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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

I think the core problem is that every manmade tool eventually has to choose 2 of the 3:

• Be intuitive for new users

• Have features for power users

• Sane number of customization options

Like the dock labels issue. I personally don't need or want labels in the Dock. But there should be an option to enable dock labels for people who are not familiar with all the icons.

In fact I would like to hide the labels for ALL icons on the Home Screen, with a tap-and-hold to show them temporarily, like the mouse hover on the Mac Dock.

Now you need 2 more options to satisfy everyone.

And then you need to keep the Settings app from becoming too cluttered or intimidating.

So I believe the cornerstone of all good design is a good settings/preferences system, that is easy to navigate, discover, search and filter. And to selectively restore defaults when you fuck shit up.

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Two separate points:

1. You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them.

2. For a long time, Apple's way around the problem was to have different platforms for different markets. The iPad was a simple computing platform for very casual users, and the Mac was the more capable option for more advanced users. For some reason, Apple has now decided that their simple platform needs to be as capable as the more advanced platform.

> You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them.

Which of course makes them completely undiscoverable, too.

The Terminal/NSUserDefaults system is useless for navigation and discoverability of optional settings.

How would I see all the options available for an app? We're back to googling and peer support.

> For some reason, Apple has now decided that their simple platform needs to be as capable as the more advanced platform.

Because they were getting crap for it.

> We're back to googling and peer support.

Googling and peer support is much more acceptable for advanced actions than simple actions.

If I need to Google how to disable labels in the dock, that's probably ok. If I need to Google how to turn down the brightness of the iPad...that's not great.

Yes, exactly.

An interface can only ever have a finite number of discoverable actions. So choose what actions are core functionality, and make those discoverable. Hide what's left.

I absolutely disagree.

Nova Launcher is an example of a pretty good piece of software that fulfills all 3 requirements in my mind (it's a 3rd party launcher, or desktop, for Android). It's what I use personally so it fits my power user and ricing needs, but it's also what I set up for less computer literate relatives.

It has every option one could want, but they are organised sanely and are kept separate from the basic interface. I don't see why this is difficult.

As a power user you could easily set up your click and hold labels with KWGT or KLWP. Having this option available doesn't make the phone worse to use for normal users. All hail the android ecosystem!

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