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We have two different definitions of minimal here. My take on a minimalist design means that life is made easier for the user. E.g. process data so the user ha

by josho 13y ago

We have two different definitions of minimal here. My take on a minimalist design means that life is made easier for the user. E.g. process data so the user has conclusions to interpret instead of raw data (that fits a minimalist design, but takes more processing). I see now that your take on minimalist design is to remove unnecessary features from software. I'd argue that nobody wants "useless fancy features", unfortunately, what may be useless for me is necessary for you (otherwise why build those features anyway). So, it's all good to say let's keep to minimal designs (by whichever definition you mean), but in the end I don't see how that solves the problem that returns on hardware improvements is slowing, and frankly you haven't made the case that minimalist design solves the problem either.

jokoon 13y ago
> unfortunately, what may be useless for me is necessary for you I don't understand that, I think I meant the opposite. > and frankly you haven't made the case that minimalist design solves the problem either You gave the example of the iPhone. The apple platform is one of the least flexible platform. In many places it requires to learn an unpopular language, objc, which is not used on existing, non-apple platform for many reasons, first one being that nextstep is owned by apple. Then it requires approval from the apple store. John Carmack talked about those "layers of crap", they're present in most OS. And what do you mean by "solving the problem" ? Having a minimalist designs allows you to leave more resources for other things, it doesn't "solve the problem", it just leaves room for more improvement. > life is made easier for the user So basically you're forcing everyone to walk on paths, and forbidding everyone to explore forests. I understand that it's better for the mainstream customers because they're not able to learn how to walk in forests, but flexibility is good too: you should still enable it. In the end, when you buy hardware, most of the time you use the default feature set of the OS, nothing else. Web apps just use a sluggish, unreliable networking protocol which was designed to view static webpages. So to sum up, people buy hardware to use facebook and twitter, listen to music, play a game, and that's what it is, a fancy, expensive gameboy color with chat. Except the hardware is 1000 or 100000 time faster and batteries last just as long. I'm not making the case of solving a problem here, I'm just talking about the absence of improvement.

by josho 13y ago

jokoon 13y ago

> unfortunately, what may be useless for me is necessary for you I don't understand that, I think I meant the opposite. > and frankly you haven't made the case that minimalist design solves the problem either You gave the example of the iPhone. The apple platform is one of the least flexible platform. In many places it requires to learn an unpopular language, objc, which is not used on existing, non-apple platform for many reasons, first one being that nextstep is owned by apple. Then it requires approval from the apple store. John Carmack talked about those "layers of crap", they're present in most OS. And what do you mean by "solving the problem" ? Having a minimalist designs allows you to leave more resources for other things, it doesn't "solve the problem", it just leaves room for more improvement. > life is made easier for the user So basically you're forcing everyone to walk on paths, and forbidding everyone to explore forests. I understand that it's better for the mainstream customers because they're not able to learn how to walk in forests, but flexibility is good too: you should still enable it. In the end, when you buy hardware, most of the time you use the default feature set of the OS, nothing else. Web apps just use a sluggish, unreliable networking protocol which was designed to view static webpages. So to sum up, people buy hardware to use facebook and twitter, listen to music, play a game, and that's what it is, a fancy, expensive gameboy color with chat. Except the hardware is 1000 or 100000 time faster and batteries last just as long. I'm not making the case of solving a problem here, I'm just talking about the absence of improvement.