gmurphy

This is lovely - I used to use YouTube recordings of Yamanote line trips as a way to fall asleep.

As a small bit of feedback - from the sleep perspective, the melodies and door chimes seem quite loud and frequent - would love an even more "backgroundy" version where the ambient travel sections are longer, and those chimes and melodies are quieter. Perhaps even with masking of human noises.

At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.

You are looking for the wrong badge.

We did a lot of experimentation with keyboards in Android - finding better ways to type and click is pure HCI dream work

The key challenge is:

- At first, people don't care about speed - they just want to type well and accurately - for most people, that means standardised layout across all their devices, and they won't consider phones that push them into other models.

- Only after they've mastered that standard layout do they start to care about speed, but by then they've gotten good enough at the basic system that swapping to anything else is too much of a regression

So I really do love the existence of third party keyboards that cater to the set of people that are willing to deal with that setback

cloudpebble was the best part about Pebble - it made development so easy I did so much more of it

The developer experience for modern devices is so awful - the teams driving it are so immersed in big team development that they leak build systems, config, package management, certificates, permissions, and store integration concerns all over the place - then some of them have minor errors and you're stuck

Sometimes you just want to write a single file of code and have it run. Cloudpebble will probably be the thing that brings me back to pebble.

When we started work on Chrome my favourite browser was a now-forgotten IE shell called iRider, which implemented tree-ish style tabs in a better way than anyone, and we did take multiple attempts at vertical tabs early on.

We didn't ship them because they were only a mitigation of the too-many-tabs problem, not a solution, and they didn't really fit our model of 'tabs are titlebars'. They were also never going to be default - most people did not have that many tabs, and we had a very strong opinion was that we shouldn't have configuration - it was better to very strongly execute on one vision we loved and risk losing people (but hope the quality would bring people along), than to execute and support multiple directions poorly.

The world has changed a lot since I last worked on Chrome ten years ago, so as an outsider I'm excited to see what the team currently attempting it can do.

Replacing the Android home buttons with the swipe up gesture. It was demonstrably a very clear usability and efficiency loss, but most people strongly preferred it.

Before we had that latter data I actually argued against attempting it - I figured having a clear usability win vs iPhone would be an area we could capitalize on, and didn't believe we'd be able to execute the swipe system well in the time we had (I'd rather be behind and robust than leading edge and flaky), but doing it was definitely the right call - felt pretty sheepish about that one for a few years. The eng and ux teams that pulled it off were next level.

I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules. But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision:

I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I also agree that uniform colors are awful, but that was after my time so I have no stake in that).

However, usability is not about pure efficiency - a huge amount of it is approachability - people have to _want_ to use the UI. If they don't want to use it, no amount of pure-usability work will mean anything - it will just be "shitty computers" in their heads. In Android's case, the developer-provided weirdly shaped icons were a major sticking point - people would take one look at an Android homescreen with all kinds of mismatched splatters of icons, mentally lump it with Windows and Linux in the must-be-for-geeks bucket, and walk off to the Apple store.

It drove us nuts - in actual tests, people would often find Android easier and more efficient to use, but would still pick iPhone as the "easier" product, because that's the one that was inviting, that fit their style, that looked easy to use.

So we did a lot of work nudging Android to a place where real people would find it desirable, easy, and powerful - making really difficult tradeoffs - sometimes breaking expectations, sometimes sacrificing a little bit here and there to gain a lot somewhere else, sometimes just taking a chance.

It took a lot of effort from a lot of wonderful people, and it involved a stupidly large amount of arguing against "just copy iPhone" laziness and pressure (a major reason I left), but I am still deeply proud of what the team was able to do. We couldn't please everyone, but I think more people were pleased afterwards than before.

When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions

Telling people the height ratios between them followed the golden ratio was a very convenient way to shortcut the bikeshedding and get to "aha, very nice"

The trick was it didn't follow the golden ratio at all because the golden ratio is not some magic number that leads to balance and peace - lighting, rounding, color, and visual strength all dramatically outweigh it

My wife and I have both used gmail for twenty years - she's been sending me email from her account for years, with my personal domain forwarding to my gmail. But since the Google Domains > Squarespace disaster, the gmail spam filter has lost the plot - it will occasionally spam filter of her from-gmail emails mid thread.

I am certain I have missed critical emails because of this, so trust is gone. I now have to dedicate time each day to going through my gets-an-email-every-two-minutes spam folder. Even though I happily worked there for 16 years, I sadly now find myself in the process of de-Googling.

Since our own accents generally sound neutral to ourselves, I would love someone to make an accent-doubler - take the differences between two accents and expand them, so an Australian can hear what they sound like to an American, or vice-versa

I brought the print-and-play GALAXY PDF for my son - he loved it and spent the next ten hours playing it, barely stopping to eat. Seemed like a good mix of mechanics and modern videogame progression rewards.

The shipping to Australia is a little pricy, but I aim to buy a set of the physical versions (they're each randomized) to use as flashbangs for future boredom.

The water flow analogies always messed me up because young literal me couldn’t handle reconciling the abstraction with “actually current flows negative to positive”

Pretty sure this is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jkarneges - would love to hear their reflections, 25 years later

This is sweet! When we made Chrome some of us (OK only me) were enamoured with an IE shell browser named iRider - it had tree style tabs and pinning, so was useful in very similar ways

IIRC one of the things they did well that could work here is batch control of tabs by dragging across them - you could click on a close or pin button, then drag vertically across other tabs to apply that action - it made handling the glut ever-spawning tabs very easy

I used to get this a lot - I'd be dozing peacefully, then would hear a loud bang with a hypnic jerk and auditory startle response (a white flash).

I just put the whole thing down to nervous system noise, like closed-eye hallucination and tinnitus, though it went away when I got a bit older and stopped drinking caffeine after 3PM.

The original text was longer, but it was very clear that "incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software" and included examples.

You can see it in the original announcement here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d1_ool4r7s&t=1503s

To be fair, while it is lenticular, it's a huge upgrade over the 3DS, which only rendered two views (one for each eye) so it only worked from straight on; the Looking Glass display handles a significantly higher number of views (~45?[1]) so you get continual stereo separation and different viewpoints as you rotate the device. Rendering costs are much higher though!

[1] https://docs.lookingglassfactory.com/keyconcepts/how-it-work...

I loved this game as a kid - it gave you a rare sense of freedom - movement within an expansive space, and that joy of throwing things in gravity-defined arcs, rather than locking you into grids, straight lines, or constrained single-screen levels. Never knew there was a 'fly home' key though.

Chopper Commando was (for me) a spiritual followup, and I loved that game even more.

Unfortunately I don't remember the exact reason, but with some squinting at the past I believe it would've come down to two things - resources and how we thought about the role of developers:

Chrome was a no-crunch 50-person project, which sounds like a lot until you think about how we were porting webkit to windows, adding a sandbox, creating a new javascript engine, a new windows UI toolkit, etc and we were ruthless about prioritization - any engineer who could've spent on an RSS renderer would've been taken away from valuable webkit windows compatibility work (omg ACID tests), and weeks mattered.

Second, we had an extremely strong belief in letting developers own as much as they could - our impossible ideal was that the Chrome UI wouldn't exist and developers would just create content you could access emphemerally through your operating system. At the time, we had seen that it was possible for developers to use various trickery (XSLT or CSS?) to style RSS feeds so they would show up somewhat like how you described (IIRC Feedburner did this)

So if you take those two things together (and again I may be misremembering) you see it being a "developers can do it so if they care they can do it, we should not spend time making something that overrules them"

It's not possible for me to know whether that was the right idea in hindsight because I don't know what we would've sacrificed (I think I would've preferred using that time to make the standalone image renderer have better zooming/panning controls)

I don't think you are alone here - there's a reason Chrome invested so heavily in dev tools and made them (and things like view-source) accessible in the core distribution even though they were also perfect candidiates for being addons. Many of us owed our careers to the path that view source opened, and we wanted to pay it forward.

I do regret not finding ways to do more - for example, an unrealized goal of mine was to find a way to add a 'create' button to Chrome to nudge everyone to be a creator - my favorite simple+cheeky idea was to have a way to enable contentEditable on the current site, then save the resulting changes as an extension you could give to your friends, allowing you to graffiti the internet in private small groups.

Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined the team for the first ten years wanted to redesign history and felt it could've been a huge differentiator. We had mockups that looked like subway maps, implemented floating overlays showing your recent tasks, and we designed the history database to store everything forever.

In reality, Google search was good enough to find what you wanted 95% of the time, and most people would not bother discovering and learning a separate pathway to find the remaining 5% - especially when combined with our poor human memories and local search capabilities at the time.

I designed Chrome, and was responsible for decisions around its UI, including the addition and removal of the RSS button.

Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of the time, was to only offer what people needed, and allow extensions to cover everything else.

I loved RSS. We all did. I still use Feedly every day and mourn the loss of Google Reader. But even back then, practically no-one else cared, even amongst our early adopter userbase. If we had lowered our usage bar to allow the RSS button, the bar would've been low enough that a thousand other features-you-don't-want-but-other-people-do would've been in there too (omg the arguments about having a "print" button).

Extensions was our "if you want it, you can add it" answer. It was imperfect, because it didn't allow ideas such as RSS to be advertised to the mainstream, but we had already clearly seen that that hadn't worked, and regardless, your daily tools should not be a place for pushing agendas unless you have total confidence that they will be valued.

I still think "following stuff" is an unsolved, undervalued problem and big opportunity space

The search engine choice screen in Android did have a bid model (and complicated EU regulation around it), but the search engine choice screen in the early versions of Chrome were not a bid model - we just felt it was a cool thing to do, but we removed it because practically everyone chose Google anyway and first run screens are bad for retention.

FWIW, the initial versions of Chrome did not have Google as the default search provider - the first run experience had a dialog that made you choose between the top three search engines in your locale

If price is a barrier, a less open, fiddlier, but much cheaper ($79) solution I've used recently is the Aurga viewer[0]. You have to use their awful apps to access the device, but if you can get past that, it does work - I was able to access and control the BIOS of a NUC I had in a closet. It can join a wifi network or host its own, which is useful in the field.

[0] https://www.aurga.com/

I have not used cash in the two years since I moved back to Australia. In fact, it took a year for me to realize that they had redesigned the notes while we were away because I hadn't seen any.

Though I hadn't used cash in the US for many years either (didn't even have a way to withdraw cash), so it didn't seem that special.

I am the glen briefly referenced here - I miss working with Evan, and I could write chapters about the magical alignment he talks about that we swam in, and how I yearn to feel that sense of directionality and purpose again - one of the many reasons I left Google last week.

I am so thankful I got to take part in the Chrome adventure with so many people I still call my friends.

Also the close button was only not funny for a stomach churning 5 minutes after I saw the techcrunch article; at all other times: hilarious.

That was my theory too, so I started opening Apple Maps and viewing my location on my watch before starting my run, and anecdotally it increased the initial accuracy by a great amount

Me too! I've found that books with characters whose names begin with the same letter tend to cause me great confusion.

Names are just firstletter+garbage, which also means I can't recall any of the characters names when I've finished reading.

Tourists are weird by definition because people are interested in seeing the things that are different/unique relative to the context they are from, and those things get way more interesting if the locals find them normal because it highlights the cultural difference.

So I try not to take offense if visitors aren't interested in the same things I am - the real challenge is whether they respect the differences in those things.