mtm7

This is one of the most refreshing designs I've seen in months. It's absolutely beautiful. I'd be interested in a Mac version.

I don't know anything about the engineering behind an email client, so I'm curious about the security aspect – would my emails ever touch your server?

Side note: you could post this on Dribbble if you want more beta users.

I commend your effort. Humanity likely would've progressed more from the application of this data than it would with you working on leveraging autonomous blockchains (not that that's a bad gig either).

I think the general takeaway is:

1. have an idea 2. make some mockups with plain HTML/CSS 3. run it past your target market to see if they'll pay for it 4. if so, build it

This works even better if your target market is willing to fund the development costs.

I still feel like there's an idea somewhere in here – maybe with medicine, or maybe with supplements, nutrition, etc. You could position yourself as a knowledge base and use the data as a marketing funnel for related products. Examine.com has an interesting business model along these lines. (If I was about to start an anti-anxiety medication, I'd sure as hell pay to know which one worked best.)

Nice work. I like the design, and the names you generate are better than others I've seen on similar sites.

Question – why is "anrdoezrs.net" prepended to all of the buy links? (I'm assuming it's an affiliate link?) I use an extension (uBlock Origin) that flags it.

I remember a story about an electronic musician who preferred to mix his songs with earbuds/headphones instead of with a high-end megabucks studio sound system. His reasoning was basically, “that’s how my fans will listen to my music, so I need to make sure it sounds good to them.”

I can’t remember who it was, but the idea always stuck with me.

Anyway, I agree that we should test our applications with the same hardware (and internet speed) of our average user. Very few people use a computer as good as a software engineer’s. :)

Author here – the majority of developers in the 2019 State of JavaScript [0] said that they didn't know Svelte but wanted to try it out. I was the same way, so I spent the weekend learning it, and I put together a few basic examples to show you how it works.

I'm interested to know if anyone has used Svelte for a larger production application. If so, what are your thoughts?

[0]: https://2019.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/svelte/

I appreciate this analysis and agree with some of the points, although I have to add: for any interface that I use daily (such as a file management system), I prefer the modern version — flat design and all.

I don’t want heavy borders to show that something can be resized (just show me a different cursor when I hover), or column titles styled like buttons, or an always-visible scrollbar (I rarely need to know a “vague” measurement of files in a folder). To me, this just makes an interface more confusing.

Although I’ve been spoiled by Mac over the last few years, so maybe this argument is more about Windows.

This also applies to features. Easy example: if you’re implementing commenting on a social media app, you could use a textarea instead of embedding a rich text editor. The simpler option usually decreases your overhead and helps keep your product easier to use, easier to explain to potential customers, easier to develop...

It’s easy to keep adding stuff (especially if your customers are requesting it) but you should evaluate if it’s truly necessary.

Scientist: “I’ve created [new medicine]!”

Manager: “Perfect. Let’s sell it!”

Scientist: “Well, we’ll need to test it first. We should run some trials —“

Manager: “We definitely need to test more often! But I already agreed to have it out by next Tuesday, so maybe we can just release it and aim for more testing next time.”

I know the “safe” decision in a boardroom is to suggest whatever makes the numbers go up, but this post is right. People push it too far and damage their products in the process.

Examples: I no longer click on Quora in search results. I’ve stopped using Reddit on mobile. I used to love Imgur, but now I hesitate because they force you to run 1MB+ of React and download 553 resources for a subpar experience of viewing a single image [0].

I understand that these are businesses and the lights must be kept on, but certainly there are better ways to do this. Maybe a more humane strategy wouldn’t be as profitable in the short term, but it would certainly be better for building a sustainable business that actually lasts.

[0]: https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try.

I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don't want to turn this into an editor debate, though. Just a personal example.)

If you would've asked me a month ago, I would've said that engineers cared too much about making things performant to the millisecond. Now, I would say that many of them don't care enough. I want every application to be this responsive.

I never realized how wasteful web tech was until I stopped using it. And I guess you could say the same for a lot of websites – we bloat everything with node_modules and unnecessary CSS and lose track of helping our users accomplish their goals.

Ah, I stand corrected. The content box width is indeed based on the viewport size. My text, however, is still rendered in 14px Courier on macOS (and even given a .monospace class), so I'm not sure what's going on there.

I just updated to Chrome 79 and now the distilled mode is gone. For anyone who's looking on how to re-enable it, here's a thread: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/22576539

I can confirm that it's still loaded by an experimental flag. As a word of warning to anyone who wants to try it: the design isn't suited for reading at length (120 character line width, set in Courier). It's really not that great.

Firefox and Safari have decent reading modes, though.

Yes, that's correct. The author is fairly active in the indie maker community, so maybe he pulled on his network?

I’ve been using this extension for a couple weeks and it does everything I want it to. My favorite/most-used feature is the customizable font and background colors. I’m glad you give your users granular control.

Btw, you’re on the front page of HN :)

There’s some negativity in this comment section, so I just wanted to say that I really like your product.

I’m glad you’re working on making it sustainable before spending more time on the open source version.

I’m impressed with this system, but I’m even more impressed with the author’s writing style. I’d love to see more technical posts written with this level of clarity.