Pretty IP Address lookup | Hacker News Reader

Pretty IP Address lookup

ip.phurix.net

45 pointshm2k34 comments

Pretty. And useless. No labels on anything, numbers arranged every which way and that, disrupting reading and removing the ability to skim and isolate the information you're looking for.

A completely counterproductive design that I pray was done as an artistic endeavour and not as a genuine "design" by anyone who would wish to claim to know UX.

Probably one of the worst offenders of "all form, no function" I've seen recently.

Part of its beauty is that the target audience would know and understand what each element is at a glance without being prompted.

There's no need to insult the visitors intelligence.

It is form over function, it is arguably less readable like this. While I can tell what each part means it takes me longer due to the non standard design.

That said, in form it is highly accomplished. Very shiny.

Who cares? Someone did something because he wanted to, not to solve enterprise issues.

Then why post it here? This forum is sure to evaluate for both form and function. And the function is pretty limited.

Cool side project? Hacker News is news in any sense of the word "Hacker". That can mean Enterpurnial News for any type of business. Or it can mean Show-Off-Neat-Side-Project News.

The one thing that it doesn't mean is One-Person-Or-Group-Only News.

Sure. But be prepared to have it deconstructed.

> Probably one of the worst offenders of "all form, no function" I've seen recently.

But does that really count when form is the intended function, and what little practical function that exists is mealy a flimsy excuse for the form to exist...?

Seems like we're spinning off into philosophy here pretty quickly. The bottom line is this is hard to read so it won't get used.

Nah, it is neat and pretty - sort of like one of those novelty clocks that run backwards or have math functions instead of numbers. Nifty, and might be a cool conversation piece.

I'm just hoping that's what this is and that the creator wasn't seriously trying to create something that people would actually use.

I think you may be taking this a little too seriously and I'm also considering you're being sarcastic though I'm not sure.

As far as I'm aware no one is making great claims of this being some UX masterpiece or it's purpose of being functional and from a cursory look it seems as if the purpose was for 'neat-o' or even 'pretty' factor. Also, have you considered it's intended audience? Not everything created has it's intended audience as, well, everyone. Myself and I imagine most people on HN understand it fine and actually enjoy it being presented that way (Therefore it does have function) as opposed to the standard way we've seen it for who knows how many years.

So, your prayer looks like it was answered before you even uttered it though going by www.phurix.net . . .

Looks like I'm one of the few that likes it so far!

I think it's simple, I like the fact that it does just one thing, and I enjoyed the geekiness of the extra encodings (binary, long and hex).

Almost every other network tool website is 50% google ads, 50% reverse-dns-propagation-zone-transfer style, with the actual IP address in small or medium size text. Double click selection works well in my browser too (FF 5.0).

You have my upvote!

Personally, I much prefer the design of http://ip.appspot.com/

And for the sake of convenience, alias the following to something simple like "ip":

  curl -L -s --max-time 10 http://ip.appspot.com | egrep -o -m 1 '([[:digit:]]{1,3}\.){3}[[:digit:]]{1,3}'

What do you need the grep for?

Probably so you know that the output you received is definitely an IP if egrep returns 0. The script on the server could fail or return unexpected non-IP output.

Another one: http://icanhazip.com/ With instructions: http://rackerhacker.com/icanhazip-com-faq/

"Pretty difficult to read IP Address lookup" you mean.

Pretty? Sorry but it looks more like one of those tag clouds. A big mess in my opinion.

Looks like a bit of info you can get from thousands of other places, formatted to be useless. Fantastic.

Maybe I'm using the wrong browser (Opera) but I see a big mess of numbers. Nothing pretty about it.

When I cannot double-click any of the fields to select them for copying, it gets pretty useless.

First IP i tried and the RDNS goes "outside" of my display on the right instead of being centered. Lot of white space for nothing on the right. Hard to understand what every value means, I had to check the HTML source and the div id to understand.

Are you sure about the results also? I tried some chinese IP and retrieve a result as US and "address did not resolve"

I don't really think that's pretty at all... The information is really awkwardly presented and that makes it difficult to parse.

http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/ is better

The use of a signed integer value is a pretty glaring problem.

Why? It resolves to the same underlying value either way.

Clearly not as good as http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/network-location/

Although you don't get the IPv6 stuff.

I think the purpose of the page was purely asthetics not functionality.

I think a good designer knows aesthetics and functionality are connected.

He also know that sometimes the form is the function

Then render it as colors, or music etc. Since it was rendered as text, there is some expectation that somebody will try to read it. And its pretty unreadable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com