Comment by sdflhasjd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdflhasjd | Hacker News Reader

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I actually think their UI is too form over function. One particular annoyance I had recently was with the DNS zone editor.

It truncates both the record contents and the domain name, which means that if you've got a bunch of long domains with TXT records, telling them apart means copying the contents into a text editor to see the truncated text.

e.g

  somekey._dkim.subdomaina.domain.com     k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA
  somekey._dkim.subdomainb.domain.com     k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfBBBB
  somekey._dkim.subdomainc.domain.com     k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA

getting truncated down to

  somekey._dkim.subdo...     k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
  somekey._dkim.subdo...     k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
  somekey._dkim.subdo...     k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...

Compared to AWS, which is visually unappealing, but I can actually see my DNS records....

I agree. I think their UI is actually a little too creative at times. It has lots of whitespace and a single color and that means people will say "clean", "minimal", "modern", "artsy fartsy".

But I agree, that with something that coins itself "the developer cloud" it should provide critical information first. It is ok to kill some whitespace or put some monospaced fonts in there. You aren't trying to sell me an iPhone, I am trying to manage a server.

Route53 on AWS is what I have been using for domain management and I like it because it doesn't mess around with cute UIs. It is strictly function. Instead of form fields for each TTL line and host line like other sites do, you just get a big multi-line text box and you use spaces and line breaks (gasp) to create your dns listings.

I actually like their UI - I think Azure or AWS looks fairly scary to me, someone not that familiar with cloud architecture.

I agree, but I seem to recall creating/editing records much easier than Route53... particularly with the console redesign.

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