Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

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All the "fringes" stuff is where the magic is. The author suggests that no one notices some of the refinements, well this may be true on day one, but people discover these touches as they grow more familiar. Those subtle thoughtful additions are what makes the difference between an app I like using, and one I love using. They help me feel a couple of things:

1) A connection; I feel like I noticed something just for those who care 2) Assurance the product is well cared for 3) A feeling that the dev understands me

This stuff is gold for a product. I am thinking of Procreate when I think of the king of this sort of thing. That app is just so ridiculously clever. I don't know how they managed to take the plethora of UI that other illustration apps have and squeeze it down into ~6 menu items. Somehow it works beautifully and there are so many subtle touches and hidden workflow gestures just waiting to be discovered. It's usable out of the box, and the more you use it the more you naturally learn how to use it more efficiently.

Apple has a lot of niceties like this in their software. I've had so many times I thought "I wonder if I can do this?" and it just works because a designer thought of it before me.

Prime example I stumbled upon recently: In Apple Music, you can press+hold an album or song to pop open an action menu. I use this a lot for adding songs to the queue. There's an item to add it next in the queue, and another to add it last in queue. Usually if I want it somewhere specific in the queue, I'd just add it next and then move the song where I wanted it, but if I'm adding an album partway through the queue, that means you'll be dragging a bunch of tracks manually. So I thought, "it'd be nice if I could just drag things exactly where I want in the queue and drop it there." And then I figured I'd actually try it. If you press and hold a song/album and yank it from its place, it stays under your thumb. You can then either operate with another finger to open up the queue, or hold your thumb over it to pop it open, and then just drop it exactly where you want in the queue.

Not the first time I've come across something like this, but it's the kind of thing I only find on Apple platforms, particularly with their own apps. As much as I liked Google Play Music, you couldn't do it there, and I just checked Spotify and it doesn't let you do that either.

I'm surprised to see an example from Apple Music. That app is an perfect example of design neglect too. The ability to filter your song list for a specific track is now hidden in Apple Music.

To reveal the filter field, you must select the "View" menu, and "Show Filter Field". Worse each time you relaunch Music, this field is again hidden, and you have to select the menu item again.

It's much worse for apple music classical. It's great for classical music, but the way the library works with works and recordings is unintuitive and they decided to remove the ability to download (!?) and the ability to share playlists in the classical app and those as main-app only.

I love many things about Procreate, but their palm rejection is terrible (ie inexistent) compared to every other drawing app which means the canvas often zooms/rotates wildly while I’m drawing (maybe cause I’m left handed?), making it super frustrating to use; they’ve ignored requests to address it with eg canvas lock for years ;_;

https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3/6/13198

https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3/6/13105

I have had no problems with this, but I use an iPad Mini for all my sketching and my palm is often off of the screen to the side as it's a small surface.

I’m on a 12.9” iPad :)

> they’ve ignored requests to address it with eg canvas lock for years

Shouldn't that be pretty easy to implement, too? Just a button that prevents rotation...

> people discover these touches as they grow more familiar

people discover these touches in the breech, when they need to move on for some reason or other, and all that's familiar is lost. in the words of Joni Mitchell, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone"

It depends on what kind of app you are making. Text editor is probably where the "craftsmanship" shines the most, cause there are just way too many text editors out there.

(Un)fortunately in many other cases it doesn't work like that. People use a certain app to book train tickets even its UI sucks hard and it asks 100 permissions unnecessarily, because the only alternative is get it over the counter in person.

> People use a certain app to book train tickets even its UI sucks hard and it asks 100 permissions unnecessarily

It's worth questioning why this is, as often as you can. We have a wallet app / payment system on most mobile devices that is card agnostic and gets better interfaces. Meanwhile, other services have to make do until a big player like Amazon or Ticketmaster comes along, consolidates the industry and starts charging high rents.

This is very true, and with regard to product success, the opposite effect here is a sad story - a tool full on lots of small annoyances is death by a thousand cut because each is hard to describe it doesn't seem worth explaining and so you get no telemetry for why nobody uses your product.

Not to steal your thunder about a MacOS-specific text editor, I would say that many Windows devs would say the same about Notepad++ and Sublime Text. While I am not a Windows fanboi, when I am forced to use that platform, I am always searching the Start Menu to run those text editors! I agree: The "TLC" (tender, loving, care) is well transmitted to users over the long run. The endless number of "hacker-friendly" features slowly builds a rabid fanbase.

I am confused. Why was this downvoted with no child comments?

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