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Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

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Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#171

Post by pjmlp »

TuringTest wrote: post #169
pjmlp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean by piling up , , CSS and JavaScript?

Yes, why not? That's no different than piling objects in a GUI widget library to build a tree structure for the layout of a window; except that it has a human-readable string representation.

Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing.

Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in.

And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#172

Post by TuringTest »

pjmlp wrote: post #171
TuringTest wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why not? That's no different than piling objects in a GUI widget library to build a tree structure for the layout of a window; except that it has a human-readable string representation.

Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing. Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in. And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.

> I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn

How well does that work when your GUI must be shown in arbitrary devices, with arbitrary screen sizes and arbitrary resolutions? And how well does it reflow when the user changes the viewport size?

In any case, the original post to which I replied was comparing HTML5 to the NeWS platform, which provided a unified UI stack itself, so you wouldn't be able to match the native behavior following that approach either.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#173

Post by on_and_off »

taude wrote: post #159
on_and_off wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, I feel that UI tools are evolving very fast on Android. ConstraintLayout is pretty much AutoLayout without the bad parts, Databinding makes declarative style UI easy to write. It is not perfect by any means, but it is definitely improving quite steadily.

But these ideas of declarative frameworks supporting databinding are old, and have been implemented many times in many heterogeneous frameworks and platforms over the past two decades (probably longer, but I don't have context).

I don't have the context either, but according to the people behind databinding on Android, the previous databinding frameworks are usually pretty slow.

They focused on making it run fast by making it compile to bytecode and make the same minimal calls you would make in java .

It is true that it is not a new idea at all though

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#174

Post by on_and_off »

fspacef wrote: post #164
on_and_off wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and neither are used on Android

I get the /s but does anyone know why this is the case? Would make life a lot easier IMO.

oh, I did not mean to be sarcastic, just to point out that the state of these frameworks don't matter that much when they are not used on the main platform where people write UI in java.

As for the lack of Swing/JavaFx on Android, I don't know if there is an official reason.

It could be that Google only wanted to take the language and replicate everything else in order to avoid lawsuits.

Another option (and they are not exclusive) is that you take a lot of cruft with you when you integrate something like Swing.

Also, widgets like RecyclerView are really complex and do some deep optimizations like pre-binding views when the ui thread is idle. Having ownership of this part of the stack in order to make it evolve might have been considered worth the development cost.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#175

Post by kpil »

hasbot wrote: post #73
kpil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swing is themeable, as has always been. With some minimal effort, it's possible to do a nice looking GUI with fonts that not look like vomit, etc. If Sun and Oracle had spent more than 5 minutes on packaging applications - why not in jxe-files for executable jars, as a simple start to avoid torturing your users - and using nice fonts - and why not a discrete and non-whiny non-bundlig autoupdating jre - they could act…

I was a Swing developer (and loved it). Distributing Swing applications was never a major issue. The issue was that once the web hit, all my co-workers wanted to do web applications and convinced management web was where it was at.

I specifically mean such a simple thing that they have used the .jar file extension both for executable jars and plain archives of files.

If they had defined and promoted using .jxe as the file name extension for executable jars, there had been so much less confusion for the end users.

(Just like they have done with ear, war, rar, etc)

Also, the security considerations for java web start applications where rather strange, with ugly icons warning that you were running a java application etc, and much higher requirements for certificates and signed executable compared to just about everything else that you run on a computer.

If they had re-imaged the framework to use a "installation" and providing automatic updates, just like normal applications, they could have lowered the bar a little.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#176

Post by pjmlp »

TuringTest wrote: post #172
pjmlp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing. Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in. And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.

> I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn How well does that work when your GUI must be shown in arbitrary devices, with arbitrary screen sizes and arbitrary resolutions? And how well does it reflow when the user changes the viewport size? In any case, the original post to which I replied was comparing HTML5 to the NeWS platform, which provided a unified UI stack itself, so you wouldn't be able…

That is what layout managers and logical pixels are for.

You are missing the fact that NeWS offered this kind of control.

"The NeWS Book" - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#177

Post by no_wave »

Arizhel wrote: post #79
cassowary wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the hamburger menu because at least there's a consistent UI that tells me where I can click to find stuff. Otherwise agree, undiscoverable hidden UIs must die, and so must these flat UIs (which are equivalent to undiscoverable ones). Underlined blue words are good too. Worst ui trend ever. I eagerly await a return to the 1980s. Which is not nostalgia, because I didn't use computers then — I'm too young a…

The 80s had their high points for sure, but computer interfaces really aren't one of them unless you like green-screen mainframe interfaces. IMHO, the peak for UIs that are easily usable by regular people with minimal training was back in the mid-to-late-00s. It was before this idiotic flat-UI fad, when UIs had a colorful 3D look to them so they were actually attractive, and also functional (since they were also very…

I'm convinced that flat got popular because it was cheaper than creating textured graphics. The endless fawning over flat on HN was extremely obnoxious - back in 2013 you couldn't go a day without a "flat design is good design" post ending up on the front page.

Glad to see that there are other people out there who hate it. If there's one example of comically dumb flat design patterns right now, it's that "filter" icon you see around the web that looks like a solid-colored upside down triangle and nothing like a filter.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#178

Post by zanny »

pjmlp wrote: post #153
fnord123 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, which platforms that Qt targets, cannot have dynamic linking?

Embedded devices, car infotainment systems, iOS (only dynamic frameworks from Apple are allowed).

If you are targeting ios you are already paying Apple for a developer account, so paying Qt basically just doubles the license cost. Everything else is fairly exclusively corporate, where Qt licenses are a non-issue.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#179

Post by pjmlp »

zanny wrote: post #178
pjmlp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embedded devices, car infotainment systems, iOS (only dynamic frameworks from Apple are allowed).

If you are targeting ios you are already paying Apple for a developer account, so paying Qt basically just doubles the license cost. Everything else is fairly exclusively corporate, where Qt licenses are a non-issue.

I don't see an issue paying for Qt, other professions pay for their tools.

I was just giving an exemple where LGPL isn't possible.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#180

Post by quickben »

taude wrote: post #160
efdee wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard people talk about them, but I've never seen it on any of the 4 Windows 10 machines running under my roof. Apart from the (already plenty annoying) notification about a new version of Office.

I haven't seen any either. I makes me wonder if people are using pirated versions of Windows and Microsoft has figured out a way to know this reliably and target them with ads. I do have my "developer tools extensions" enabled on my Windows 10 machine, which I wonder if it affects being targeted by ads.

I upgraded from paid win7 ultimate. Maybe they a/b test?
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