Hacker News Reader

I think its a bit interesting that everyone is criticizing the "instant typing" when in the original presentation they almost immediately said that they were going to have the option to turn it off. It seems a neat feature but its not exactly deal breaking to just remove it.

View on HN

Agreed. It is currently there in Preview, but they stated immediately they'd offer a method to disable it.

This is fair. But much of the value of good software design is sensible defaults. If you need to twiddle 8 different inscrutable, independent knobs to just the right settings in order to make a default installation usable, that's not a good user experience. Most users will simply give up when faced with that level of UI hostility, which is hardly good for business.

I'm going to make a prediction that the default will become "not live typing", and the feature will disappear altogether later.

(And yes, a thousand times yes, sensible defaults. But even more than that, as few preferences/options as possible. I would much prefer people make a design choice, than no design choice.)

How about they start with telling you that it's turned on? I don't see anything in the web interface that tells me that others can also see my live typing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com