Which tools/services have your favorite UI/UX?
e.g.:
* Linux with its pipes
* i3 with its window management
* vim
* emacs
* fzf
* pgsql
* google.com
* wikipedia.com
I can't help but think that we could do so much more with some tools.
Heroku. It abstracts SO much work away and just lets you get on with writing software. It's probably the most underrated platform online. Following that, I think the UI/UX are learned appreciation. Vim and Emacs are amazing once you "get it", same with tiling window managers, etc. Good UX is supposed to be discoverable in a sense and most power tools for developers aren't exactly known for being approachable.
It's a small detail, but after moving to iOS from Android recently I discovered Universal Clipboard: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT209460.
You copy text on one device and paste it on the other. A great piece of UX, and an example of the best interface being no interface at all.
Vim (recent versions) + the `term` command. All shells and REPLs as Vim buffers, also run any command asynchronously. Paired with the `sendtowindow` plugin, can have two-way communication between any REPL and any other buffer.
Gerrit, the code review tool.
It's a perfect example of a tool that looks terrible if you've never seen it before, but after learning its core concepts you will never want to use any other code review system. It's fast, it's optimized for daily use, and it doesn't attempt to woo you with flashy features up front.
It has a tradeoff that most developer tools these days are too scared to pull off, the one where you can't onboard someone within a minute, but you will win them over once they start using it for a while.
The Julia REPL. Unicode, colored stacktraces, special modes for documentation and package management, accepts LaTeX commands to enter special characters, has paste mode:
“In Julia mode, the REPL supports something called prompt pasting. This activates when pasting text that starts with julia> into the REPL. In that case, only expressions starting with julia> are parsed, others are removed. This makes it possible to paste a chunk of code that has been copied from a REPL session without having to scrub away prompts and outputs.” → https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/REPL/
- Letterboxd, as a movie fanatic, this app is great, and its community seems very welcoming.
- Feedly, it almost makes me forget I'm really missing Greader.
- Stripe, docs, dashboard, landing pages--everything they do ends up being top notch.
- Github (this is a weird one), didn't really appreciate the care for the UI until I had to use Gitlab extensively, the worst offenders are the PR UI--everything looks so cluttered, and it doesn't happen on Github.
Step Two (https://steptwo.app) brings a smile on my face every time I copy a 2FA token from it.
Especially when coming from Authy, which has by far the most horrible UI ever created.
I like DigitalOcean's site for deploying servers - simple, clean and fast. A few missing advanced features in certain cases, but much more user friendly than AWS.
https://linear.app/ has beautiful UI with super smooth animations. In general, I think "command+K" command-line interfaces for user-facing tools is a huge step up (Superhuman, Linear, etc..).
Mac's Window manager. I love how each separate screen had its own "space" that can be cycled through with control and arrow
Simple, discoverable, does not abuse the SPA paradigm, and lets you turn off features you don't need so it doesn't clutter the UI.
Netlify is consistently held up as an example of how to do developer focused UX. I'm def biased as an ex employee but I can attest that i've seen from the inside how closely design and accessibility are integrated in the dev process.
as far as up and comers, i'd recommend checking out https://supabase.io/ - love the minimal black/green aesthetic. they recently released a Tailwind/React design system too https://ui.supabase.com/
The Swype button in the Swype keyboard for Android. Press it and the word where the cursor is will be selected (like control+w in some desktop editors). Swipe from that key to c/v/x and you will copy/paste/cut directly. Swipe to the space bar and you will change input language. And swipe to other keys to access different keyboards modes.
No other keyboard I know has it (if you do know please tell me!) and I feel extremely slow without it.
Magit, an emacs package to control git.
It's not pretty, and certainly not conventional, but very efficient and discoverable.
I know I'm not in the majority but I deeply enjoy using GNOME. I barely have to tweak the defaults to feel right at home.
Hacker News is pretty good.
Sublime Text just oozes productivity.
As a video/movie/tv show lover, I love http://www.reelgood.com
The mobile app is as good if not better than the browser version.
I find Excalidraw to be really cool with respect to UI/UX
ipython + jupyter-notebook are such killer applications. I use both daily for everything from trying out code, calculations & notes.
IntelliJ Idea + Ideavim plug-in and my heavily customised keybindings and F1-F12 keys. The same UI and keybindings for all my programming languages. I live in this program for 80% of my computer time.
Tmux+Zsh+fzf+bat+exa for terminals and splits. Same or similar keybindings to my InteliJ setup.
command line with flags and manpages
Org Mode (with my heavily customized labburn-based theme).
Apple Pay. It just works every time, even with dodgy internet.
It was seamless to set up and has a layer of security over just using a contactless credit card for payments.
Things 3 the macOS app and iPhone app has some amazing UI/UX, yeah it's a glorified todo app but one that is a joy to use.
gcloud and kubectl with completion bindings
Azure Data Studio. It’s a bit buggy still but this kind of visual/textual hybrid is very clean and powerful.
Best: Original iTunes. Worst: Apple Music.
ReGet Deluxe.
Sony Vegas 6.0-7.0
ulysses.app, I only wish they added tables.
Monday.com
Avaza
Fogbugz
Anything JetBrains
simple and yet so effective