Hacker News Reader

dporanon Q&A about the Windows Start Menu and Taskbar

Thanks! The Internet Archive Software Collection sounds like a great resource. I'm going to check it out.

dporanon Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

Thanks for the suggestion!

Here it is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33794018

dporanon Q&A about the Windows Start Menu and Taskbar

An HN post yesterday [1] reminded me of this Q&A that I did last year.

(Thanks to HN user DoingIsLearning for suggesting a separate submission.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33760814

dporanon Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

I created the Start Menu and Taskbar, and I did intend for them to be at the top of the screen.

http://blogs.harvard.edu/danieloran/2022/11/28/qa-about-the-...

dporanon In Defense Of The Stylus

Real, shipping stylus-based computers -- not just mockups or concepts like Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook -- go back to at least the late 1980s, with the GRiDPAD:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/188223/the_long_fail_a_brief_...

Maybe the lack of success has been due to poor implementation, but I wonder whether styluses are just inherently problematic:

1. Truly reliable handwriting recognition always seems to be just over the horizon, and I wonder whether it always will be. Honestly, I often can't read my own handwriting. Sure, you can store handwriting as "ink," aka a bitmap, but that's like choosing a fax as your file format.

2. Switching from stylus to finger to (possibly) keyboard is awkward. You need someplace to put the stylus, and it makes one-handed operation pretty difficult.

That said, I actually think I'd enjoy having a stylus for input sometimes. I hope that someone eventually figures out how to put all the pieces together. (Too bad that Microsoft Courier didn't make it.)

dporanon Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs

  Steve Jobs played a minor role in Apple’s early success with the Apple II

I disagree. Here's what Isaacson writes (p. 73):

If it had not been for Jobs, [Wozniak] might still be handing out schematics of his boards for free at the back of Homebrew meetings. It was Jobs who had turned his ingenious designs into a budding business, just as he had with the Blue Box . . . . To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak's awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs's role.

For all of his foibles, Jobs was the quintessential founder, relentlessly pushing the business forward -- recruiting great team members, signing up investors, and polishing the product for a mass audience.

dporanon Brin on Yegge's post: "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages"

Battelle asked about the highly critical memo from a Google engineer that was mistakenly made public. . . . Brin was less diplomatic about the memo. "I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so," he said. "If you want to get a point across, limit it to a paragraph or so."

Considering that Yegge seemed to make a compelling case, that peremptory response doesn't reflect well on the Google executive team.

dporanon Matias Duarte on the philosophy of Ice Cream Sandwich

What an engagingly written interview with a thoughtful designer. Two points stand out:

1. Unlike Apple, which apparently eschews formal user research, Google relied on "ethnographic research" to shape Android 4.0.

2. In between Apple's hyper-realistic UI and Microsoft's Spartan aesthetic, Google is trying to find a middle ground in Android 4.0 that facilitates new approaches and new experiences.

From the screenshots alone, it's hard to tell what it actually will be like to use Android 4.0. But it's great to see that Google is thinking so deeply about user experience.

dporanon The Man Who Inspired Jobs

From Tom Hughes, who was design director for the Macintosh project, here's more about the meeting between Land and Jobs:

[A]ll serendipity for Sculley who was just along for the ride. He just happened to luck out. And, there was no pilgrimage… no planned meeting with Dr. Land. I was working for Steve as Design Director for the Macintosh project and we were in Boston and I asked Steve if he’d like to meet Dr. Land, whom I had worked with before Apple. I called Dr. Land and he agreed to meet Steve. We arrived to find a BBC documentary film crew there. Dr. Land excused them and we began a 3 hour visit which included a glimpse into color experiments that were in his lab, to his personal office and an amazing review of some of his personal collection of photographs. The memorable part of this was that Steve was meeting someone who legitimately could be, almost uniquely, a mentor for him. And, clearly, they shared an awareness of the importance of good design as it contributed not only to their products, but to their corporate culture as well.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2666-the-story-of-polaroid-in...

dporanon Asking for accessibility gets you nothing but grief.

Hats off to Microsoft's Greg Lowney, who, in the early '90s -- working pretty much by himself -- pioneered this corporate focus on accessibility. A great example of intrapreneurship within a big company.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1998/10-22lowney...

dporanon Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple

This announcement only makes more poignant what he said in that speech:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

dporanon I am nothing

What a wonderfully thought-provoking and inspiring piece. Thanks, Paul, for sharing it.

In a similar vein, from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College:

"If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.... Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

dporanon Airbnb Nightmare: No End In Sight

But PR isn't about logic -- it's about storytelling. And if Airbnb isn't careful, the arc of the narrative here could seriously harm their business.

I agree with edw519: Airbnb needs to do something dramatic -- whatever it takes to transform EJ from a neglected victim of an unfeeling corporation to a hardy survivor who has moved on, thanks to Airbnb's caring and magnanimous support.

dporanon Why you shouldn't start a startup

"You're a visionary product guy? You'll spend your time chasing money, customers, users, employees, facing No's."

How true!

dporanon Poll: Should HN display comment scores?

Making it easier to spot popular comments -- without showing comment scores -- would be helpful. But instead of drawing attention to the HN username, why not emphasize the comment itself, with a change of font weight and/or color? So just as downvoted comments now fade to gray, maybe the most highly rated ones should somehow stand out.

dporanon Osama bin Laden Is Dead

Yes, apparently it's a common practice:

http://www.slate.com/id/2226505/

dporanon Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

The journalist A.J. Liebling said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

I guess the corollary here is, "If you don't own the server, you don't own the file."

Maybe this is why Richard Stallman calls cloud computing "careless computing."

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

A new version -- hot off the servers -- now shows all of the classic HN info: points, poster, time, and comments. And there's also a "Loading..." message.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's fun to do same-day development.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

Iframes are everywhere, but usually in places where it's hard to notice them, e.g., in ads.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

Alas, some sites do bust out of frames. I understand their reasons, but it does make things more complicated for a design like this one.

By the way, when a site does bust out of hnvue, I've noticed that the page can get into a weird state. Closing the browser window (or tab) and reopening hnvue is probably the best solution at the moment.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

All good ideas. Re showing comments without the HN navbar: that would involve some more complex screen scraping, but I agree that it would be nice to maximize the space for the most interesting info.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

Definitely a possibility. This is the minimal viable prototype! I'll have to think bigger for version 0.00002. :-)

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

Re the theme: I just used one of the Dojo defaults. It's easy to swap them.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

Very impressed by Dojo. It's amazing how you can do almost everything declaratively -- via markup. That makes it easy to put together simple UIs like this one.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

I'm going to use it myself, so I'll leave it up and try to enhance it.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

The score would be a handy addition. That's not part of the RSS feed, but I'm using YQL to screen scrape anyway, so it wouldn't be hard to add.

I'm curious to hear how hnvue works over a few days.

dporanon Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

I have mixed feelings about frames, too. In this case, I think the benefits of seeing everything at once might outweigh the drawbacks. (It's all Dojo JavaScript, by the way. No actual HTML frames were involved in the making of this product!)