Ask YC: What software makes you happy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128714

by kulkarnic • 18 years ago

12 65 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do you feel extremely happy when you use some particular software?

I'm trying to see if there's a pattern in software which makes users happier (not more efficient, etc.).

If there's an application/webapp that is particularly enjoyable to use, comment! Maybe there's a pattern we could uncover, replicate and make life better for everyone around! :)

xirium3• 18 years ago

The responsiveness of contemporary applications has vastly improved. Two examples would be Photoshop and Firefox.

Photoshop3 didn't have many features but it was the best application in its field. However, after using Photoshop4 for short period, you looked upon the previous version as clunky, even though you never noticed the shortfalls when using it. This cycle of improvement continued for the next two versions.

For web browsing, Mosiac1.0 was a fantastic program. When it was written, it was the best in its field. However, if you've used a modern web browser then it would only take about 10 minutes to make you entirely frustrated with Mosiac. Let's run through some of the features. A single, non-presistent connection to web server. Caching of previous pages in history only. No incremental rendering. Awful responsiveness, especially when using multiple windows. No scripting. No tables. No background images. No font styling. No text alignment. And on very early versions: no forms. It also crashed frequently. Regardless, it was an absolutely fantastic program which made impossible tasks trivial and saved lifetimes of effort.

Important aspects that make me happy in decreasing priority: make it open source; make one task trivial; make it crash less; make it more responsive; make the repetitive parts of interaction take decreasing amounts of subjective time.

kulkarnic6• 18 years ago

Echo the last part. Dependability and responsiveness are absolutely top-importance! In fact, I feel that what's more important than responsiveness is a uniform response time. Nothing puts me off more than a file-copy among the same teo disks taking 10s one day and 2 min on the next (for the same filesize).

Of course that could be just me! :)

rms7• 18 years ago

In games, I always found the design of the Diablo series interesting. Every action and click is designed to have some kind of reward. So clicking on a jewel or sword in your inventory makes a pleasant sound. Killing enemies is even better.

kulkarnic6• 18 years ago

Hey, now as I think about it, games are the sort of thing that have taken UI expertise seriously, while ignoring all the UI experts (and their arbitrary heuristic rules!). And it's led to some very enjoyable applications!

jcromartie2• 18 years ago

That principle is what game designers call a "juicy" experience. It is, more precisely, when every action results in an large amount of feedback (animation, sound, particle explosion, etc.).

Hexstream• 18 years ago

Diablo gets repetitive and pointless real fast...

rms7• 18 years ago

I used news.yc to make someone happy the other day. There was a new user that didn't understand why he was getting downmodded so I told him the reason. It seemed like karma really meant a lot to him so I upvoted all of his stories and current comments, giving him an extra 20 karma points. In an economy with infinite karma, I didn't think it was a big deal to arbitrarily give him more. I think he was joking a little when he said it "made his month" but hopefully I made him smile.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125233

Paul Graham told me via email that up and downarrows aren't for arbitrary karma operations and then a couple days later he took away my ability to vote on any comment or story. I upvoted this story to 4 but it didn't count because I can't vote anymore. I find the whole scenario somewhat bizarre.

xirium3• 18 years ago

The foo is strong in user NSX2 but that grasshopper has a long path to travel.

rms7• 18 years ago

I hope he sticks around. In communities like this some contrarians are a good thing.

(I upvoted you but it didn't count)

yters2• 18 years ago

Huh, the community here is changing if people are getting downmodded for long posts.

rms7• 18 years ago

They weren't long posts in the style of nostrademons, they were more stream of consciousness style.

DanielBMarkham3• 18 years ago

rms -- that's truly ironic. The commenter broke unwritten rules so you helped him out with advice. Then you gave him a bunch of karma, in the process also breaking unwritten rules and getting busted.

And before pg says "it's in writing somewhere" -- the system shouldn't require people poking around the blog to figure out what will work or not.

The whole karma thing gives me a headache. It's supposed to be for good articles, except in the case where you use it to agree or disagree, unless you disagree and you don't have enough karma, unless you use it too much, in which case...

Ugh. It's like by insisting that it's a simple up and down arrow we've made the whole thing much more complicated than it needs to be. But hey! It looks simple on the page! I guess that's something.

rms7• 18 years ago

Upvoted!

ghiotion3• 18 years ago

> the system shouldn't require people poking around the blog to figure out what will work or not.

I don't agree with that. The Internet has allowed way to many folk's inner Id (i.e. Id, Ego, Superego) to run a muck. They see some snippet of something or other that offends their delicate sensibilities and they go apeshit in the comments. HN is based on what should be a simple idea: don't say anything in the comments that you wouldn't be willing to say to someone in person. There are variants on this theme: be thoughtful, don't be abrasive, [perhaps] keep your politics to yourself, etc. If someone gets riposted for their comments they ought to ask themselves, what am I doing wrong? Not, what's wrong with the community. If they're incapable of doing that, they probably don't belong here in the first place.

pg2• 18 years ago

What you don't mention was (a) this wasn't the first time you'd done this, and (b) that before turning off voting for your account, I tried sending you an email asking you to stop, and you replied basically telling me to fuck off.

rms7• 18 years ago

a) Yes, there were one or two other users that I have karma upbombed. I did it in compensation for comments they made that had gotten to extremely low negative levels. You've previously emailed me several times to stop responding to dead comments and once telling me you killed a comment that suggested using another comment as an impromptu poll. With that email, you said the only reason you didn't ban me from the site was because it was a borderline case.

b) Your email to me was harsh. My response was "Sometimes I think you take yourself too seriously" which was meant not as "fuck you" but "have a sense of humor about up and downarrows."

ingenium• 18 years ago

Paul, the thing is, you ARE too full of yourself. At the YC interview, when we went around the table and shook hands it went "Hi, I'm Jessica. I'm Trevor. I'm Robert." And then you just smiled, because of course you were Paul. We were just supposed to KNOW who you were....

Taking away rms's voting rights isn't about improving the discourse of this site. It's about your own sense of self superiority.

kul• 18 years ago

campaign monitor makes me happy

aneesh• 18 years ago

I'm a big fan of the 37signals software. Also Jott; Jott makes me feel productive, which makes me happy.

asenchi• 18 years ago

OpenBSD

kulkarnic6• 18 years ago

A lot of the comments here are really eloquent in their brevity! Still, it'd be great if you could say which aspect of the software tool makes you most happy. I know, thoroughly subjective, not statistically projectable, but interesting nonetheless.

jcromartie2• 18 years ago

Honestly Reddit makes me happy because of one simple fact: you write comments in plain text using Markdown.

If every site did this the world would be a better place.

vixen99• 18 years ago

How about something not seen until fairly recently? The reply button. In the UK for instance, there is hardly a single newspaper or online magazine that provides this in their 'respond to article' facility. You can post a comment but without a reply button no one can specifically challenge that non-sequitur or unsupported abuse you've churned out. They can do it indirectly by naming you but who's going to take the trouble to refer back? Where implemented, I'm sure this facility has had a positive effect on the way people treat each other on the net.

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

http://www.shatters.net/celestia is a favorite of mine.

kulkarnic6• 18 years ago

wow!

edw519• 18 years ago

hacker news, craigslist, and google maps, especially hacker news

During long and lonely coding sessions, they remind me that I am not alone.

brlewis• 18 years ago

Pictures of my wife and kids make me very happy. I like my wifi photo frame, and I also like piclens. In conjunction with ourdoings.com, of course.

gahahaha• 18 years ago

There is other software than Emacs? Interesting...

pistoriusp2• 18 years ago

I don't really think it's possible for software to make people happier without making us more efficient. When a previously complicated task has been simplified or improved it generally makes people happier to use it than an alternative.

I tried but couldn't think of any software that I use which made me happier and was less efficient than something else.

kulkarnic6• 18 years ago

Sorry. My bad. I should have said not necessarily more efficient!

@pistoiusp: Any that makes you more efficient + happier (not just more efficient)?

pistoriusp2• 18 years ago

OS X, Textmate, Safari and VLC.

niels• 18 years ago

Gmail. There are many great features that combined with ease of use, makes this a killer app for me.

tjr2• 18 years ago

Infocom.

Most especially, the ambassador from Blow'k-bibben-gordo in Planetfall.

mixmax• 18 years ago

3d studio max

I relax by building stuff in 3ds max. Much cheaper than building stuff in the real world, and almost as fun. Currently I'm building a yacht. I am even thinking of actually building it for real when I finish.

german• 18 years ago

It's an interesting question, I could say Gmail or Twitter but it only makes me happy when I receive an interesting Email or IM, so in that case is not a bout the software but the people.

The only software that makes me happier are music players (Exaile, Amarok, etc) because they let me hear the music that I love in my PC.

eol_of_urnst• 18 years ago

Scrivener :-)

pinecone• 18 years ago

GNU Emacs =)

Flemlord• 18 years ago

Microsoft Word 2007. I love the tab strips and the new formatting options. My documents look beautiful.

brent• 18 years ago

latex, gvim, firefox, matlab, R.

musiciangames• 18 years ago

At the moment Squeak Smalltalk is making me pretty happy. I've worked on a project on and off that was in Java, and decided that development in Java was never going to be fast enough to keep up with what I need to do.

So I invested some time in learning Squeak, and now I'm starting to get it the productivity is rising sharply. And as it's relatively such a joy to program, I find I'm putting in much more solid hours as well.

abstractbill• 18 years ago

Happy isn't quite the right word... I feel comfortable when I'm using Emacs. And very uncomfortable editing text with anything else.

LogicHoleFlaw• 18 years ago

vim makes me happy when it becomes an extension of my fingers, and allows me to manipulate text like a musical instrument lets me manipulate notes.

The macro programming software for my PC gamepad makes me happy because it makes playing certain games effortless. I don't worry about the interface. I just do. The software gets out of my way.

My favorite online computer game, Final Fantasy XI, make me happy, but in a different way. It is the social aspects which keeps me coming back every time. A more cynical person would say it is the Skinner box effect, but I'm not that jaded yet.

newt0311• 18 years ago

Python.

suboptimal• 18 years ago

vim has my vote. It's my "killer app" for notes, fitness log, recipes, etc. It's also my favorite IDE, together with Firefox/bug.

utx002• 18 years ago

i don't know about extremely happy but i love using fogbugz ... and emacs

spydez• 18 years ago

The BugMeNot addon for Firefox is one for me. I can get around stupid required registrations for sites like NYT.

The other thing that made me happy was when I wrote up a bunch of bash/python scripts to make my day easier at work.

See a theme? Yes, I'm lazy.

Also, Fullscreen Homestar Runner addon for Firefox. Required for happy viewing of H*R if you use your HD TV as you monitor.

kingnothing• 18 years ago

Ruby makes me happy. Its code is succinct and beautiful.

Hexayurt• 18 years ago

Omnigraffle on OS X. It's software to change platforms for.

delano• 18 years ago

Winamp 2

tjr2• 18 years ago

Anything that's certified as 100% Pure Java.

utx002• 18 years ago

good one :)

kulkarnic6• 18 years ago

The number and breadth of comments here not just speak about how much software affects us emotionally; but also of the diversity of this community as a whole. Most interestingly, they do seem to have a pattern in them. I want to explore this further, and so have created a form which you could fill out. Go here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pSljT7jP3pc-ef3p...

Your feedback will be appreciated (and conclusions shared at news.yc, of course). Thanks!

Ask YC: What software makes you happy?

Related Stories