"Gravity is worth asking about."

nnozzlegear 6 days ago 23 commentsRead Article on unsung.aresluna.org

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Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

matusp•about 2 hours ago

The minimalist approach is great until it isn't. You can cover 98% of use cases with a single button is a great motto, until you are in the other 2%. I often fail to find basic functionality in software today, because some smart product manager decided that nobody really needs it. For example, it is now often impossible to load all elements from a list and filter/sort it along basic properties.

dwattttt•16 minutes ago

Does it satisfy 98% of users always? Or does it satisfy each user 98% of the time?

eviks•44 minutes ago

> This is why it’s important to hire and recognize people who will understand that those limitations have to be imposed arbitrarily

Better get the folks that recognize users exist and are different, so instead of arbitrary mistakes UI should be tailored to a user.

Case in point:

> five options I have to choose from, every time, even if I never touch four of them:

So the way out is to allow you to remove those 4 rather than arbitrarily stop at 3 where you don't need 2 instead of 4?

zahlman•18 minutes ago

I don't understand what the title has to do with the content.

jasode•4 minutes ago

The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".

It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.

So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code has gravity.

SCdF•12 minutes ago

Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.

Oarch•11 minutes ago

It might be the term "financial gravity" I've seen used sometimes. That makes sense in this context.

nizmow•8 minutes ago

The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.

graemep•7 minutes ago

I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"

dwroberts•10 minutes ago

They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean

> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.

I assume this is just LLM nonsense?

Michelangelo11•about 2 hours ago

This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.

thomassmith65•about 2 hours ago

This reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package":

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

vnorilo•about 1 hour ago

Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.

danangReader•about 1 hour ago

Fyi this article is not about gravity.

ymolodtsov•about 1 hour ago

The same people who want minimalism here in the comments are angry at Microsoft for removing half the features in any control panel inside Windows with every release.

Shows how difficult it is to design and build software at scale.

jonplackett•25 minutes ago

The worst thing about Apple AppStore ads is they create a who-can-pay-more rises to the top situation, where previously it was more based on merit.

And In order to make an ad campaign make financial sense, you MUST have a subscription app. Because just getting one download will cost you at least $3 which is already over the cost an app used to cost.

and your conversion rate to paid might be only 10 or 20:1. So you need to make $30 per customer

So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.

realusername•21 minutes ago

> So as well as being annoying at the moment of seeing them, ads in the AppStore are directly contributing to the general enshitification of apps.

You can even cut the word "apps" from the analysis here, the appstore just gets most of its money from games which are pretty much slot machines.

That's exactly why every time they promote the appstore somewhere, they put a productivity app as an example, they would like to avoid to be classified with gambling regulations, which is essentially what they are.

alex-moon•about 2 hours ago

I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.

jdub•about 2 hours ago

That's part of the philosophical change that led to GNOME 2.0

https://ometer.com/preferences.html

VorpalWay•about 1 hour ago

And yet, KDE Plasma is so more usable than Gnome these days, because they swung too far into removing settings. You needed to install a separate Gnome Tweak tool to even be able to change font antialiasing settings last I looked, which is preposterous. I get literal headaches from the defaults.

JoshTriplett•about 1 hour ago

Yup. GNOME 2.0 was a little rough because they swung far enough the other way, but it was still a huge improvement to remove all the "unbreak me" obvious preferences that only had one sensible answer. A few versions later, it was a delight to use.

willtemperley•about 1 hour ago

GNOME 2 was lovely.

Then GNOME 3 came and I switched to Mac.

applfanboysbgon•about 2 hours ago

And yet, VSCode has ~70% developer share, largely because it can be everything to everyone, but no more than what you personally need. Just put a search bar in your preferences dialogue, it ain't that hard.