Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at Apple (@jasonyuandesign). A lot of the comments currently seem to miss this and are focusing on immediate feasibility, “successful” design, or ability to deploy irl. That is not the point here. Things like this are both creative exposition, as well as corner stones for conversations for the rest of the community.
I get a lot of value from HN, but technocratic communities often fail to understand the value of reimagining everyday things.
They sometimes get so caught up in the technical bits and pieces they don't like about something you end up with responses like those you in this discussion, or HN's reaction to Dropbox, or Shallots Slashdot's reaction to the iPod.
Yeah, this whole thread is why Hacker News has the "orangesite" reputation it does. I wouldn't have shared anything like this on here, and that is a criticism of HN, not projects like Mercury OS.
I thought this was an interesting project. The site is well-designed. The UI is attractive. As a designer, I really enjoy reading about these things. The fact that this isn't something you'd build your personally customized Linux distro on is not a problem for me. (And no, I don't know the designer or any of his friends. I think the challenge the guy took on was interesting, and I liked reading about it.)
I like HN because of what people share here, but I've never liked the community itself, and this thread is a pretty clear example of why.
No, I said the OS didn't look like something you'd use for heavy-duty development work.
I was being a little sarcastic, but I was just amazed at all the people who spent ten seconds looking at this and said "this is useless, it clearly wouldn't be very good for all the extremely complicated powerful things I want to do. Can it handle fifteen different terminal windows? Fail!!1"
The interesting thing to me is that a compromise is totally feasible and doesn’t need its own OS to accomplish. Let me save a “workflow”.
What is a workflow? A collection of apps, all with their internal states saved, and their positions saved on the screen. Let me close my current flow and open a new flow, with as little friction as possible. I could have an “email” flow in the morning, a “repo 1” flow after that, a “repo 2” flow, (and repo 1+2 etc) a documentation/paper reading flow, and on and on. A few macros can probably accomplish this. Maybe it already exists?
On a more fundamental level the authors are totally right about the debilitating distractions of apps and their damn notifications. But you’d need OS-level control to address that.
That's all non obvious. As far as I can tell this was just as serious as any of the other, 'this is the future', post. See the recent humane keynote for example, and the vergecast's reaction to it.
That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
It is well known issue in products that require serious 'design' for human interactions that tech nerds are useless as target audience samples.
In gamedev there are 2 groups of people first is 'game designers' or 'creative direction' and second is - 'tech people'. Best games for wide audience happen when 1st completely ignore 2nd on what needs to be done... And 2nd completely ignore 1st on how invisible bits have to implement it. Often 1st can not iterate properly without code changes on every step and it kills best ideas. I have seen a lot of success when design iterations can be done in no code or very low code environment.
It's worth discussing implementation feasibility of product designs. While I think a modern Canon Cat would be awesome, there are reasons why such a device doesn't exist.
For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.
The ability of deployment of an operating (observe the word!) system is paramount and it IS the point here!
Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties.
Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile.
We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!
I'm going to disagree with you here. Concepts have their place in the world, one cannot just have pragmatic ideas in a society, nor can you just have idealistic ideas, there must be a balance, they both feed each other.
While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix.
Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later.
We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit.
Being corner stones for conversations means that people are going to talk about things that matters to them, like usability or ability to deploy. These are good things! That's what design studies are supposed to do!
I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.
I don’t know how to feel about a promising designer only spending 2ish years with ADT and bolting. Perhaps if this work is paired with a personality of similar righteousness, that could be a team issue - otherwise to have someone attempt to do great things and see them immediately (in the relative product roadmap sense) leave, is troubling from the outside.
Was also about to reply with the Superlight recommendation. Cannot stand the lag of bluetooth mice and was working my way through various mice over the years, usually trying at least 5-10 alts per year. Have not bought another mouse since the Superlight. Other Logitech mice (gaming and otherwise) eventually failed in one way or another. Not only is the Superlight a superior experience — it performs just as well today as it did 1.5 years ago when I got it. Wish the dongle and charging port were USB-C and that the Logitech SW wasn't the hot garbage that it is (I eventually settled on using a spare machine to update its config bc I won't have that SW on my daily) but from the perspective of the actual mouse itself, it's amazing.
As a user of this app and long-time admirer of the developer behind it (co-creator of the fantastic Paper drawing app for iPad), maybe it would help the conversation if I illustrate my daily encounter with this UI.
I’ve been trying to limit the days on which I eat unhealthy foods to Fridays and Saturdays (yay, it’s Friday!). I’m good at sticking to plans like that without help from an app, but when I gave “Habits” a quick spin, I admired its mission to provide a playful, game-like alternative in the sea of habit tracking apps.
Once a day (except Fri & Sat) it sends me a notification. Tapping it launches the app straight to that “checkbox”.
While the description in the post may make it seem like this is too long of an interaction, I promise you that it really isn’t, and that the haptics and animation are indeed a satisfying experience. So satisfying in fact that I stuck with the app even though I’m certain I’d follow through on my challenge without it.
(That certainty, btw, comes from how I personally have set up habits like this for over a decade, with help from a mental trick somewhat adjacent to a mind palace/loci[1] to track and reward follow-through. I bring this up because I have often thought that it might be possible to bring the power of these rewarding mental models to a broader audience via an app. And to some extent that’s what Habit accomplishes via its unique approach. The haptics and emotional resonance of the “checkbox” are a little Pavlovian mental & sensory reward for completing one’s goal. And they lead the user to a playful/gamified representation of their progress through their habit, in the form of a small, abstract 3D scene that gradually builds as you continue sticking to your goal. If I’m in a rush, I ignore that scene. But I always enjoy tapping the notification and checking off the day’s accomplishment.)
As a designer, I could maybe quibble over details of the interaction or visual style (which is customizable btw via a season of themes — another unique component) but as a a user I’m simply excited to have this app as part of my routine, thankful that someone is daring a different approach to app design, and curious to see if there will be more apps that might introduce a wider audience to the mental hacks I’ve found useful for a long time.
If you’ve read this far, I’d encourage you to check out some of the other posts on Andy.works, incl. a great retrospective on Paper’s creation[2], as well as background on the developer’s philosophy behind the “Not Boring” suite of apps[3]. Lastly, here’s the App Store link if you want to give the interaction a try (I promise I have no affiliation): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/not-boring-habits/id1593891243
This is great, Alex! I didn't write about it in this article, but much of the app is based on leading behavioral science advice for building new habits. It's great to hear stories like yours to show that something that looks and feels great can also work really well too. — Andy
I think the press release is lacking in detail. For example, they completely fail to disclose whether recovery was attempted by rerouting power from life support to the structural integrity field.
I believe a geomagnetic storm calls for rerouting power to the subspace accelerators backing your deflector dish, and of course sufficient impulse power to maintain an appropriate heading, not rerouting to the SIF. Please get your spaceship right. It's a technical forum!
Sorry, was assuming SpaceX had quantum slipstream already. But it appears I was mistaken. In the case of a slipstream drive, integrity for entry and exit of the slipstream would be paramount. But if they’re still using warp, then your comment of course is accurate.
Impulse, by the way, is covered by the press release [1] and, I agree, would need to be a priority no matter which FTL drive is used to get the satellites to their final destination.
[1] > The Starlink team commanded the satellites into a safe-mode where they would fly edge-on (like a sheet of paper) to minimize drag—to effectively “take cover from the storm”
Presumably the cars driving on the intersecting lane of travel could very well be in the aforementioned higher energy state when an accident during a rolling stop occurs.
> Tesla will perform an over-the-air software update that disables the "rolling stop" functionality, NHTSA said.
I was perplexed by the wording as well. Apparently software updates can be labeled recalls now? Did someone inform Microsoft, maybe this would help Windows 11 adoption.
Xcode saves keybindings in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/UserData/KeyBindings
I have neither experienced arbitrary resets across updates, nor have I had issues moving my custom .idekeybindings from that folder to new clean installs and finding my shortcuts intact. Maybe the update issue occurs when using the default bindings set and a change of functionality intersects with your customizations? Might be helpful to create an alternate set and go from there. Then, when updates roll in, it should be easy to track down new conflicts in Xcode's preferences via the Conflicts filter.
Not sure what else might be causing it, sorry, but thought I'd point you to the folder anyway.
I've used all gens and recently tried G3 for the first time. I instantly noticed that the bass was significantly better than the Pros. It's been a while since I've listened to G1/G2 but from memory I would easily place G3 above all of them in terms of bass. It wasn't enough to persuade me to get some because I love the noise cancellation on the Pros and would rather wait for their update. But I was tempted, in part due to the bass.
Interestingly, this approach seems to be gaining more traction in Germany specifically. One of the larger newspapers, Die Zeit, applies it for the free tier of its website. There’s a big annoying modal when you go to zeit.de if you want to see that approach in practice. Hilariously the choice I make in that modal never seems to stick. Maybe there’s a separate GDPR-compliant toggle somewhere to allow them to track that I want to be tracked ha!
