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allenu commented on My original Palm IIIx   goto10retro.com/p/taking-... · Posted by u/rbanffy
allenu · 4 days ago
I loved this era of tech. I had a Sony CLIÉ PEG-SJ22 and used it a ton for to-do lists and random notes.

I was surprised at how easy it was to learn Graffiti and how quick it was to use it. Not as fast as typing, but better than hunting and pecking on an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. I didn't like how the stylus felt on the screen when you wrote so I cut a little piece of a post-it note and put on the area where you'd do the Graffiti strokes.

I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I was able to save some web articles onto the device. When I was on a lunch break, I'd read through the articles on that little thing. It truly felt like living in the future.

allenu commented on Show HN: Nestable.dev – local whiteboard app with nestable canvases, deep links   nestable.dev/about... · Posted by u/anorak27
whalesalad · 7 days ago
When I see words like nestable and infinite, I assumed this would be something where you can draw a diagram and then zoom in or out to see it at different detail levels. IE, draw a CPU diagram and zoom out and it becomes a simple box. Then you construct a motherboard around it. So I can see it as a simple block diagram at motherboard level, but as I zoom in the motherboard disappears and I am in the context of the CPU, seeing things like cache locations, cores, etc.

This is a product I REALLY want. Since I want to be able to diagram entire complex systems without always seeing 10,000 boxes on screen. You could start a presentation at 35,000 feet, showing the entire rough structure, then zoom into different regions where more detail will appear (infinitely)

Nestable feels more like excalidraw, with a folder/file structure?

allenu · 7 days ago
This is something I've always thought would be useful as well, but after seeing some demos of it in action [1], I'm now not so sure. One of the issues I see is that because of the infinite zooming/scaling, there's no sense of place or spatial awareness that you get with a 2D map, or even a traditional outline. I think it would be easy to get lost if you had too much nesting and a lot of content.

Maybe on a smaller scale, it would be manageable though. I remember seeing some presentations that use Prezi and that has the ability to nest text at different zoom levels, and the transitions between slides worked pretty well and you did still have a sense of place, but the presenters didn't have tons of content all over like in the youtube link. I wish I had a link handy for the Prezi presentation I saw online because some of them were structured like your description about different zoom levels, like a fractal.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GblI7GI0jQ4&t=85s

allenu commented on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind   whynothugo.nl/journal/202... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
allenu · 18 days ago
I kept hearing about Claude Code for a while and never really tried it until a week ago. I used it to prototype some Mac app ideas and I quickly realized how useful it was at getting prototypes up and running very, very quickly, like within minutes. It saves so much time with boilerplate code that I would've had to type out by hand and have done hundreds of times before.

With my experience, I wonder what the author of this blog post has tried to do to complete a task as that might make a difference on why they couldn't get much use out of it. Maybe other posters can chime in on how big of a difference programming language and size of project can make. I did find that it was able to glean how I had architected an app and it was able to give feedback on potential refactors, although I didn't ask it to go that far.

Prior to trying out Claude Code, I had only used ChatGPT and DeepSeek to post general questions on how to use APIs and frameworks and asking for short snippets of code like functions to do text parsing with regexes, so to be honest I was very surprised at what the state of the art could actually do, at least for my projects.

allenu commented on GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"   bsky.app/profile/kjhealy.... · Posted by u/minimaxir
dlvhdr · 18 days ago
Except we realize they’re illusions and don't argue back. Instead we explore why and how these illusions work
allenu · 18 days ago
I think that's true with known optical illusions, but there are definitely times where we're fooled by the limitations in our ability to perceive the world and that leads people to argue their potentially false reality.

A lot of times people cannot fathom that what they see is not the same thing as what other people see or that what they see isn't actually reality. Anyone remember "The Dress" from 2015? Or just the phenomenon of pareidolia leading people to think there are backwards messages embedded in songs or faces on Mars.

allenu commented on Getting good results from Claude Code   dzombak.com/blog/2025/08/... · Posted by u/ingve
kleyd · 19 days ago
Does anyone else find themselves starting projects that wouldn't otherwise be worth the time investment, while avoiding Claude Code for the tasks that actually have high priority?

Who has had success using Claude Code on features in older, bigger, messier projects?

allenu · 19 days ago
Absolutely. I only just started using Claude Code on Sunday and I tested it by taking a small project that I was toying with and extending it with lots of features that I had thought about adding but didn't have the time.

Then, I explored a product feature in an existing app of mine that I also had put off because I didn't feel it was worth spending several days exploring the idea. It's something that would've required me to look up tutorials and APIs on how to do some basic things and then write some golang code which I hadn't done in a while. With Claude Code, I was able to get a prototype of the idea from a client app and a golang service working within an hour!

Today I started prototyping yet another app idea I came up with yesterday. I started off doing the core of the prototype in a couple of hours by hand and then figured I'd pull Claude in to add features on top of it. I ended up spending several hours building this idea since I was making so much fantastic progress. It was genuinely addictive.

A few days ago I used it to help me explore how I should refactor a messy architecture I ended up with. I didn't initially consider it would even be useful at all but I was wowed by how it was able to understand the design I came up with and it gave me several starting points for a refactor. I ended up doing the refactor myself just because I really wanted to be sure I understood how it worked in case something went wrong. I suspect in a few weeks, I'll get used to just pairing with Claude on something like that.

allenu commented on Tell HN: I underestimated how lonely building solo can be    · Posted by u/paulwilsonn
allenu · 22 days ago
As a solo builder myself, I totally agree. You get lost in your head a lot of times since you're the only one who understands the problem set you're working on, the progress you're making, and the challenges that still lie ahead.

The work you do is also not something that's easy to talk about with friends and family who have regular jobs either. I think for a lot of people what you're might be just a fun thing and not a real job, and if you talk about how hard it can be to try to work on something yourself, they might not fully appreciate it since you could just walk away from it all and get a "real job".

Not having coworkers is tough when you just want to chill and hang out for a few minutes before getting back to work, although if you were working remote during the pandemic or are still working remote today, you probably got used to that.

Have you tried co-working spaces? I know you won't necessarily be able to vibe on the work you're doing, but having random conversations with people might make the solo work a bit more bearable.

Going to meetups or events with other entrepreneurs may also help. I've gone to meetups and talked to other people who are doing their own thing (or startups with others) and I can see they have the same experiences, which helps keep me sane.

allenu commented on Optician Sans – A free font based on historical eye charts and optotypes   optician-sans.com/... · Posted by u/exvi
GranPC · a month ago
Link rot is alive and well... unlike their links. https://web.archive.org/web/20190430201350/https://twitter.c...
allenu · a month ago
It indeed looks like a real quote then, but not much of a testimonial. It may as well be rephrased, "Optician Sans is a thing that I acknowledge exists." Nowadays I suppose that's good enough reason to put up the logo of a company on the landing page.
allenu commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
wonger_ · a month ago
What's your design process? Any sketches, wireframes, other people testing? Also do you have a video demo or screencast?
allenu · a month ago
My design process is heavy on prototyping directly in code. I usually start off with sketches in pen and paper and then a quick mockup of the UI directly using Swift code since my apps are for iOS and Mac only.

I don't have any testers on this new version at the moment, but I'm considering having some beta testing once I get closer to release. No videos either, but I'm planning on writing some blog posts going over some of the UI flows and new features in the app to help with promotion. Once I polish the lesson UI a little bit, I'll probably post a video on YouTube of it too.

allenu commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
allenu · a month ago
I'm working on an update to my flashcards app, Fresh Cards. The current version has a lot of limitations, so I've been working on a rewrite that improves all aspects of the app, for nearly a year now.

Most recently, I've been incorporating a lot of improved UX design. The app has always used a playlist metaphor, i.e. your database of flashcards is your library and you can sort them in different ways and then hit Play to start reviewing. Within the review session itself, you go through the cards in the playlist in small batches so that it's less overwhelming, among other reasons. After every batch, the app returns to an overview screen so you can see what you've just reviewed so far in the session.

The challenge has been designing this overview screen so it's clear where you are in the playlist without making it overwhelming. I finally came up with a good design this week, which I was quite happy with: https://mastodon.social/@allenu/114921335089371494

I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement this new UI has made on how the product feels. The old UI only showed you the history of cards you've reviewed in the session and highlighted the most recent batch of cards. This new one shows you the full playlist, but redacts the contents of the playlist ahead, so you immediately get a sense of how much left there is to do, but without being shown what is in the contents of the cards. Interestingly, this has the effect of making you want to see what is in those cards, i.e. to keep reviewing!

allenu commented on A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab (2006)   davidweiss.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/ingve
mrpippy · a month ago
In Redmond?

I seem to remember MacBU was in San Jose, maybe that was before this post? Or were things split between the locations?

allenu · a month ago
I started working in MacBU about 3 years after the article. It was split between the two locations when I joined. (Outlook for Mac and PowerPoint were both in California.) These photos look like Building 115 to me, though I didn't go into this particular lab often. After this, the team moved to Building 31 and later Building 35, if I remember correctly.

One thing that was interesting about MacBU was that it was in a completely separate division from the rest of Office (i.e. Windows Office). That gave the team a really cool outsider vibe and the team had a really nice close-knit culture.

u/allenu

KarmaCake day3164April 15, 2013
About
I'm an indie dev making apps for Mac and iOS: https://www.ussherpress.com

Check out my latest app, Minders. It's a micro journaling app that feels like social media, but private. – https://minders.ussherpress.com/

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/allenu; my proof: https://keybase.io/allenu/sigs/9lNtoSQ24I0rd8_9OIJb6D9k8F_jqdLfVvZfvN-N2R4 ]

meet.hn/city/us-Seattle

Interests: Entrepreneurship, Mobile Development, Programming, UI/UX Design

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