Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.

So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.

Your pricing is way too high.

World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!

How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.

P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:

- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)

- components

- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support

Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.

Edit: I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?

Thanks for your honest and thoughtful feedback.

Re: the features that you mentioned - these are definitely on my list. I thought that getting the product out there sooner was preferable to waiting longer at this stage. But I fully resonate with you, and I’m working on releasing them shortly.

Re: pricing, this is something I gave a lot of thought to, and I came to the conclusion that instead of participating in a race to the bottom, I prefer that the paying customers really see value in my product. I would like to offer a more generous free plan and find the right niche in the design field for those paying customers.

With this in mind, here’s a 50% discount code for any plan, for this community and anyone who would like to support this project: HN50

Re: the mailing list, it’s a great idea. I’ll implement a subscription list soon for the people who are interested. In the meantime, you can send me an email at contact@vecti.com with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.

The first new feature we got on BOTH models was synced alarms! Why? It was already most hated feature on a stand-alone setup.

Also, their communication system between the models is a VERY noisy ad hoc wiresless audio mesh network.

(I have to admit it works better than our Wifi across the apartment – but I guess it’s because there’s no legal TX Watt limits!)

However, may I make a speculate here a little..

The brand and presentation seem to try to appeal to (young) tech savvy people; but those are the ones who are hardest to win due to so many different needs they have for their OS and software running on it. Similarly why people don’t move from Windows to Linux.

Thus, I’d be afraid this might very easily end up in the ”toy” category like the many alternative cloud or browser OSes.

So, instead, why not take a chapter from Chromebook’s.. book, and target the users with simplest needs: the non-technical. Those, who just ”need a browser in a laptop”.

New selling points: - No need to update it, it takes care of its self - No need to install suspicious apps, it can make the things you need - No menus full of apps, settings and actions you will never use; only what you actually want - You can’t break it, it can protect itself from accidents - Never again odd error messages, it can always explain them to you ELI5 and help to fix them

And lastly: - Nothing to ”learn” - always just ask and it’ll do it for you

Note: The last buttons slide below the browser chrome on iPhone Safari, when the there’s nothing to scroll.

Sometimes 100dvh helps instead of 100vh, if the document vertical size is used to define layout.

Screenshot once per second. Works everywhere.

I’m still waiting for mobile screenshare api support, so I could quickly use it to show stuff from my phone to other phones with the QR link.

Change your Youtube language to Finnish, which isn’t supported by auto-dubbing (and probably never will), and all audio will be in original language.

in this age where google has monopoly for content created on the whole world, its just matter of time until they available

It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.

Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.

The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.

I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.

-

Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:

These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.

Are we reading the same thing?

This linked statement clearly authorizes invasion of privacy by public authorities, in the name of any of the very vaguely listed reasons – as long as there’s some law to allow it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...

>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". *Only targeted interception* of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]

If a principle of the EU legal order is at stake, such as the right to privacy, then that constitutional imperative can very well override a new law.

The commission and parliament are well aware of this risk. They often choose to have laws advised on by the courts, in advance. To avoid a legal mess.

This is normal in a functional democracy. To avoid abuse of power / overreach by any institution.

I'm not happy with everything the EU does, but to call it useless is to be ignorant of the rest of the world.

ECHR court however can't repeal the law, only fine the governmemt for actual violation of convention rights.

I don't remember whether the EU top court can repeal EU laws, but general answer is no. It's politics -- if the government is full shitheads that somebody voted for and then haven't protested hard enough to boot out -- then they can ignore constitution, jail judges, behead journalists in a forest and send army to shoot at protesters of the wrong kind.

It seems axiomatic that legal systems contain provisions that prevent their violation. However, democracy requires that laws are voted on by elected representatives or plebiscites, which can of course mean repealing prior laws.

However the EU institutions are not sovereign, which might be the loophole here?

Edit: I'm aware that the EU is only afforded "competences" given to it by treaties, so perhaps human rights don't fall into any of these...?

However, I also wonder if legislation such as Chat Control, etc, might fall outside its competences.

In the end, the question is whether there is a legal mechanism by which the introduction of laws such as those in question here can be prohibited?

>Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?

Doesn't matter really. No right in any treaty is absolute. Not even the right to life itself -- the police can and does shoot people and it's legal for them to do under specific conditions. And of course the chat control law says that whatever it is supposed to be doing should be done in the most privacy respecting way possible.

In theory the court (any court really) can weight whether the measures are proportionate and whether negative obligations (not invade privacy) are in a balance with positive obligations (you know -- protective children is also important) and whether the balance is appropriate of a democratic society.

The problem everybody is trying to not see - there is no right to E2E encryption under any law right now. There is no right to have a communication channel that government can't possibly listen to. It's not a thing. The same way there is no right to have your house unsearchable by police and your freedom unbound by a court that can jail you. There are strict limits when any of those things happen, but they do fact happen all the time for good reasons and for bad ones too.

Add: if I would attack it from a legal standpoint, I would not focus on privacy so much, but rather say that creating mass-scaning capability is a threat to the democracy itself.

However, mass surveillance cannot reasonably be held in balance with detection of crimes, as most people are not criminals

What I'm saying, is -- just because the balance isn't where you want it to be, and the policy is bad, that alone doesn't mean the law is unconstitutional, against the EU treaties or ECHR or should be impossible to pass through the legislative.

It's just bad because it's bad.

It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.

The ECHR itself is independent of the EU, it is national governments that have signed up to this treaty.

So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???

.... It would be interesting to hear knowledgeable legal opinion in this!

Correct. EU is not a party of the convention, member states are, so EU law can be ruled on by ECJ and national law and actions of national governments by ECHR.

Then at the end of the day it's the national government that would look at your chats and "I'm just following EU law" would not be an especially great excuse for the ECHR court.

>Article 8 de la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales:

>Droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale

>1. Toute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée et familiale, de son domicile et de sa correspondance.

>2. Il ne peut y avoir ingérence d'une autorité publique dans l'exercice de ce droit que pour autant que cette ingérence est prévue par la loi et qu'elle constitue une mesure qui, dans une société démocratique, est nécessaire à la sécurité nationale, à la sûreté publique, au bien-être économique du pays, à la défense de l'ordre et à la prévention des infractions pénales, à la protection de la santé ou de la morale, ou à la protection des droits et libertés d'autrui.

—

> Article 12

> Nul ne sera l'objet d'immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d'atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes.

And that's it, no other additions.

That's the key word.

Seems like eveything has to be JSON and text based these days, because binary is more difficult DX.

When reading articles discussing binary formats, I usually see them using box diagrams of packets, description tables or hexdumps.

This neatly describes nested structure, names and ”types” - just enough.

I wonder if there’s a hexdump like viewer in IDEs that can present binary files like this? I can also imagine a simple UI to make the files editable using this.

If it works for you, happy the help you setup a private instance or something. And for in-office use, maybe optimize for quality rather than minimal updates it is now.