Hacker News Reader

vladstudioon Jpegli: A new JPEG coding library

Thanks in advance!

If you use Raycast on Mac, you can create a custom script and use it to talk to LLM cli via Raycast interface:

https://gist.github.com/vladstudio/92efe283453f5f22d4606947b...

vladstudioon Loop: A free window manager for Mac

I tried them all: Magnet, Rectangle, Yabai, Raycast window management, maybe something else I forgot. I have no clue how I only learnt about Loop today. It seems to have a combination of features that works best for me personally:

- triggered by Globe key (both radial menu and shortcuts)

- radial menu below the cursor

- two arrows at the same time for different action

- properly visible preview.

I have high hopes to live happily ever after with Loop.

vladstudioon Stract: Open-souce, non-profit search engine

To make Stract usable for me (slightly reduced vision), I had to apply the following custom CSS:

``` html, body, div, td, th, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, b, i, strong, li, button { font-family: ui-sans-serif, sans-serif !important; webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; font-weight: 400; text-rendering: geometricPrecision; } ```

vladstudioon Show HN: Draw Fast – Real-time AI image generation based on drawings in a canvas

vladstudioon Show HN: ElectricSQL, Postgres to SQLite active-active sync for local-first apps

You might want to update the github star counter on your homepage :-) It said 333 during my visit, while on Github itself it's 1.3K already. Congrats!

vladstudioon Unpoly – The Htmx Alternative

There are a lot of mentions of HTMX in HN, but not Unpoly – which looks like a more powerful alternative. Did anyone try both? What are your impressions?

vladstudioon Ask HN: How do you feel about UX/UI design subscriptions?

thanks – yes, that's what I'm trying to figure out. What are the use cases for this kind of pricing.

"there are people for whom that makes sense" – I'm trying to find them, without much success so far :-)

vladstudioon Ask HN: What method do you use to send a link from smartphone to laptop?

chat with myself on telegram. they call it Saved messages.

vladstudioon Redesigned Google Fonts website

You could scroll through https://fonts.google.com/?preview.text=0&preview.text_type=c...

vladstudioon Kagi Small Web

Vlad, you're awesome! It's hard to tell to what extent it is actually beneficial for users or your company, but I feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing these kinds of things still happen in modern Internet.

vladstudioon Ask HN: What are some well-designed websites?

I guess people get awesome landing pages the same way they get any other pages :-)

* either build them in-house if there are skills;

* or buy a template and customise it;

* or hire a designer/developer/team to do it. The awesomeness of the result directly depends on clarity of requirements, I think.

As an example, I recently designed a website for BinaryNights [0], and we did use Linear.app as a starting reference, but during the discussions quickly shifted towards more minimalistic approach.

[0] https://binarynights.com/

vladstudioon Ask HN: What are some well-designed websites?

I should have said "objective", not "universal" probably. E.g. "Doesn't surprise me" will be different for different people.

vladstudioon Ask HN: What are some well-designed websites?

Aah, that's always a controversial question, on one hand, some universal rules of usability do exist, but on the other hand, everyone's habits, taste and use cases are very different.

The most neutral definition of a "well designed" website, without any further context, could be "created in a way that helps users achieve intended goals efficiently, while keeping max number of users happy about its look".

Again, different audiences will have very different answers. Here at HN, sites like https://www.mcmaster.com/ and https://www.craigslist.org win – because HN users appreciate old look and how efficient these sites are.

https://www.apple.com/ is an industry standard of a marketing site for consumer tech. It's not universally "well designed".

Other examples of well done marketing pages: https://www.sketch.com/ ; https://statamic.com/ ; https://linear.app/ got its share of hype recently.

Other times, a website is well designed because its content is awesome and is easy to consume. See https://ciechanow.ski/ and https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

Is https://github.com/ well designed? As an amateur developers, I'd say yes.

Is https://htmx.org/ well designed? Hmm, at a glance, there's no design at all. Is no design also design? That's a rabbit hole.

P.S. I often hear my website is well-designed :-)

vladstudioon Double Commander – Changes in version 1.1.0

If you're on Mac, you might also want to try Forklift – by coincidence, they just released major version 4 yesterday (for which I was lucky to develop some of UI).

https://binarynights.com/

vladstudioon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2023)

Location: Tbilisi, Georgia (not a state :-) )

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: (Skill, rather) UX/UI design, product design, html/css/tailwind code.

Résumé/CV: https://vlad.studio/resume

Email: vlad@vlad.studio

I've been working as a UX/UI/product designer in various forms for almost 20 years now. BTW I got multiple long-term projects from this comment on HN [0]. Safe to say my design skills are optimized for HN audience!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29723734#29724047

vladstudioon Front-end is harder than back-end

it seems appropriate to mention htmx ~ Essays: https://htmx.org/essays/

vladstudioon Ask HN: How do you manage email on a custom domain?

I found Zoho mail to work well for me.

vladstudioon Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems (2021)

if you're interested in the topic, a nice article was just published in Smashing Magazine about Oklch:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/08/oklch-color-spaces-...

vladstudioon UX design patterns for loading

For my customer's multi-step wizard [0], I tried to make inevitable waiting less boring by showing a random AI-related fact, such as:

In 2017, Saudi Arabia has given citizenship to the social humanoid robot Sophia. She became the first-ever robot to get citizenship of any country in the world.

[0] https://www.kadoa.com/playground

vladstudioon FFmpeg Explorer

I've seen multiple attempts to add GUI to FFMPEG. I think this is the best I've seen so far. Great job!

vladstudioon Sidebery – A Firefox extension for managing tabs and bookmarks in sidebar

if you don't ming me linking, I wrote a post about it on Orion feedback site: https://orionfeedback.org/d/2783-random-thoughts-on-arc-orio...

vladstudioon Sidebery – A Firefox extension for managing tabs and bookmarks in sidebar

More and more browsers have sidebar (vertical) tabs natively these days:

* Orion (mac only) - https://browser.kagi.com/

* Brave (mac, windows, linux) - https://brave.com/download/ (right click any tab and then Use vertical tabs)

* Arc (ugh) - https://arc.net

vladstudioon Show HN: Image Upscaler AI

Not an honest comparison, but Pixelmator Pro [0] has a similar "Super resolution" option when resizing images. (Among other great features, of course, being a full-featured photo editor)

http://pixelmator.com/

vladstudioon Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years

Can https://non.io/#all just become a part of https://non.io homepage? So that the marketing goes first, and #all goes after it.

vladstudioon Ask HN: Dev productivity tools you would pay for

Many of productivity tools I use are free (and not always related to dev, but as a side effect, increase my development productivity as well):

* a big monitor (switching from 13" to 27" definitely had an impact)

* https://www.raycast.com/ has the biggest impact to my productivity. So much good stuff there! Just one example is resizing windows with keyboard. Good old https://www.alfredapp.com/ is another option;

* https://devdocs.io/ to look up docs;

* https://www.tldraw.com/ for temporary sketches, wireframes, etc.

* while I'm here: in my experience, one-time purchase from https://serif.com/ is a great alternative to Creative Cloud.

vladstudioon Autocomplete – A JavaScript library for building autocomplete experiences

I feel I must mention that there exists a completely different approach to solving this problem, with HTMX or other "hypermedia" (let's keep all state on server) tools:

https://htmx.org/examples/active-search/

vladstudioon Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?

A year ago, I wrote a long reply to someone's post, sharing my thoughts about hiring design agency vs. freelancing designer (such as myself). I got two long-term customers who found this post and contacted me after that. Thanks HN!

vladstudioon Open source Background Remover: Remove Background from images and video using AI

I do realize it's not the same at all, but Pixelmator for Mac is a great little image editor that has "Remove background" and more AI-powered features, such as smart up-scaling.

https://www.pixelmator.com/

vladstudioon Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

My personal site – [0] – has been an incredible source of the emotional stability for more than 20 years. I publish my art there in the form of desktop wallpapers, and the positive feedback just never stops (knocking on wood).

Whenever I have a problem at work, or feel insecure, I say to myself – hey, at least people like my pictures!

[0] https://vlad.studio