran into a door today that had a handle on the push side. Not even a crossbar - an aluminum folded-over handle, one on each of the double doors. It is, unmistakably, a
pull handle, and it had "PUSH" written above it and even underlined, and still it gave me pause.
When I worked for squarespace, their beautiful new offices had glass conference room doors that swung one way, the other way, or slid on a track, depending on the room configuration.
However every one of those doors had the same handle on both sides, giving you no clue as to which scenario this door was providing. You saw people pull/push the wrong way all the time, and then look up/to the side to see the hinges and where the door stop was. I eventually mentally dubbed that quiet look upwards before you touched a door the, “squarespace peek”.
After a while I’d heard that the original plans had the typical plate and handle for push/pull and the ceo felt like it messed with the design of the doors.
It reminded me of my experience at a Japanese Onsen (hot spring) last week. While entering the Onsen, the sliding door is automated and slides to open on it’s own. While exiting, the automated sliding doesn’t work. It has handles with no indication of pull or push or slide. The design of handles suggest most probably pull. I kept trying to pull/push with no movement. Finally, realized I am supposed to use those handles to slide the door left and right. That was one funky design, imo.
Reminds me of this japanese comedy sketch
https://youtu.be/ZkQNP2cqG2IAnother tricky thing is figuring out how to flush the public toilets. The user interface is non standard on every toilet. The most surprising way I've encountered was to step on a button on the floor. (Remember to never press the big green button)
> Remember to never press the big green button
One of my greatest fears :p I saw someone do that one time actually, and the door that the button opened was really slow moving and irreversible until it had completed opening fully. This was on a train, with all of the passenger seats facing the door in question. The guy that did it had to quickly pull his pants up and then stand there awkwardly while the door finished opening so that he could close it again.
That design is everywhere in Japan, and can be quite embarrassing for tourists.
First time I went to Japan I walked up to my hotel late at night. I went to the door. There was no handle or obvious way to open it. I stood there like an idiot for a minute or two. I walked back out to the street to make sure I'm at the right building. I walked back to the door and finally got it. The trick... you have to wave your hand directly in front of the door an inch or two. Places in Japan often do not put the motion sensor ahead of the door, but straight down. You start feeling like a Jedi at times, waving doors open.
There used to be a coffee shop opposite my office that had a pull handle on the push side of the double doors. The right hand side doors were also often locked. I once sat at the nearest table to the doors and watched a dozen people pull then push on the right door, then pull and finally push on the left door, and often end up visibly aggravated by the time they got in and joined the morning queue!
The next day my debugging instinct kicked in, I bought some PUSH stickers and did some covert guerrilla ergonomic stickering. Problem solved and it made me smile every time I went past that cafe!
I see so many glass doors designed like that. The doors usually have a sticker that says “PUSH” on the push side, however the sticker is invariably printed with a transparent background so you can read it from the pull side. I don’t notice when I am reading something backwards/mirrored, so I am always pushing on the pull side…… Arrrrrrgh!
At this point I believe it’s a tradition to design push doors this way.
I can think of one door in a place I frequent for lunch like this which I have repeatedly ran into. Now, 80% of the times I start thinking about it about 20 feet away as I’m approaching it. My internal dialogue goes something like “Ignore how it looks, it’s a push door.” The other 20% of the times I still fumble the opening. It’s the most unintuitive thing I’ve experienced in a while.
I’m guessing the vox office featured door has that bar because a flat metal plate wouldn’t seem right applied to glass? Going without the plate the glass would get dirty.
> "The Design Of Everyday Things"That book changed my life.
Totally agree. Anyone that designs things to be used by other people, would be well-served, reading that book.
"When a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed."
That is a great book! There is so much discussion around doors, and rightfully so! I can never walk through an unusual door again without thinking about it since reading that chapter.
While this is true I often wonder why so many of those doors don't just open towards both sides. They exist and I think it's the best compromise because it's just not possible to use it the wrong way.
A couple of possible reasons: one-way doors can have a solid frame, making them easier to secure; and they are better at sealing against weather.
I'm currently in a country where I can't read the language and memorizing push vs pull feels so unnecessary when you could just design a door with obvious operation mechanics
The plate also makes it easier to clean as without it peoples handprints will be in a wider area. For wood doors its even better as wood can be time consuming to clean well.
The natural wear or polishing that occurs further acts as a signal to draw one's attention to it as well.
The natural wear or polishing that occurs further acts as a signal to draw one's attention to it as wwll
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 easy to implement, it has a diversity of lightweight clients for all OSes and is fairly resistant to censorship. To me it's pretty much perfect tech that solves a real problem. I hope Bram Cohen got rich off of it somehow.
But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.
Qbittorrent client has a built in search engine. Add the jackett plugin and you can search every public tracker in one click.
I haven't visited a torrent site in years.
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.
Support in the browser would require the browser to stay on the whole time, along with the computer. Bittorrent clients are better run on small less power hungry boards (RPi, etc.) or on hardware that is meant to be running 24/7 anyway. For example, I run the Transmission daemon on my XigmaNAS home file server. The NAS is headless, but I can control the daemon through its remote GUI, so as soon as I click on a torrent or magnet link on the browser, it calls the local Transmission GUI which sends the info to the client on the NAS which starts the download freeing the browser and the PC of any further work.
https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/
https://github.com/transmission-remote-gui/transgui
I don’t know about others, but my browser is open about 100% of the time
The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
Brave supports bittorrent natively and is basically a reskinned Chrome without the spyware.
Honest question: how much of the torrent content is corrupted in some way? I dabbled with file sharing back when Kazaa was a thing and I infected my computer to the point I had to reinstall the operating system and I "learned my lesson." But maybe I overlearned the lesson, and it can be used reliably?
Kazaaa has nothing to do with torrents, but what do you mean by corrupted?
Torrenting can cause a fragmenting issue, but defragging clears that up. And like anywhere else, random executables sometimes contain malware but there's nothing inherent in torrents that makes that more likely.
I meant “file sharing” more generally not “torrents” specifically (I edited my previous comment). I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware. While not inherent to torrents, it does seem inherent in sharing of random executables. Have the trust issues improved? What are some good use cases of torrents?
So while Kazaa and the like eventually got the ability to actually download from multiple sources, and be able to see that a particular source is popular, as I recall from the early 2000 days, back then it was pure point to point. That is, if you chose to download something, you also were implicitly choosing what source to download it from. So even if five people had the file "Foo", you chose which one to download, and there was no way to know that 4 had the same file "Foo", and 1 person had something else, with no way to know which was what you wanted.
Torrents avoid many of those issues; you can see how many seeds a file has (though Kazaa and the like later added that). And you had to have gotten the magnet link from somewhere, which would have its own evaluatable trust. It's the difference between downloading file called "Foo" from random internet user's computer, and going to a website, that you know, and downloading a file called "Foo" that you also know has been downloaded, and retained, by X number of users.
> . I don’t know what exactly happened to my computer but I suspect malware.
Yes, that's very plausible.
> Have the trust issues improved?
If you're retrieving executable code, the source giving you the magnet link is usually given some implicit trust. A good practice is to distribute a hash or better still a signature of the file(s). Though I would expect BitTorrent is designed to protect the shared contents' extents via hashes too.
If the content is some multimedia, then ideally it could be untrusted. Your favorite OS probably has much more robust libraries handling the multimedia content than it did a decade ago. But ultimately if the content distributed is infringing then it probably comes from a less trustworthy source. In which case you should have a different posture when handling these untrusted files than the generally untrusted interwebs content.
I don’t think torrents are any different in that aspect from the rest of the web.
Just as you would download and run an executable from a trusted source, you can download a torrent of an executable (from that trusted source) and run it.
E.g. many Linux distributions offer torrent links next to regular downloads; if you trust that website, you can download either file.
It's mostly like the rest of the web, though another commenter is right that seeds demonstrate a small amount of trust. If I'm on some random public warez site, my executable is likely to be malware. If I'm on something like the Internet Archive, Debian's site, or /r/datahoarder, their torrents are likely just a more efficient way to share data.
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.
No, but clients do advertise how much of the torrent they have, so you can glance at your peer list and if you have 2 peers stuck at 10%... there's a good chance that you won't get more than 10%.
Yeah, and while current peer % is useful, it doesn't answer the other user question of "What percent of this thing has been seen anywhere recently?"
Which seems a pretty reasonable question for a user to have, if we're talking about fully decentralized torrents without a tracker.
I'd assume he got rich off Chia - not nearly as elegant as bittorrent.
I don't think he did unfortunately.
He's currently creating a cryptocurrency.
Because I pushed petabytes of data over it for the past 15 years and it never failed me, not once. Simple as that.
BitTorrent is 20 years old, IPFS only 6. So, might just come down to familiarity. Definitively many more people, even outside tech crowd, have heard of BitTorrent whereas IPFS is still mostly unknown.
https://www.mcmaster.com/Fast, snappy, responsive. No banners or cookie prompts, doesn't ask my to sign up for a newsletter or an account to continue and see more selection, it doesn't load in megabytes of JavaScript to show me products.
Plus, responsive as all heck, and there isn't any bullshit prompts like "click here to see our selected offerings" or "check out our value products here"
Like, from. The short url, I'm already looking at the products.
I think it works because it is like the best parts of a part catalog without being too cute or clever. There are issues with searching sometimes if you want to browse to the part you have in your mind but cannot think of the name of, but usually it works. And yes, it is expensive to buy everything from McMaster, but that isn't what they are for. They also can be quite good about identifying the actual product/source if you ask.
Drilling down into different categories is better than any other site I’ve used. And like Costco, they curate pretty well and just have one supplier for each part, although the supplier may change. If you need a type of gear or screw, there is one option only, no need to compare various brands.
It was just as good 15 years ago too! And it’s probably not true not but it used to be the least possible friction to order things. Even if you weren’t logged in, if ordering from a company premise it would just confirm the address and let you order and send you a bill later.
Its also an awesome repository of 3d models. Must use website for anyone with a 3d printer.
Meh. Not so much. First time I opened it show half screen banner to download mobile app.
And the website wasn't designed for mobile at all.
There is a big banner on mobile, asking to download the app.
Plus CAD drawings available for every part. I love Mcmaster-Carr
yes, despite peoples complaints that it’s not mobile-first and pretty, it feels extremely futuristic to find a part number, download an stl, and 3D print to check for fit. never had a problem with ordering from them.
That is a rewarding site to search. Reminds me of rockauto.
The UI is definitely not responsive and the website looks ugly.
The UI is very obviously responsive, usable and fast.
i think they mean responsive as in it doesnt rearrange everything to fit on a screen 500px wide
I know what responsive means. I went from maximized window to narrower than many websites can handle and it adapts flawlessly. No idea how anyone could call this not responsive.
GearWrench ratcheting wrenches. They're compact and fit in places that sockets never will. The ratcheting mechanism is very fine, with low backlash, which matters a lot in those tight places. They feel great, and they're a delight to use.
Wirewrap tools. They're mechanically simple, easy to learn, and let you create neat, dense hobby prototypes faster and easier than soldering.
Wago Lever Nuts. These let you join a wide range of wires, from 24 to 12 AWG, stranded or solid. They're quick: strip, insert and flip. They're verifiable: you can check that it's done right just by looking at it. They're reliable: the spring pressure ensures they never come loose, even with vibration and heat over many years. I'm never going back to twist-on wire nuts.
Ruby. The seamless blend of OO, functional, and imperative programming is beautiful. It can be dense without being obscure. irb and pry make it easy to explore code and data. The syntax is mostly conventional and easy to learn. The standard libraries are well designed, and have consistent interfaces. The documentation is concise and easy to scan. I won't say its "The Best", but of the dynamic, interpreted languages I know, Ruby is the most fun to use, and it starts with the clean, well-considered design right at its core.
Wago connectors are great. I used them on my powered motorcycle panniers to make them field-repairable. They're brilliant little devices.
>
GearWrench ratcheting wrenchesThere are also hex bit ratcheting wrenches (go by a variety of names). They key is they take a standard bit, and are only the depth of the bit + a few millimeters. Lifesavers on doorknobs.
If you really needed the clearance, you could probably grind part of the hex end of a bit down too.
Something like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/VIM-Tools-1-4-in-Hex-Bit-Ratchet...
Great list. Having specialized hand tools and using them to great effect is an intoxicating experience.
The Kinesis Advantage keyboard [1]. The height of the keys in each column are different because, well, the length of each of our fingers is different. It’s so naturally comfortable that it goes unnoticed and one’s fingers just fall into the right position. Placing one’s fingers offset left or right is so obviously uncomfortable that it’s basically impossible to have off-by-one typos. There is a lot of subtly well-designed ergonomics to this keyboard (though also some not great bits—looking at you, function row).
[1]: https://kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage2/
I use a custom keyboard with a similar columnar stagger. In addition it's small enough that I can reach every key without moving my hands, which means my accuracy is noticeably better. There's no chance I'm ever going back voluntarily. Typing all kinds of symbols all day just doesn't get more comfortable.
This is why I'm always so annoyed by all the "qwerty vs. dvorak" arguments. It's pretty much the least problematic part of conventional keyboard design.
> Contoured keyboard designed to provide maximum comfort and productivity for Windows and Mac users.
As a Linux user this leaves me really second guessing.
I have this keyboard and use Linux and it works perfectly.
Best of all, all keyswapping and other layout changes are done via the keyboard itself so absolutely no software required to be installed :)
McMaster-Carr has the best shopping website I've ever seen. The UI is beautifully intuitive; even if I don't know exactly what I need, odds are I can easily find something that will work and they can have it at my doorstep in under 24 hours, no matter how obscure. Even if I don't plan on buying anything, it can be helpful to click through the site just to see what is available. Because most categories of parts have surprisingly well written descriptions and breakdowns, the sire can actually be a good engineering resource.
I've bought from them many times before and have yet to be disappointed with what I got. It is definitely expensive compared to other suppliers or Amazon, etc. But you pay for the convenience.
I hear they aren't very good outside the US though, which is a shame.
This has actually created a huge bias in my company. People try to solve problems with parts from McMaster because it’s so easy to search, but we often overlook other company’s (e.g. Cole-Palmer) products (which may be much better suited for our applications) because it’s a pain to find them on their websites.
I'd love it if they added a price filter option! If I want a clear plastic tube I don't always know whether I'll get a cheaper price with acrylic, UV-resistant acrylic, static dissipative acrylic, ultra-strength polycarbonate, high-temperature polycarbonate, etc... It can take a lot of clicking to find the cheapest option!
Unfortunately I don't see them creating a price filter as they are mainly geared at businesses vs. hobbyists or consumers, where "get it here fast" is more important than saving a few dollars. That being said, I find adding all of the prospective parts to the cart works well for me when I want to compare prices
I’ve yet to work in a business that doesn’t care about the price of something. This is particularly true when we are evaluating parts that might be used in production at scale.
As a business user, I’d like the price filter too. For instance, I might be okay with any material for a valve in a prototyping application as long as it’s the right size, I just need to find the cheapest one (with one day shipping of course!)
Honorable mention to Rock Auto, which has a similarly dead simple shopping UI.
> 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.
I was more referring to issues with shipping and ordering outside of the US. But you are entirely right about them focusing on American measurements, their selection of metric parts is much weaker and more expensive than their customary (main?) Sizes of parts. I do wonder if they are or will be working on improving that any time soon.
What do you mean familiarity with American measurements? Unit conversion is a solved problem.
I assume they meant that they default to making things that come in imperial-unit sizes (e.g., quarter-inch nuts instead of 6mm ones or whatever). It's not really practical to mix and match.
> It's not really practical to mix and match.
Tell that to my computer, with both 6-32 and M3 screws.
Tell that to my computer, with a bunch of stripped out threads.
It’s also a problem that shouldn’t exist any more in this day and age.
McMaster-Carr's website is great for finding items, but it's really irritating if you're just ordering one or two things and want to know what it'll actually cost. Unless it's changed in the last few years, they won't let you know the grand total until AFTER you place your order. Maybe it helps them simplify order fulfillment, but it's really annoying.
They changed it, you get a total before ordering now
Raptor supplies is the non usa equivalent but less usable
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 Lone Peak trainers: foot shaped, light, comfortable, quick-dry. Right now every pair of shoes I own are Altra (but I'm trying out Topo Athletic phantom 2 next)
Gore-Tex. And Neoprene.
Docker. People like to hate a winner, and they've gone the paid route, and they did just take already-available kernel features and wrap them up... But man, they did it well and they revolutionised software development and deployment.
Debian, XFCE, Tailscale, Syncthing, rsync, ssh, ffmpeg
I recently borrowed a Fiskars x25 for the first time, after reading about them for many years. They really are better.
Splits better than my maul and weighs less. I was surprised to find that the latter was more important. If it takes less energy to cycle, you can split the same log more times without it feeling like a burden to do so.
The next time I need to split more than a trifling amount of wood, my first step will be to acquire a new splitting axe -- the overall time to completion will be faster.
As a pencil enthusiast, I love the rotring 600. I have two. I also loved rotring’s Tikky 1 (not the subsequent ones)
Other great pen/pencil:
- Pentel Ortez. I have the 3 mm and, if used properly, the lead wont break
- Zebra delguard. Also wont break. I have it in 0.5 mm
- Rotring’s artpen. My favorite fountain pen, but it appears discontinued :S
My absolute favorite pencil with which to do math is the Pentel Kerry .7mm. It feels so good.
Any advice on technique with the splitting axe? Use the same way as the maul?
So happy to see the Fiskars mentioned. Grew up with farmers in the midwest US but love my fancy little splitter hitter from across the pond.
I find a subtle lift on the handle right at the end of the stroke, almost like a whipping action, seems to help a little. It may be in my head, but it seems to stick less.
Use the full length of the handle, the horn at the end provides a positive grip and you get more speed.
On large rounds don’t start in the very center, bisect the round but start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side and has a better chance to propagate through the length of the round. Work your way back towards you and repeat if needed.
Always focus on where your strike lands. Most smaller logs will be one hitters but aim precisely anyway. On larger rounds stitch strikes together in one continuous line across the face. Don’t get sloppy, if you’re more than an 1/8” off left or right hit it again. Repeat across until she gives. Precision beats percussion.
Set your rounds on top of the biggest round you can find when splitting. This flattens the contact (tip #1) and the large round below provides some inertial resistance. Splitting directly on the ground provides more bounce, reducing effectiveness, and the bit gets dulled by contact with dirt and rocks.
Keep the cover, its durable, provides a great hanging handle. The blade doesn’t need to be razor sharp like you would want with a cutting axe, but it should be sharp and clean.
> start near near the far rim so the crack is only supported on one side
I have no professional background, so maybe I'm totally wrong, but I would advise against that, because if you aim a bit too far or the wood gives too easily, most of the impact will be against the haft instead of the head, and the haft can break this way.
I usually start at the near side and then work towards the far side, which is only dangerous if you don't have a wide base (another log maybe) under the piece you're currently splitting, because if you miss the near side, the axe is flying towards your feet.
I'm in the market for a new splitting axe - thanks for the recommendation!
I love Rotring pens and pencils - I used a Rapid Pro mechanical pencil throughout college. Nowadays I use a Rotring 600 or 800 with Ohto ballpoint refills. The knurled grip is great, the the overall weight of the pencil is much better than your average plastic pen.
> Now THAT is really good design
Perhaps explain why it is better? A personal opinion is not as useful as an insightful explanation.
> was useless
You haven’t said what was wrong with it. Also I think your wording is awfully close to breaking site guidelines: "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Disclaimer: not a mod, I’m just a hippy that wants us all to get on well together!
Absolutely. I started felling trees and splitting wood recently, and I went through a few axes. The Fiskars have been amazing.
Do you think their shorter axe (n12) would be good to take bike camping?
To bike camp bring a small foldable saw, so instead of spending 1+ hour splitting wood after a long riding day you can spend that time enjoying camping
I have a carpenter axe which is very compact and somewhat lightweight, but gave it up because I never had to use it
X11 or X7 would probably be a bit lighter and more durable. I know its ‘plastic’ but I’ve beat the shit out of mine for 15 years and it hasn’t loosened up at all. Wood handles get finicky in the elements. The handles are hollow, too, you might be able to pack a flint kit up in there for energency use.
Something like an Eastwing is goong to be a better chopper, but these will split better. Both are useful.
Google flights is fantastic. Don't know if it is "the best-designed thing I've ever used", but it is on top of my mind as I just used it yesterday. Google doesn't get enough credit for the things that they did do well - including Search and Maps.
Another is Macbooks - the pre-2015 ones at least. I haven't used the latest M1 ones, which I hear great things about. The Aluminum body, the flawless screen, magsafe, great sound - there is so many things I love about Macbook hardware. Such a beautiful marriage of form and function.
I must disagree with you on maps. Google maps is a fantastic geographic aware search.
It is a horrific map. On any given screen there is an 80% chance that the major road I'm interested in is not labeled. Finding the name of a relevant cross street is a nightmare.
I feel like it used to be better. Way better. I think the map aspect has been dropped entirely as a real feature now that they supply directions (search) primarily instead.
I agree with this 100%. And there needs to be something in the design to allow you to zoom the text size. It's comical to witness myself trying to read too small text and reflexively zooming only to have the same sized font.
Even worse, it seems almost random which zoom levels have text. Often, especially for train line and station names, zooming in makes the text disappear!
Use OsmAnd~ for lots of options and Guru maps for easy handling.
Both based on OSM, of course.
Honorary mention to altitude level labels in terrain mode. They're like one millimeter tall on mobile, and not much better on desktop.
Agreed. As my eyesight has gotten worse, I rely more and more on being able to do a quick pinch-to-zoom to read small type. Ironically, this pushes me away from native apps and onto the mobile browser!
I didn’t know how badly I would like to see this until now. I love static-ness in UIs.
I have OSM and Google maps installed. If I'm trying to navigate to a specific town or street, I'll use OSM because it's "just a map" that isn't trying to sell me shit. But if I'm looking for a business (restaurant, shop etc) I'll always use Google Maps because they're trying to sell me shit, and because OSM is absolutely pitiful in this regard.
I have tried to help out here by adding business in my area but the process of slow. Not sure who is in charge of approvals. Google, on the other hand, almost defaults businesses to being on the map even when they don't want to be. (My wife ruins a small business that doesn't have a bricks and mortar store - it's just online. Since it's registered to our home address, she absolutely didn't want it in Google Maps, but it took a good bit of clicking to get it off the map. Hence, they're reliable A.F. for finding businesses, even if they don't want to be found
If the alternatives include "Google Maps from about 6 years ago", then yes, yes I have.
I don't really fault Google that much for their design decisions here, as Maps have really morphed into "Local Search", which makes sense for most use cases, but I agree with the GP, if you are just, for example, wanting to look at a map of a new area (i.e. not where you live), I think Maps is worse than it was some years ago.
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.
I just got an M1 Macbook Air this week to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro. Performance is cool (lots has already been documented about that), but the battery life is on another level. Charged it on 4 days ago and after about 7 hours of use, it's still at 48% at the time of writing this post. Ditto to what you said about "a beautiful marriage of form and function".
Typing from M1 MBA I picked this weekend. I don't think I enjoyed any device since 2012 MBA so much. Love keyboard, unlock by watch, portability, and unparalleled battery life. Screen is a compromise (coming from 2019 MBP 16") but I am okay with that.
I have multiple close family members who are still using the old Magsafe Macbook Airs. I ask them every year if they want to upgrade to a newer model, and they decline, they just love the laptop. I replaced the battery in each one to the OWC upgraded battery kit.
I loved the SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip players I owned during past years. They needed to be reflashed with the RockBox firmware (but tbh pretty much every portable player firmware is inferior to RockBox) however hardware wise they were fantastic: light, well shaped, buttons in the right places, very readable display despite the small size, audio was excellent, FM reception too, battery lasted hours and hours. I brought them on the beach and kept them running for hours while sunbathing or walking like 1 meter above sea level, and they worked for years. I had to ditch them eventually when the headphone jack began to fail, but that happened when the battery had already became old and other buttons unreliable, so repair which was often destructive was out of question. Unfortunately SanDisk cut corners in later models (less RAM, smaller CPU etc.) and RockBox became harder or impossible to install, so I got a much cheaper Agptek player, which can't run RockBox as well but costs a fraction, and that's it.
I bought a bunch of Sansa Clip+ when they were being discontinued because they were dirt cheap and with Rockbox and a huge sdcard, they "rocked". My last one died about a year ago :(
I didn't go for the Agptek because they can't run RockBox, and I got bitten very badly by the awful ui on a Shanling player. So I bought a teensy Jelly Pro and hacked it into my favourite ever mp3 player.
I forgot about this. Sansa with RockBox was the best.
ZFS. Complete research companies unknowingly depend on the utmost reliability and flexibility ZFS has to offer. Started right with the first version included in FreeBSD in production use and never failed once while being the central storage connected to multiple HPC clusters with millions upon millions of rather small but also some vary large files. While offering five nines of uptime we even had to ability to send efficient binary forever incremental differential snapshots to remote DR locations. Meanwhile we saw many large crashed sites at companies which had downtimes of weeks using lustre. ZFS even got hated by management because it's not giving them fancy relationships with the normies using HP/Dell. So the last ten years are probably the best ZFS got here because some instructed architect is looking for commercial replacement but nothing better seems available.
The documentation is shit though, I spent a full hour digging through forum answers trying to increase my swap space. All this bpool zpool crap.
And then my system /boot got full of some snapshot (wtf I never asked for this), apt-get failed to live up to its promise of magic, got more hell about a 20% preservation rule (again wtf).
Was cutting and pasting some zpool zsysctl zc -a -f -foo -bar and then some sudo zfs destroy bpool npool zpool/blah/autosys@ubuntu_h2h3rc4h stuff. I cut and pasted a bunch of stuff off the forums I didn't understand until apt-get worked again.
I didn't understand a word of it, and there was zero documentation in the obvious places.
I'm done with ZFS. Back to ext4. It just works.
This may be a normie response - but Apple Airpods Pro are one of the best products I've used. After years of using several bluetooth headsets that get finicky (with connections that is), having a set that just connects and works every single time is refreshing. They really changed my behavior - I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone calls. I would replace mine immediately if they were lost / broken.
I agree, unfortunately however I've recently developed worsening tinnitus that I've attributed to them. There appear to be several others who have a similar experience[0].
I've stopped using them in favor of my over-ear VModas the past couple weeks and my tinnitus is significantly better. I rarely listen to music loud and the volume only seldom goes over 50% so I'm having a hard time attributing it to excess listening volume.
[0]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250886390
I agree with this. I remember buying mine in a busy part of SF. I opened them on the street and my iPhone instantly recognized them and paired. I didn’t even need to open the Bluetooth settings menu. Then, as soon as I put them on, the street I was on, which was so busy and chaotic just prior, became dead silent. I hadn’t experienced magic like that in a long while.
I hear the latency is high, which is a challenge for all wireless earphones. So good for music and calls, but not for videos, games, singing. Do I understand correctly? :-)
Interesting. I returned my airpod pros because I kept losing them and/or their case, and had anxiety until I found them. And I knew it was only a matter of time before I didn't find them again. Also, the audio quality on the other end of my calls was actively bad. I've reverted to wired earbuds with a mic in the cable, and am (very) grateful I was stubborn about keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on whatever phone I'm using. (Perhaps my experience would have been better with an iPhone, but there is no way I'm buying an iPhone, for lots of reasons.)
Useful observations, but is this really a comment on design? The key feature, a robust connection, is just software/firmware quality.
I don’t quite understand this comment.
As a customer, I don’t care what a firmware is or if it’s the best software or if it runs in Azure or iCloud. To me, it just works. I don’t care how. The fact that it works way better than competitor products I tried over the years is enough to say it’s well defined.
The key is a frictionless experience.
Firmware and software that influences user experience is absolutely valid for a design discussion.
Prioritizing ease of connection was a design decision, and not one that’s inevitable (see a dozen other duly wireless earbuds that don’t do it as well).
I’ve owned both the pro and the max. Returned the max because the pro has noticeably superior noise canceling. Also weight + portability.
If they are the original version consider getting them tested at the store to see if they are covered by the recall. Free replacement with the new model (apparently with improved adhesives).
And I would rank them near the bottom because they don't fit in my ears without causing significant pain within a few minutes.
Even with the 3 different tip sizes? The old EarPods/AirPods worked alright in my ears but never great. The Pros have been fantastic for me personally.
>
I went from not liking phone conversations at all (getting agitated after a few minutes)to comfortably having long phone callsI love my Airpods. One of my favorite products of all time. But I've found them to be totally useless on calls. I'm on my third pair -- that's another thing: they wear out if you use them a lot -- and I've had 3 different phones in the meantime and nobody can ever hear me when I talk on them. I've tested it myself and they make the speaker sound very quiet and far away. It must not affect everyone, because I see people using them for phone calls, but I've never been able to make that function work.
I can’t bring myself to spend this much money on a device that has worse mic audio than my free airpods. And it’s the same for all wireless buds, the mic is just in the wrong position.
Airpods pro, ipod, logitech k308 keyboard, typescript language
I genuinely loved the second-generation Zune. The aluminum case felt lovely in the hand, it had swipe-based momentum scrolling before that was common (without even a touchscreen!). It had a matte paint on the front that felt almost like velvet, the buttons clicked nicely, the UI was both gorgeous and practical, the desktop software was the same (after the first couple revisions). I was really sad when mine got stolen from my dorm room a couple years after I got it, even though I had a smartphone by that point.
Bonus entry: the GameCube controller. With that huge, luscious analog stick and that huge, luscious A button. And the overall shape fit the hand really nicely too. For any game that didn't make prominent use of the secondary analog stick, I think it was and still is the best game controller out there.
I loved my Zune as well (it also got stolen, weirdly), not only because of all the reasons above but even the headphones were of excellent quality and lasted as long as the device did (in comparison, both iPod headphones I've owned broke after around 2 months).
The only major flaw it had was a lack of fonts to display unicode characters! I know it was mostly (only?) sold in the US but wanting to display artist names in Chinese or cyrillic characters must surely be a basic feature.
I was a huge fan of Windows Phone which based it’s Metro UI on Zune. I miss my Window’s phone dearly. I always felt the UI was far more intuitive and simple compared to iOS/Android.
My first smart phone was a Windows phone. I loved the OS's responsiveness and the feel of the Lumias.
Years later, nothing still comes close.
My Aeropress coffee maker. It feels more convenient than a french press, and much cheaper than an espresso machine.
https://aeropress.com/
Also a bidet. Americans really need to start using it more.
Honestly, I’d prefer my coffee maker to not do double duty as a butt washers, but maybe I am funny about these sort of things
I'm sure they have separate ones for bidet usage and coffee usage.
I think in space it comes in handy. But best not make coffee again after that.
You say that now, but just wait until you splash yourself clean with an Aeropress while sipping an espresso.
As an espresso snob, I'm going to go with a Breville Double Boiler machine. Many espresso machine snobs used to crap on Breville as being "consumer grade", but they really succeeded with their Double Boiler machines, especially their more recent models that make it easy to descale the boiler at home.
The BDB includes features that can cost literally 5X as much on Italian machines (stainless steel boilers, a preheating tube that pulls brew water through the steam boiler first, an electrically heated grouphead, etc.) but it still has fantastic temperature stability.
Lance Hedrick (latte art champion YouTuber guy) raves about the BDB and would be my top choice if I don’t already have another model.
In addition to being great and having features of more expensive machines it can be trivially modded for flow profiling. You can now do what decent/slayer/lever owners do and pressure profile. Ok maybe it doesn’t quite compare to those but they are a multiple of the price, and now you can do the coffee shots, turbo shots, blooming shots and all that fun stuff.
If mine breaks down and I’m not in the mood to spend $5k on a machine id get the dual boiler.
I owned a Breville Dual Boiler for a few years, was always happy with the coffee it produced, and I thought it was very good value for the price... until it failed in a manner that caused it to constantly trip a GFCI. I brought it back to the shop where I bought it (who service all varieties of espresso machines), and they told me that Breville won't sell them parts for repair. I then contacted Breville, and they wanted me to ship it back to them for maintenance, at a cost of several hundred dollars. So I wound up with one of those much-more-expensive Italian machines, which has now seen daily use for a few years and not needed anything more than a replacement group head gasket (which cost $10 and any idiot can replace one at home).
I used my fathers Rancillio Silvia for 10ish years after he used it for about that long. It’s still good but I have upgraded. It had a US$70 service after about 15k coffees and was still fine at 20k. It’s got a little surface rust on the drip tray. Fantastic machine.
This pales compared to some machines though - I was recently reading about someone has a ‘60s Faema e61 that has made nearly 5 million coffees.
https://www.home-barista.com/advice/faema-e61-original-vinta...
The Nanopresso is also excellent.
I used an Aeropress for years and then switched to the Nanopresso.
https://alternativebrewing.com.au/products/wacaco-nanopresso...
The Nanopresso gets a crema which is remarkable for a fairly cheap, portable device. I have one at home and one at work. They are good enough that they keep me away from cafes.
Both the Aeropress and the Nanopresso are so well designed.
Aeropress is great if you like to experiment. I've long since given up on it and settled for the simplicity of using a moka pot.
Bidets are something I take for granted. It was only during the covid toilet paper shortage that I became really grateful we had them.
Oddly enough, my answer would be Secura's french presses. All metal, no seals. Just works...seemingly forever.
I have a Secura french press, and while it works well, I seem to have to use so much coffee to make a reasonably strong brew. I've been sticking to some no-name steel version of a Bialetti moka pot for a few years now.
Yeah, it's a very basic soaking method. You either have to add more grinds, or wait longer. I grind up about 60g for 2 large cups of coffee.
It works for me because I don't mind letting it sit while I prepare lunch. If in a hurry, you can keep stirring it to get slightly faster results.
Wow 60g would take me 20min on my cheap hand grinder.
I used a beautiful wooden Japanese grinder, Hario, because I loved its simplicity. But, same as you, it takes forever. And sadly, I didn't even know it was taking longer than usual as I didn't have a baseline. Try one of these linked below. You can knock out 30g in about 20 to 30 seconds.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07ZNXQF4S
Whoops I said this too before I saw your comment. It's so great!
Been using an aero press for years, but the seal wears out. Need to press very carefully or the air goes out the top instead of the bottom.
I almost listed this as mine. The design is still really good for the cost. Ease of use / cleaning / disposing of grounds is a smart design. I accept that the seal will wear, I actually think not over-engineering the seal and making it triple the price adds to the design.
It's not too hard to get a replacement rubber seal, and easy to swap in the new part.
They say it will last longer if you don't store it with the seal compressed in the tube, but I always leave it like that and it still lasts years.
If you just push it all the way through, the tip of the seal won't be compressed. No effort to do it like that.
Do you know if you can get a real one on Aliexpress? I’ve looked at replacements but wouldn’t want to get a fake that will leech at high temps. I’m not in the US.
I loved my TiVo, almost everything about the end to end experience was flawless. Just recalling the ‘be-bip’ sound of interacting with the UI still brings me joy. The interface was as simple as you could ever hope for (and structurally similar to the navigation in iOS). Up, down, left, right, pause, rewind, fast forward, thumbs up and down. Everything was built on simple consistent primitives and everything felt immediate, in a way no TV has to me in more than a decade. Even the control felt nicer in your hand than the usual slab of plastic. Coming home to new episodes of Star Trek it had kindly decided to record always gave me a warm feeling that this smart little box was on my side. Too many devices feel like a fight against something utterly soulless these days.
The Technics SL-1200 turntable. The fact that the design has not changed except for minor tweaks since the product was released speaks for itself. I used it both as a DJ many years ago and now kept one of the turntables just for listening. The quality of the turntable is palpable not only in its physical weight but in the utter simplicity of the design. The dotted edges of the rotating plate are both aesthetically pleasing while also informative communicating rotation speed. Every detail every little part of the unit is functional design of the highest quality while also visually appealing. In my view one of the greatest achievements in modern electronics and industrial design.
Waiting list for the SL-1200 or SL-1210's in the 90's were well over a year and you couldnt even get B stock (ie returns resold) from Panasonic Technics either.
I will add another one to the list, their SU-A range of amps with the R-core transformer.
When they first came out, I was invited to a blind listening session with Technics somewhere in London and they had some of the SU-A amps up against considerably more expensive amps and you were shocked at the quality, you could point to where the different instruments were being played left and right, you could tell whether they were at the front, middle or back of the sound stage, it was an awesome experience and the low price meant they showed up some serious big names in the hifi world. Magazines were harsh to them imo.
Its just a shame they couldn't replicate the quality in their surround sound amp's but I suspect that is more to do with the encoding used then and now. But the return in audiophile quality is not proportional to expenditure above a certain price, its more exponential.
> The dotted edges of the rotating plate are both aesthetically pleasing while also informative communicating rotation speed.
Isn't this pattern actually used as a rotary encoder for speed control?
Yes I've heard it's actually used to sync two plates
Agree. The device is made of long lasting parts. Easy to repair if needed and parts for even the oldest models are still available.
i dont know if this is exactly in or exactly out of the HN wheelhouse, but: my keychain. it's a small hoop of plastic-coated braided strand cable with two threaded ends that screw together.
the plastic coating hasn't ripped, torn, loosened, or discolored. none of the metal has rusted. the thread pitch is big enough to screw and unscrew quickly but small enough to not loosen on its own and has good clamping force. the threaded end for passing through keys is small enough for all my fobs and keys. its tough and strong but pleasant to handle. no part of it is worse for wear even though i fidget with it and have changed keys multiple times. it also currently has like 11 keys and a large fob on it. ive had it for ~5 years and I'm fairly certain it's the most reliable thing i own. it's easy to use and easy to understand and it always does its job.
and to top it all off, it was like 70 cents.
it's a god damn marvel.
looks like this, although mine is smaller:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/281726615218-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
I’m not a knife fetishist or anything, but a weird number of my favorite household items are edged things.
I grabbed a Global 12” chef’s knife after reading about it in Kitchen Confidential twenty-ish years ago, reminded of its superiority whenever I’m in a friend’s kitchen. I am sad to admit that IKEA makes a very decent clone, though.
An old nemesis gave me a Benchmade serrated knife with this miraculous spring-button release, absolute joy to handle.
I used to tie fishing flies in Montana as a kid; fly-tying scissors are fantastically sharp and useful for all kinds of micro projects. I often use them for extracting slivers that tweezers can’t reach. For macro work, nothing beats a pair of sewing shears; get a decent set and you’ll never touch a standard office or school scissor ever again.
Oxo scissors for the kitchen, though — the blades comes apart so you can clean the space between the hinge, lotta gross stuff will build up there in the kitchen.
I got to handle a Leica Q2 fixed lens camera today. I don’t know much but about photography, but the build quality of that thing… it puts my new 16” M1 MacBook Pro to shame.
Also the Microsoft Elite game controller is just bewilderingly nice to handle.
The best bicycle lights ever made are the Sparse anti-theft lights. Unfortunately their business didn’t pan out, but you can find some remainders here and there on eBay.
The current best lights are the Knog cobblers. They have three drawbacks: dismal battery, usb-a, and easy to remove (thus easy to steal). I’m hoping that an inevitable “rev 2” will solve the first two problems.
Legos; also the ender 3d printer. I had a nostalgic time putting the ender together. Felt like a lego set. That's not saying it was trivial (it challenged me) but that I trusted it every step of the way not because of previous experience, but because of the obvious well-designed aspects of the experience as I was putting it together. For example: I put on a part sloppily, and trying to attach anther part was the first real resistance I felt in the entire process -- physical that is, I had to study every page of the manual for a minute or two before even being able to figure out what the next step would need to be, but it was always clear after studying.
I'm sorry, but 3D printers, while quite an innovation allowing cheap and fast prototyping, are not well designed things. I own three, and talk to friends who collectively probably own close to 100.
They, including models with great reputation (e.g. Prusa printers), break all the time. Also the mere fact that there are thousands of mods for all of them on sites like Thingieverse to make them better is another indication they aren't really all that well designed.
Things like manual leveling, heat creep, bottom layer adhesion issues are common problems across all models.
They're finicky things with PLENTY room for improvement.
I think the last consumer paper(inkjet/laser) printer I've seen with the same reliability as my Prusa Mini broke down 20 years ago.
I haven't had a single print come off the bed by itself and never had to level anything. In ~150 prints there was one failure. Of course I'm just a hobbyist, but still. It could be worse.
I agree. Inedible exciting and rewarding machines, worth the time investment, but it’s still very early. I’m sure I’ll be blown away by what’s possible in ten years or so. Today I’m still babying each print and the machine itself. Jams are the worst.
With the exception of having to occasionally replace the print head my mk3s are excellent. No leveling problems, solve all layer height with live z. Flex filament works great
The Apple Ecosystem.
I've invested a lot of hard earned money into it. I have an ipad, iphone, a macbook air, an apple watch, airpods pro and a mac mini. Bought these over the years.
Just the way these things work so cohesively to me is pure magic. The attention to detail on extremely minor things is pretty impressive. I haven't had to think about "doing" anything with tech ever since I bought apple products. You just remember to charge them and everything just works. I come from a pure windows / android background and I was mindblown by how convenient things were.
I'd highly recommend Apple devices to friends and family.
There are some things I like, but never fell in love with them. iPhones died too fast. MBP had weird display glitches because of the lighting adjustment. The touch bar was less useful than a touchscreen. Keyboard is so bad that it's often the deal-breaker when trying to buy a macbook. It might be useful if I could just plug an external keyboard into it, but I need an adapter for that now and the adapter gets hot with all the things I put on it.
I mean the competition does a lot of things badly, but Apple products are badly designed too.
I managed to dodge every single bad apple product. I never bought MBP's only Airs. No touchbars. No shitty keyboard.
The products I've owned / own had zero problems maybe cos they're a subset of Apple products that do not have problems. What do you mean iphones die too fast? My experience has been quite the opposite.
I've said this before, but happy to write it over and over. One of the co-founders was my old EM at Uber. He's as sharp as they get, and very kind and humble to boot. If you are looking to support companies started by people that are definitively Not Jerks, check this one out.
Different teams I believe. I think Raycast team uses Linear for issues and I am sure they inspire each other.
Raycast has Linear as one of the core extensions it lists: https://www.raycast.com/extensions/linear/
I find it interesting that most of the comments are about physical products.
The 'best design' is often something that's so frictionless and easy to use that it's invisible in day-to-day use. Everyday infrastructure like steps are something that's noticeable when they're off (e.g. spaced too far apart, or too steep); most are designed well.
It's easy to find things that are designed poorly. But much less tangible to find a 'best designed' item.
You are right, people are probably missing a lot of things in plain-sight. Most of the comments are about some esoteric product or software - so nothing to add to the shopping list :)
Only recognize Google apps and Apple hardware from the other comments - they are great.
Agreed. It's real tempting to answer, "indoor plumbing". It's really nice to flip a lever and get clean, safe water. It's real good not to need to stroll to the outhouse, too.
Coming from a developing country, I was very impressed that you could get drinking water straight from the tap in some countries. My wife, a civil engineer, couldn't believe it either. There's just so much complexity involved in it, including storage, which can have rats and rust.
Normally we just filter the stuff between the tap and cup. And as a kid, we had to boil and store it, and just learned to tolerate the metallic/dirt taste at times. This was when soda peaked.
> This was when soda peaked.Somehow I never put the international explosion of Coke and Pepsi in this context. The things late-20th century Americans took for granted!
A local I knew in Mexico told me that the water in his town was safe to drink, and that the theory of unsafe tap water was a disinformation campaign by gringos/Coca-Cola. Spoiler: Was not safe to drink the water.
Mostly unrelated but I would like to be able to set the temperate and water pressure for my shower so I can just enter and press a single button. This would also be great for those showers where you can never get the water temperature or pressure right so you have to keep adjusting it.
I would also like to run a bath by doing the same thing, and having the water stop when it's at the right level. Maybe there could be a heating element that keeps the water at the right temperature so you don't have to occasionally top it up with hot water.
I'm sure this already exists but I've never seen it anywhere.
Thermal regulating shower/bath faucets are relatively common:
https://www.deltafaucet.com/design-innovation/innovations/sh...I have one in my master shower and it's fantastic. Of course, the water starts out cold (because the water in the hot water pipes are cold) but once it's up to temperature, it's very consistent, even if you have a toilet flush in your house which would reduce the pressure of cold.
> Of course, the water starts out cold (because the water in the hot water pipes are cold)
No, this should be considered a failure condition for a constant temperature shower. I don't care how they do it, just bleed the cold water into a separate pipe off to the side or something.
We have sent people into space, I want actual uniform temperature water.
I've seen a few apartments in Asia have small electric water heaters right before the faucet. They provide instant hot water until the main boiler's hot water arrives.
This is fairly common in newish kitchens in the Netherlands too, especially if the kitchen is far away from the boiler. Sometimes even with a boiling water tap, so you don't even need a kettle anymore.
>
The 'best design' is often something that's so frictionless and easy to use that it's invisible in day-to-day useOK, here's something I use every day that's reliable and clever and works almost as if by magic, even though nobody appreciates it: a three-way light switch. Simple, elegant, interesting -- and nobody notices or cares.
Turbo Pascal 7, then Borland Delphi 5 were the most productive programming environments ever. Very few bugs, wicked fast, and full proper documentation.
Nothing since comes even close.
Not sure how similar they are, maybe extremely, but I really loved Borland C++ Builder 4. Making GUI apps was so painless.
I tried XCode but it was so complicated to do anything I gave up after a couple of weeks of reading docs.
I looked at the C++ version, but after you built a form, and started hooking up events, there was orders of magnitude more boilerplate code staring you in the face, and it wasn't something that you could edit without breaking things.
In pascal, you could edit the form, or the source, and nothing broke. There were also far fewer lines of code required to do something.
Well, I've nothing to compare it with, but I never needed to look at most of the boilerplate, (wasn't it in the header, which I never looked at? I think I looked at the pages of boilerplate once ever), could just make any necessary changes in the Object Inspector. Never had problems breaking stuff, maybe because I made changes that way. In fact I realized some time later that I'd been writing C! Like the person who realized they'd been talking prose all their life. Now (sometimes) I just write in C, never C++.
p.s. I started (after BASIC) with Turbo Pascal, in the 80s. That was so awesome for its day.
Yeah plus in 5 you could still follow the source of the included libraries. I’m 6 the concealed them somehow
Is that a little dig at Topspeed's/Softvelocity's Clarion? ;-)
My 2000 model year BMW M roadster.
Not counting the radio, the car had a tiny number of buttons and switches- window up/down, headlight knob, and 5 buttons. There was nothing extraneous or redundant. There were no door lock buttons- the lock indicator was the button to lock the door, and the door open handle was the unlock button.
Also, every darn control in the car was exactly where it was supposed to be. It’s hard to describe it, but even from the very first time sitting in the car, I never had to search or guess how to operate anything. I would think about needing to do something, put my hand where I thought the control would be, and there it was.
I’ve never had a machine delight me like that car in its simplicity and elegance of design.
It kind of pains me to say this, but I'll say Sonos from about 5-6 years ago. When I first got a couple speakers, I touted it as the best consumer electronics experience I'd ever had to except maybe some Apple products.
Unfortunately, it has been consistently downhill the past couple of years. What used to "just work" now constantly has issues and glitches, and speakers I got just a few years ago that work great are now essentially EOLed in their software. I've definitely purchased my last Sonos product.
Sonos + Spotify have been so spotty. Playing music from Spotify consistently starts tracks halfway through a song. Sometimes no music plays at all even though it displays as playing in Spotify. Sometimes Spotify just cannot connect.
I have something like $3500 in Sonos speakers; it’s really disappointing how unreliable they are.
Anecdotal but anything + spotify is very glitchy. The Car audio system, bluetooth speakers / headphones etc., where other apps seem to work just fine.
I know this is very different target markets and product desires, but I have 3 Google Home mini speakers I have spent under $150 on + my privacy from our overlords. Works very well with Spotify and solid sound for someone who isn't an audiofile, and while not amazing design, very solid. My condolences to the OP on their failures of late :/
Kitchenaid direct-drive stand mixer. I have one from the 1950s that has been used multiple times a week since it was bought new by my grandmother.
The dough hook, whisk, and other attachments secure in place with machined fittings so there is no play or wiggle. This has made them last.
I took the top off of it 10 years ago to make sure it was still properly lubricated. That’s all the maintenance it has ever had. (Well I broke one of the Pyrex mixing bowls…but eBay)
I'm amazed no one has suggested Chromecast. It just works. Click a button on your phone or laptop and the video or song you were listening to or want to listen to suddenly appears on the TV. Even grandparents seem to get it. Maybe Apple TV is a similar experience but Chromecast is as good as it gets
I know a lot of people seem to love Chromecast, but for some reason using a phone to control TV never made sense to me. I prefer the physical remote. And for sending screen to the TV, the quality was never good.
Our Chromecast and the one included with TV haven’t been used for years.
The Chromecast was never amazing, and having to use a phone or Chrome to control your TV is really weird. Having a Chromecast was better than nothing though.
However if you’ve used an AppleTV you realise that the Chromecast is actually a pretty terrible solution, compared to just having a device with apps.
I used to love it, but have had very annoying connection issues of late. Also shuts off and restarts during some use. I had to switch it over to 2.4Ghz recently which I think did it in, which I had to do for connection of home devices with "dumb smart" plugs.
I agree - I have a 1st gen Chromecast and it still works really well after quite a few years. It doesn't always play nice with my wife's iphone but considering how little it cost, I'm not complaining.
Well, that's because most of that is untrue.
It's not a simple system. Technically all you need is upnp to perform all those functions. A raspberry pi with a build of VLC that only always plays full screen and a slideshow of some kind in between use. However, with the google product specifically it is deliberately designed to handicap itself and require all kinds of extra software (google at services, the YouTube app, etc) on the mobile device. It may look simple from the perspective of someone who already has all the added necessities, but try playing a video on the Chromecast with your own choice of software and you'll see it for the nightmare it is.
I don’t think that’s a fair way to judge a product. It’s made and marketed for sending videos from android phones to your TV, and it does that well. It doesn’t handle tasks it wasn’t built for well? That’s fine.
The best thing I ever used was iPod shuffle mini.
It was the perfect design, nothing could be added nor taken away to make it better.
But apple being Apple they redesigned it to be crap then discontinued it.
On the topic of designing great things and Apple …. Can I say that I hate Apples “minimalism above all else” approach to design. For example I want computers with lots of ports - what’s the point in buying a minimal Apple computer only to instantly plug it into another box that provides the basic ports I need for keyboard mouse external disks and camera? Somehow though the designers at Apple think this is the optimum design. I do acknowledge recent Macs bring ports back but still not enough.
I also hate it that Apple got rid of the standard headphone jack - for gods sake why? Answer: Apple designers.
I loved the original iPod Shuffle - the one that looked like spearmint pack of gum. This may or may not be what you're referring to, but to me it was Perfect; the only Apple product I've truly enjoyed without the 5-25% incredible frustration I typically hit when I stretch my usage of any other Apple product. It felt like Apple philosophy distilled - beautiful, minimalistic and stylish
but usable and useful too, even well priced and reliable. In fact I still have mine!
The following generations lost the allure somehow. Smaller, but that smaller form factor didn't actually work for me; it did not fit in my hand or in my pocket as nicely, you now needed a cable to charge it (how very Un-Apple in theory, how very Apple in practice!).
But the first one was just perfection. I got a couple of other MP3 players since in as similar format as I could find, both no-name clones and big-name versions, but nope, none of them were as smooth and easy.
P.S. Do *NOT* get me started on loss of 3.5mm port ;-<
I was skeptical, I liked my ports. Now I plug in all my devices at once, through a dongle. I like that a lot. It works well for how I work: either at my desk, with everything plugged in, or away from my desk with nothing plugged in.
They probably should've moved the ports to the power brick. That would've been ideal.
Never used a Shuffle, but the original iPod Nano was absolutely beautiful. Just a bit too easily scratched and maybe
too small.
There's no such thing, the Shuffle and Mini were separate models.
The Shuffle was the size of a USB drive, used solid state storage, and had no screen, the Mini was the one with the first touch Click Wheel and metallic colour choices, and used a 4GB spinning hard drive.
Such a little thing, but: the Rules Reference card in introductory-level Magic: The Gathering products. Magic's full rules are 250 pages of legal-lite text, and yet, this little folded insert, with just five cardface's worth of text, amply covers everything a complete beginner needs to play. It's a brilliant example of cutting an explanation to the bare minimum and piggybacking on background knowledge.
US Forest Service picnic table. 3 kinds of simple flat cement castings. Held together by their own weight. Easily carried and assembled by two men. Cheap. Almost indestructible.
I presume it is limited to warmer areas: cold concrete is uncomfortable.
Do you have a photo / link? My searches haven’t turned up anything.
Which one is the simple casting that can be carried by 2, and supports itself?
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