Peach’s Most Interesting Feature, the Hybrid Command Line | Hacker News Reader

Peach’s Most Interesting Feature, the Hybrid Command Line

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The idea that command-line applications could have some sort of Renaissance on devices which do not have a keyboard seems completely insane to me.

I agree, but: consider that menus cost screen space, which is also at a premium. (But wait, a keyboard takes half the screen. I give up.)

There's no fundamental reason that command line applications can't work with input from voice recognition.

On a old slashdot flame thread on GUI vs. CLI back in the day, I pointed out that calling CLIs less familiar and less intuitive when compared to GUIs wasn't fair because CLI's do have a very familiar, non-virtual analog: speech. CLI, of course, it just a very specific and rigid language, just like programming languages.

I've worked with many first time users over 20 years and have never witnessed any of them intuitively understand either CLI or GUI, both are artificial, contrived and unique and need to be learnt. I don't essentially see one as a better choice than the other for a new user, maybe in some ways the CLI has less abstractions which can be a help, I've witnessed much confusion over the many many ways you can enact the same result using different methods in a GUI.

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned."

(Discussion on who coined this phrase at http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html)

After having our first child 17 months ago and dealing with the headaches of breast feeding and an infant with trouble "latching," I'm no longer confident that even that is totally intuitive...

Edit: ah, his 2001 quote seems to validate my frustrations :)

Yeah, our first never figured it out at all, she was bottle fed all the way, but our second (8 months now) was latched on like five minutes after birth.

I think 'intuitively' actually means less having to think about all possible options at any moment or stage of an action. If its clear how to accomplish the next step, it is considered intuitive.

GUI are considered more intuitively because options in general are visible as menus and buttons. On a CLI adding parameters to a command can get complicated if you are halfway and forgot if it was '-l' or '-L'.

That's why I tell users to always remember the '-h/--help' option ;).

Intuitive is defined as without conscious reasoning, so no, Menus and Buttons do need you to think, take chrome, up there, top right, for starters I need to click on three horizontal lines then;

New tab New window

What could anyone infer from the terms 'tab' or 'window' without some prior knowledge, these interfaces succeed because the cost of failure is low and the level of feedback and reward is high, so we persevere, an intuitive interface would require a whole new conceptual model of how we interact with data. No, I don't have one to show you, I am fairly certain that existing approaches will appear draconian to our children's children though :)

maybe no fundamental reason but the practical reason that voice recognition still isn't that good.

Nope. However, it is more cumbersome unless tailored to voice. For example, saying "-r" versus "-R" or pronouncing something like "ioctl".

Well, except:

Voice recognition, as far as I know, can't make use-mention distinctions. There's no way to "quote" a voice command. "Siri, tomorrow tell me the result of 'Siri, what is today's date?'"

The key problem with command line applications is they lack discoverability. If you're sitting at a blank screen and a blinking "_", there's no way of knowing which commands are available. To me, this is a big feature of WIMP systems. You can visually scan the menu items.

Auto-complete in CLIs gives you much of that power back. Start typing and see what results start coming up. That's why most input boxes on the web these days—even search engines!—auto-complete as you type.

I can't imagine an equivalent user experience for voice that wouldn't be maddening. "Siri, call m–" "Mom? Want me to call your mom?" "-o" "Oh, you mean MOMA? The museum? Want me to call that?"

That assumes that the command-line only has to function on words and letters. There is nothing preventing embedded command icons, command directories (like folders on mobile OS's), and context aware sub-command selections.

There is also the ability to tie commands/sub-commands to voice recognition as mentioned above.

Yeah... Nobody wants to type messages on their iPhone... Come on!

The home page is http://peach.cool/

It looks like the app is available only for iOS.

It's a pity that the article doesn't mention either of those things.

Having tested it, it seems you can only find friends with a US phone number... or that whole feature just doesn't work.

Yeah my uk number doesn't work which is sort of amazing given plivo/twilio etc exist...

You can add friends if you know their username

Yeah...it's kind of a bummer. Would be nice to see if any of the people I follow on Twitter are on Peach as well.

This feels incredibly Silicon Valley centric. Hybrid Command Line only serves to increase friction in the messaging process, particularly for normal users. Press reviews have already noted that there is a learning curve, that the experience is better with a smaller friends list. This sounds like it is set up to fail to get broader adoption.

Agreed. The Slack-esque hybrid command line is a bit of a bait and switch to get the tech community interested. The average user by no means is going to memorize more than 1-2 commands, if any at all. I barely use anything other than Giphy on Slack. At the end of the day content and network effects will determine whether it survives.

^^ this. The commands are great but why not bring up a dialog of the commands represented by an icon that you tap to use the given command? Much better discoverability than having to type "help" and get popped out to a web page with the list.

To me, this app is perfect. Here is why:

Social to me today is very scary and over commercialized. It feels like more people are trying to convince everyone else to buy something or watch them eventually parade products in their posts than being social. Great for them, but I'm not really using social media for that. I post my life, but posting my life has serious implications if made public. "Oh hey I'm traveling" could get my home broken in to. OR I say something as a joke, but just like with texting, gets misread and now I'm an asshole to people who don't know me. Worse, all this can happen years after with little to no warning.

The chilling effect on sharing and keeping up with your friends who are hard to keep up with, the supposed point of social media, is enormous.

I like it. I love the magic words, I think they're cute and everyone thinks that is the killer feature of the app, but I don't think it is.

I think the killer features are:

* The snapchat like single-button camera and easy photo sharing (personally, the only reason I use snapchat is the camera and save the photos)

* The individual snapchat-story-like feeds you post to (also nice, love they go away)

* The lack of a central feed or RTs or easy way to get viral that can happen in places like twitter.

Obviously, I'm not going to be sharing ssh private keys or passwords over it, but for the most part it's secure against the casual online lurker. It's a great mix of the point of snapchat with the power of slack and twitter. I can come up with so many more ways I love the idea, but I can tell I'm already not doing it justice so I'll stop, but I think this is something worth looking at if nothing else as a launching point for someone else. I'm not saying it'll be the next snapchat/facebook/instagram/twitter, and I'm comfortable knowing its more gonna be like Ello and Merkat, but I like the possibilities with it for doing what I always imagined social media could and should be after seeing the exodus of quality content from friends being replaced with fake updates and perfectly posed photos.

Anything that inspires spontaneity like this, snapchat, or beme is in my opinion what social media needs to deliver for me to use it and feel comfortable sharing.

Am I missing something? This looks like they bundled a subset of Slack's features and called it a social network.

Typing "GIF," for instance, lets users search for the appropriate media to post

Seems a lot like /giphy

You're missing the whole thing. For starters, Slack is for work and Peach is for personal. But I think before you dismiss something as "isn't it just x plus y?" you need to take a little bit more time and thinking to try and figure out what the product designers are trying to achieve and how.

Maybe the product designers and product providers should be more explicit about how their product should be used and who their target demographic is, if they want a successful product, rather than making everyone "figure out" what they are trying to achieve and how.

"Figuring it out" might be the point. You do realize that you are referring to some of the very few people who have actually already built an amazingly successful product.

I would like to put this on a t-shirt and send it to every startup.

You cannot build an incredible product without a profound and nuanced understanding of your market.

That's rather arbitrary. Lots of people use Slack for both work and personal.

The deeper I look and more I think about Peach, the more it looks like a messaging app that lost it's vision. I feel the same way about Snapchat lately too, but somehow they still have a multi-billion dollar valuation, so I'm obviously not the best one to rate a company/app like Peach.

Slack didn't invent chat commands. Bots have been listening and enhancing IRC for decades.

The terminology varies, but there's little difference in implementation.

I've been using peach for a few days (@bgraves, add me!)

I'm liking it.

1. It's different and disconnected. I have FB/IG for personal/family stuff, LinkedIN/Twitter for biz stuff. Peach is more fun and more 'creative'.

2. The magic words are a gimmick for sure. But it's a _fun_ gimmick.

3. Kinda related to #1 it's a smaller 'community' now and folks are just trying stuff out.

Overall I've found my self posting a quick update on Peach over the past 48 hours more than I have on "traditional" social media (can we call Twitter, et al. traditional now?) over the past 2 weeks.

Yes, there's a novelty factor. And maybe that's it and it will die on the Vine.

An entire article about an application without a single screenshot of said application. Ok.

But they had a picture of a peach!

I really fucking hate this trend of requiring that an image be next to the opening paragraph of an article. It's fucking asinine.

I don't get how you can take its claim that a "hybrid command line" is becoming popular. For one it only seemed like a different kind of user were introduced to computers without being exposed to command lines.

Are there any demos/screenshots of the Hybrid Command Line?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peach-a-space-for-friends/id...

A few images from the App Store. Not very good examples for the CLI-veteran.

Peach is pretty neat all in, seems like they've made social 'fun', something that's been lost by the current crop of social media companies.

With regards to the command line, it's really clever, it frees up so much UI space, the app appears uncluttered and inviting. If anyone has been near a Bloomberg terminal you'll know this is how Bloomberh has worked for many years, and the users love it.

It's Yo messaging app but we can do more things using magic words.

"magic words" have endless possibilities, Interesting to see in future that, peach keep inventing new magic words their own or allow to other third party for creating own magic words?

Death of Peach: An eerie echo of Meerkat’s collapse[0]

> A messaging app called Peach triggered a media maelstrom on Friday afternoon, peaked at No. 85 on the U.S. iPhone downloads chart on Saturday, and started declining on Sunday, slipping to No. 129 by Sunday at 1:00 p.m. The tepid peak performance and an early decline are vastly significant considering the heavy tech media coverage surrounding the app.

> Because modern tech media is a headless beast, you will no doubt be exposed to dozens of stories about how “hot” Peach is in coming days and weeks. Many tech reporters believe that if other tech reporters claim something is hot, it must be — regardless of whether there is any consumer interest.

> By now, it’s clear that Peach is a turkey, much as it was obvious that Meerkat was dead a month after its late February 2015 launch.

0: http://bgr.com/2016/01/11/peach-messaging-app-iphone-collaps...

BGR linkbait aside, the amount of positive attention Peach has been receiving is suspicious, even for a startup from a founder of a successful startup.

Meerkat is a surprisingly good comparison.

Consumer tech is stuffed to the gills with astroturfing. It's best to take anything written by tech bloggers with numerous grains of salt.

If you're gonna read stuff like that, understand that it probably makes you dumber. At least, posting it makes you look dumber. Calling something a "turkey" after a day is as dumb as calling it an "x killer". Things like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc take years to become successful.

Your response is incredibly off-base. The author of the BGR article is pretty spot-on in his analysis. If you look at the author's previous articles, he has been critical, but accurate. In any case, even if his 16 years of experience in the mobile industry (I looked him up) don't allow him to make accurate one-day analyses, a different viewpoint is beneficial to everyone's thought process.

There is absolutely nothing "dumb" about bringing up critical viewpoints. Shooting them down without giving them any thought, however...

pbreit has a point. Dismissing something as a "turkey" after just one day is unduly harsh, and to call that "bringing up critical viewpoints" is euphemistic.

If that were the only comment the author made, sure. He did a pretty good job of defending his view, I think, with lots of citations etc. It is a viewpoint -- it's the opposite of looking at something and saying, "ooh, this is new and cool!" Now, it's probably more productive in most circumstances to have an open mind, but that is a matter of preference. Personally, I like to have my childlike enthusiasm for new things balanced out by the voices of other, more cynical people.

WhatsApp and Instagram actually blew up and were obvious hits in a matter of months at most.

Wasn't Meerkat done in by the fact that Twitter launched Periscope around the same time? Twitter cut Meerkat's access to the API at SXSW (mid March), and published Periscope to the iOS App Store in late March.

On top of this, I've noticed some celebrities I follow on Twitter using Periscope and advertising it to their feeds, which I wouldn't be surprised to find out is fueled by some form of payment from Twitter.

I can't comment on Peach, but I get the feeling Meerkat's demise was because they were out muscled by Twitter.

Why does anyone follow celebrities on Twitter? Does it add any value to your life?

Because it's entertaining, especially if they live more interesting lives.

Outside of the tech-sphere, following celebrities is the primary use case of many Twitter users.

We are posting on a forum community created by Paul Graham.

Which brings value to our lives

OK, but that is in no way "following" the man, so I don't see the connection.

Following celebrities on Twitter is the newest form of celebrity gossip, which itself is just a modern rendition of one of the most human of habits, gossip. Gossip is the human version of the grooming seen in other apes, and it is as much a part of the human condition as war. When everyone was uneducated and lived in small villages, as was the case for the majority of people until only a few hundred years ago, there was nothing to talk about except for gossip. Just because we now have more to talk about doesn't mean that the need for gossip has gone away completely.

Just because you and I don't get any value out of it doesn't mean that nobody else can.

I don't follow a-listers by any stretch, and maybe are why things are much rosier in my part of the world. I seriously miss Nichelle Nichols talking about her garden or her family. Colin Baker and Terry Molloy show the other side of being a sci-fi celebrity - even Doctor Who has to deal with flight delays and wait for the cable installer to show up.

Maybe it's different if you follow Kardashians with social media managers running their Twitter hype machine. But the celebs I've followed are genuinely nice people with interesting lives and passions they want to share.

Just don't tell Colin he should've taken a TARDIS when his rental car is mysteriously cancelled.

A couple days late on this, but to answer your question:

"Celebrities" I follow might be better described as a mix of creatives (musicians, comedians, actors/actresses) and intellectuals (members of the tech, math, and science communities) all with varying degrees of fame and success.

Primarily I follow people I don't know personally on twitter for interesting content. Usually I initially follow them because I am a fan of their work in the medium they are known for.

Some of these people share articles, some hold deep conversations with others on topics I find intriguing, and some just chit chat with followers. There are plenty of people I admire for their work who I do not follow because they just don't post interesting content.

For me, it provides a nice balance on enlightenment and entertainment.

I think it's a little bit the competition from Twitter's own product and a lot bit that live video broadcasting is a pretty small niche. I don't think there's room in the market for multiple participants.

Would be cool to do a Slack command for this that would post stuff to Twitter/other social media sites.

I would like to see a geo location based network like in William Gibson's Spook Country

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