gmurphy

9 ms·

1.
by gmurphy 2mo ago
This is lovely - I used to use YouTube recordings of Yamanote line trips as a way to fall asleep. As a small bit of feedback - from the sleep perspective, the melodies and door chimes seem quite loud and frequent - would love an even more &
2.
by gmurphy 4mo ago
At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or
3.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
We did a lot of experimentation with keyboards in Android - finding better ways to type and click is pure HCI dream work The key challenge is: - At first, people don't care about speed - they just want to type well and accurately - for
4.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
cloudpebble was the best part about Pebble - it made development so easy I did so much more of it The developer experience for modern devices is so awful - the teams driving it are so immersed in big team development that they leak build sy
5.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
When we started work on Chrome my favourite browser was a now-forgotten IE shell called iRider, which implemented tree-ish style tabs in a better way than anyone, and we did take multiple attempts at vertical tabs early on. We didn't s
6.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
Replacing the Android home buttons with the swipe up gesture. It was demonstrably a very clear usability and efficiency loss, but most people strongly preferred it. Before we had that latter data I actually argued against attempting it - I
7.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules . But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle
8.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions
9.
by gmurphy 7mo ago
My wife and I have both used gmail for twenty years - she's been sending me email from her account for years, with my personal domain forwarding to my gmail. But since the Google Domains > Squarespace disaster, the gmail spam filter
10.
by gmurphy 11mo ago
Since our own accents generally sound neutral to ourselves, I would love someone to make an accent-doubler - take the differences between two accents and expand them, so an Australian can hear what they sound like to an American, or vice-ve
11.
by gmurphy 2y ago
I brought the print-and-play GALAXY PDF for my son - he loved it and spent the next ten hours playing it, barely stopping to eat. Seemed like a good mix of mechanics and modern videogame progression rewards. The shipping to Australia is a l
12.
by gmurphy 2y ago
The water flow analogies always messed me up because young literal me couldn’t handle reconciling the abstraction with “actually current flows negative to positive”
13.
by gmurphy 2y ago
Pretty sure this is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jkarneges - would love to hear their reflections, 25 years later
14.
by gmurphy 2y ago
This is sweet! When we made Chrome some of us (OK only me) were enamoured with an IE shell browser named iRider - it had tree style tabs and pinning, so was useful in very similar ways IIRC one of the things they did well that could work he
15.
by gmurphy 2y ago
I used to get this a lot - I'd be dozing peacefully, then would hear a loud bang with a hypnic jerk and auditory startle response (a white flash). I just put the whole thing down to nervous system noise, like closed-eye hallucination a
16.
by gmurphy 2y ago
The original text was longer, but it was very clear that "incognito doesn't affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software" and included examples. You can see it in the original announcement here: https:/&#x2
17.
by gmurphy 2y ago
To be fair, while it is lenticular, it's a huge upgrade over the 3DS, which only rendered two views (one for each eye) so it only worked from straight on; the Looking Glass display handles a significantly higher number of views (~45?[1
18.
by gmurphy 2y ago
I loved this game as a kid - it gave you a rare sense of freedom - movement within an expansive space, and that joy of throwing things in gravity-defined arcs, rather than locking you into grids, straight lines, or constrained single-screen
19.
by gmurphy 3y ago
Unfortunately I don't remember the exact reason, but with some squinting at the past I believe it would've come down to two things - resources and how we thought about the role of developers: Chrome was a no-crunch 50-person proje
20.
by gmurphy 3y ago
I don't think you are alone here - there's a reason Chrome invested so heavily in dev tools and made them (and things like view-source) accessible in the core distribution even though they were also perfect candidiates for being a
21.
by gmurphy 3y ago
Thank you for taking me down memory lane with this great question. It's been almost twenty years, so I may misremember the internal popularity of many things, but one that stands out was browsing history - almost everyone that joined t
22.
by gmurphy 3y ago
I designed Chrome, and was responsible for decisions around its UI, including the addition and removal of the RSS button. Our design philosophy at the time, which was in reaction to the bloated I-need-engagement-for-my-team browser UIs of t
23.
by gmurphy 3y ago
The search engine choice screen in Android did have a bid model (and complicated EU regulation around it), but the search engine choice screen in the early versions of Chrome were not a bid model - we just felt it was a cool thing to do, bu
24.
by gmurphy 3y ago
FWIW, the initial versions of Chrome did not have Google as the default search provider - the first run experience had a dialog that made you choose between the top three search engines in your locale
25.
by gmurphy 3y ago
If price is a barrier, a less open, fiddlier, but much cheaper ($79) solution I've used recently is the Aurga viewer[0]. You have to use their awful apps to access the device, but if you can get past that, it does work - I was able to
26.
by gmurphy 3y ago
I have not used cash in the two years since I moved back to Australia. In fact, it took a year for me to realize that they had redesigned the notes while we were away because I hadn't seen any. Though I hadn't used cash in the US
27.
by gmurphy 4y ago
I am the glen briefly referenced here - I miss working with Evan, and I could write chapters about the magical alignment he talks about that we swam in, and how I yearn to feel that sense of directionality and purpose again - one of the man
28.
by gmurphy 4y ago
That was my theory too, so I started opening Apple Maps and viewing my location on my watch before starting my run, and anecdotally it increased the initial accuracy by a great amount
29.
by gmurphy 5y ago
Me too! I've found that books with characters whose names begin with the same letter tend to cause me great confusion. Names are just firstletter+garbage, which also means I can't recall any of the characters names when I've
30.
by gmurphy 5y ago
Tourists are weird by definition because people are interested in seeing the things that are different/unique relative to the context they are from, and those things get way more interesting if the locals find them normal because it hi

More ›