Purely impersonal criticism, but I'm getting 'beautiful' fatigue from Show HN submissions.

'Beautiful' and 'amazing' in the same paragraph once sounded impressive, but now it's kind of tiresome.

Like I said, this is nothing against you, it's more a general trend that I'm tired of seeing. Not everything on the web needs to be 'beautiful'.

Agree. It's especially obnoxious if it comes from the author himself. It's the equivalent of having a tagline saying "I'm a smart developer who works hard" - it might be true but it's not your call, it's just a counter-signal.

On second thought, I guess my criticism is more personal than yours, but I really think it's a kind of pollution that has no place in a somewhat clean community such as HN.

EDIT: I do like the look of it, but I think everyone would be better of if you (you as in Cloudfuji, not the specific designer in question) used a neutral language. If someone goes on to say in the comments "That's beautiful." it's worth so much more for everyone involved.

I didn't design Kandan, but I do think it's beautiful. And as I said, that's because of Sacha Greif's amazing work.

Design in open source is - in general - sorely lacking. We want to correct that, and help herald in a new era of apps that are not only powerful, but easy to use and a joy to look at.

Thanks! I personally reserve words like "beautiful" for things like sunsets or mountains, but in any case I'm glad you find the design aesthetically pleasing :)

Reply to the edit - I agree, we'll be less brazen with the next announcement. Thanks for the earnest feedback, we'll use it to iterate on our style.

I came here just to write exactly the same thing. I'd add that in this case, I personally don't find the product beautiful at all. It's not ugly, I don't find it visually offensive, but it's fairly generic and uses too many cliches for me to find it beautiful.

Of course, beauty is mostly subjective. In order to wield it like, say, Apple does sometimes, you have to make something that a strong majority will find unusually beautiful.

I blame Steve Jobs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHZzb42s3y4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw

> Not everything on the web needs to be 'beautiful'.

Is there anything in nature that isn't beautiful? Beauty comes from the optimal intersection of form and function; in nature, this balance is reached through evolution. That's what we should be striving for.

> Is there anything in nature that isn't beautiful?

Yes.

I vote for the fruit of the doll's eyes plant personally, though bleeding tooth fungus is none too pleasant to look at, either.

Not everything needs to be beautiful, but we wanted to Kandan to be. We had a prototype of Kandan we called Kogo initially, but it was pretty ugly. We went out of our way to make sure that Kandan was as pleasant to use as possible, visually and functionally.

I don't see much beautiful about it.

It's a plain chat layout with too much whitespace for my taste.

You know what's beautiful? A chat that I can theme and customize to match my definition of beautiful.

This one doesn't even meet the minimum requirement of not being trapped in a browser. I want working keyboard shortcuts, I want detachable windows, and I want to copy/paste properly (browser chats give a garbled mess because your fancy CSS layout does not survive the process).

I KNEW IT!

I saw this UI and immediately recalled the ebook. I bought the ebook and reviewed it on HN. I thought the design was beautiful and elegant.

This is GREAT to see it in a live app.

Read the book. Good stuff. I really liked the format.