Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of his work, but I feel minimalism can easily be taken too far. Does an indicator not need to be visible when it's off? How do you confirm that it is off. Yes, you'll eventually learn where it is by repeated exposure to it when it's on but there will still be some uncertainty even then, especially if you deal with multiple machines.

Personally I like that minimalism and want it in the products I buy, but I'd not go so far as to say it's more usable than a more prosaic alternative where you have a row of cheap indicator leds with little pictograms next to them.

Reminds me of this comic strip too:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/3/6/

View on HN

I don’t know. This LED has one function: telling you the device is still on when the monitor isn’t. That’s all it does. It’s obvious that the device is on when the monitor is on, so you don’t need a LED for that (ThinkPads really do have a frickin’ LED for that! As does my cheap Compaq.).

Putting a LED at a visible location and making it invisible as long as it is off seems like a pretty elegant solution to that problem. I don’t think it’s harder to figure out the sleep light than this whole row of LEDs on my old ThinkPad with their cryptic pictograms or the dazzling array of blinkenlights on my cheap Compaq laptop (complete with equally puzzling pictograms and including LEDs which light up in different colors so you presumably have to learn a whole color code).

Macs in general only opt for LEDs when displaying stuff in the UI is not possible (sleep light and battery indicator for checking battery status when the Mac is off), one exception being that darned caps lock. Spotlight’s icon pulses when your HDD is indexed. There are progress bars when stuff is unzipped or copied. Why the need for a HDD activity LED?

That’s a bit dishonest of me. There is multitasking, so stuff might be going on in the background, but I do think that in general it’s good to strive for a world in which we don’t need HDD activity LEDs. I also think we are pretty much there, I, at least, didn’t miss it. (Although not knowing why my good old desktop PC didn’t respond in 1998 because they decided to leave out the HDD activity light would have been pretty horrible. But that was then :)

I've had laptops where the monitor would shut off to save power and having an obvious way to know it is on is very valuable. I do not want to hit thepower button if the machine is on.

In general, dedicated hardware indicators are handy when your screen may have died or otherwise cannot rely on a monitor.

I think this goes to show just how much thought has been put into small stuff like this. For instance, there is no need for the the sleep indicator to indicate anything when it's off - simply because you know the laptop is alive when the screen is on (the indicator lights up solid white when the screen turns off). However, the battery indicator button combined with a stripe of lights show a function - the level of battery capacity left - so they need to be visible even when they're off.

With the old Powerbooks and MacBook Pros, the hinges on the top of the lid would extend magnetically just before the lid closed. These are the small gems that makes you smile when you're interested in product design.

I haven't found minimalism to impact usability myself, but there's clearly some instances where they have given the user a task of figuring someting out. For instance, a friend of mine never figured out that the top button on his iPhone locked the screen until I told him.

I would actually bet that's a case of Apple relying too much on familiarity. It's in the same place as the (more clearly marked) lock switch on iPods and roughly the same size and shape, so logically it's the lock, right? Except that won't work if you didn't have an iPod.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com