Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 108 posts.

Design & UX
66

Don't Support Information Architects

Last week Information Architects (iA) released Writer Pro, a follow-up to the company’s popular text editor, iA Writer. By far, their most heavily touted new feature is Syntax Control. Oliver Reichenstein, iA’s director, promised in a blog post to vigorously protect this new feature: Syntax Control is a solid…

71

Design

I chose images from 1973 deliberately. It's easier to tell good design from bad when you're not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.) Good design is timeless, and if you want something timeless you can't pander to the limitations of some hypothetical "average" user…

72

The making of Medium.com

There is plenty of media in the world already. And no matter what happens to traditional media economics, there’s nothing to stop the torrent of information rushing from smartphones, corporations, and new-fangled media startups onto the Internet, available for the world to see.

79

Wysiwtfftwomg

I get the content in Word, copy into the various boxes in the CMS and then see how it looks. Normally I spot a few typos, or it doesn’t appear where I want it to, then I have to go back and find the article again – which isn’t so bad, it’s normally at the top. The real pain is when I have to add another link to that…

90

Starters Guide to iOS Design

As someone who does work on both the development and design side of iOS apps I find that many designers struggle with the transition to UI work, or with the different processes involved in iPhone and iPad app design. In this guide I'll describe the deliverables you'll be expected to produce, outline the constraints of…