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Its really impressive how much Tailscale care about the UX of the whole product all the way down to the level of not over complicating their menus. The whole T

Its really impressive how much Tailscale care about the UX of the whole product all the way down to the level of not over complicating their menus. The whole Tailscale experience for an enduser (ie not Tailscale admin) is so much nicer than compared with something like OpenVPN in a place without MDM.

Kinrany 4y ago
Good UX is the whole point since they build on top of WireGuard which is already available, no?
pilif 4y ago
> down to the level of not over complicating their menus to be fair, their mobile UX has plenty of warts and behaviors that don't match platform expectations and are confusing (like what happens when you tap on any of the listed machines that you have access to). This one seems to at least have been partially motivated by making sure that accessing tailscale without paying is not too visible. I'm saying this as a huge fan (and paying customer) of tailscale.
- dpatterbee 4y ago
  >> making sure that accessing tailscale without paying is not too visible. Not sure what this means, Tailscale is free for the vast majority of non-corporate users, and I would imagine that anyone who's using it so intensely that they need the "personal pro" plan is probably someone techie enough to dig around and find out about headscale. Also headscale isn't entirely free if you're paying for a VPS or other server to host it on.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    You wouldn’t pay tailscale if you used headscale, you’d just be using the efforts they funded by using their app.
aaronharnly 4y ago
The solution of only showing menu opens if you repeatedly open and close the menu seems very bizarre to me though? Is there precedent for that?
- smileybarry 4y ago
  Android's developer settings unlock if you tap the build number X amount of times (I forgot how many)
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    7 times I think
- nabakin 4y ago
  I think the point is the users are very unlikely to do it. Tailscale's UI is designed to be used by as many people as possible and even a single additional menu hurts that goal
throwaway892238 4y ago
This idea of "protecting the users from themselves" can be dangerous. Several very large corporations are currently telling their users to do very insecure things because telling them to use an extra option in some circumstances would be too confusing for their puny brains. Even though it's a security feature and doing things securely is kind of a big deal. An extra field in an "Advanced Settings" menu should not need to be hidden behind some "Press About 5 times" secret gauntlet. Users are not so stupid that they will fill out an "Advanced" form field they don't understand, and even if they do, you can always make a connection attempt to see if the input was valid.

Kinrany 4y ago

Good UX is the whole point since they build on top of WireGuard which is already available, no?

pilif 4y ago

> down to the level of not over complicating their menus to be fair, their mobile UX has plenty of warts and behaviors that don't match platform expectations and are confusing (like what happens when you tap on any of the listed machines that you have access to). This one seems to at least have been partially motivated by making sure that accessing tailscale without paying is not too visible. I'm saying this as a huge fan (and paying customer) of tailscale.

dpatterbee 4y ago
>> making sure that accessing tailscale without paying is not too visible. Not sure what this means, Tailscale is free for the vast majority of non-corporate users, and I would imagine that anyone who's using it so intensely that they need the "personal pro" plan is probably someone techie enough to dig around and find out about headscale. Also headscale isn't entirely free if you're paying for a VPS or other server to host it on.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  You wouldn’t pay tailscale if you used headscale, you’d just be using the efforts they funded by using their app.

aaronharnly 4y ago

The solution of only showing menu opens if you repeatedly open and close the menu seems very bizarre to me though? Is there precedent for that?

smileybarry 4y ago
Android's developer settings unlock if you tap the build number X amount of times (I forgot how many)
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  7 times I think
nabakin 4y ago
I think the point is the users are very unlikely to do it. Tailscale's UI is designed to be used by as many people as possible and even a single additional menu hurts that goal

throwaway892238 4y ago

This idea of "protecting the users from themselves" can be dangerous. Several very large corporations are currently telling their users to do very insecure things because telling them to use an extra option in some circumstances would be too confusing for their puny brains. Even though it's a security feature and doing things securely is kind of a big deal. An extra field in an "Advanced Settings" menu should not need to be hidden behind some "Press About 5 times" secret gauntlet. Users are not so stupid that they will fill out an "Advanced" form field they don't understand, and even if they do, you can always make a connection attempt to see if the input was valid.