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Making Software

(www.makingsoftware.com)
752 points calme_toi | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Apfel ◴[] No.43714968[source]
Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.

I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.

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dimal ◴[] No.43716440[source]
Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.

Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.

Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.

There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.

I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.

So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.

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Narishma ◴[] No.43718359[source]
> There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.

And pegs the CPU and drains the battery.

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1. oneoverten ◴[] No.43723153[source]
Those animations wont "peg" any relevant CPU, and they clearly had a purpose that was not about wasting cycles or battery.
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2. Narishma ◴[] No.43724901[source]
They still end up doing that, regardless of the intention. It would be better if they only animated once, or just when you hover over them instead of constantly.