Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

Same. I have absolutely no idea how to interact with this. It expects me to enter a number, but ... this isn't actually a radio and has nothing to do with frequencies. I can't enter the frequency of a station I want and listen to it, so what's the point of numeric entry?

View on HN

I can understand your side, the interface comes from the typical shortwave radio, and bridging that with the internet radio results in this. The numbers are also a construct for the same purpose, creating a numeric index similar to frequencies.

Not everyone prefers this and that's fine, there are many alternatives for everyone! :) Thanks for the feedback.

I think the problem is that people who don't have nostalgia for using real shortwave radios won't care/understand the interface, and people who DO ... will be actively annoyed by/won't understand the interface!

As a counterpoint, I really enjoyed the UI. I never really messed around with shortwave, but the UI really reminded me of the hyper-skeumorphic software that used to be more common. I didn't have an intuitive idea what all the buttons do, but the design encouraged just clicking around and experimenting to see what they do. I found it fun at least.

I did the same thing - thinking if I entered a radio frequency, it might find stations with that frequency, perhaps ordered by distance from my location. It would have been fun to see what another radio station with similar frequency to my local (or childhood) favorite, in another part of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com