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Scrollbar Blindness

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#291

Post by Tossrock »

Klathmon wrote: post #217
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

There's a windows feature like this which I hate with a passion. If you grab a window and shake it side to side, it minimizes all open windows... So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I wo…

That sounds awful - glad I've never encountered it. FYI, you can use a lot of the built-in window management functions via keyboard shortcuts - Windows key + Shift + [Left|Right] arrow key moves a window between monitors.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#292

Post by derefr »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #273
derefr wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UIs of the OSes designed in the 640x480 era used 8pt system fonts, and were very careful about "spending" vertical space. The UIs of the OSes of today are not optimized for the same scenarios. Here's what Windows XP (not even really from the 640x480 era!) looks like on a modern display: https://ibb.co/W5mVgHT You could fit a lot of Windows XP, and XP-era apps, on a 1366x768 display. You can't fit much of a modern…

What you're showing here is lack of high DPI scaling and it's a completely different issue irrelevant to the GP's point - it's caused by increased pixel density, not screen space (unless your example comes from some 40" monitor or so). To make an honest comparison you would have to set the output resolution to a lower value. When done right, increasing screen density doesn't really affect available space, just makes…

Okay, maybe running XP natively on a 4K display was a bit silly. But here's XP in 1080p: https://ibb.co/BB5rsHg

UI elements are still far smaller than comparable ones in Windows 10 or macOS, when those are running at 1080p unscaled. On XP, IE and Explorer both manage to fit four toolbars (rather, a title bar + three toolbars) in 105px of vertical space. On my own macOS Catalina install, Chrome manages to fit only two toolbars in 86 device-independent pixels of vertical space.

Likewise, just consider the fact that people weren't generally looking at PDFs back in the XP era, but rather plaintext, which—as rendered on this image—was exactly 8px tall. A lot of 8px-tall text fits on a 1080p display, no matter how many toolbars you have; and a lot of 8px-tall text will even fit on a 640x480 display, if you make efficient use of the vertical space. But because PDFs use vector fonts, not bitmap fonts, they will look unreadably muddy if you attempt to scale one down such that the text only uses 8px of vertical height. You need more vertical space to look at PDFs.

So, in combination, when you throw a Windows 10, running Google Chrome, displaying a PDF, on a 768p display, it's just an ugly constrained problem.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#293

Post by olyjohn »

Klathmon wrote: post #217
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

There's a windows feature like this which I hate with a passion. If you grab a window and shake it side to side, it minimizes all open windows... So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I wo…

That fucks with me all the time. I hate it so much... But I figured out how to deal with it.

Shake the window again, and they will all come back.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#294

Post by sumtechguy »

zeveb wrote: post #119
liability wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect devs who use macbooks to generally use them the same way as the general population generally uses them. I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice. One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. When I play a first person game I always use my trusty old intellimouse. Otherwise, I use the trackpad unless I'm sim…

> I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice. I imagine that developers would prefer mice if people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably prefer mice, and I suspect people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably do prefer mice, the same way that I believe we prefer good keyboards and good monitors.

For my day to day noodling around I use a track-pad. But for dev work I use a mouse. The click drag bits are wildly better with a mouse. For example text highlighting and moving things around in the GUI.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#295

Post by saagarjha »

snazz wrote: post #200
mbar84 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other being System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys and map Caps Lock to Escape

Or Control, depending on which you're used to. Every time I try to use Windows I'm surprised that there's no easy-to-access setting for remapping Caps Lock like there is on every Linux DE and macOS.

You can really have it remapped to anything, really. Mine is remapped to F18 via hidutil to serve as a "hyper" key.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#296

Post by saagarjha »

plorkyeran wrote: post #156
marmshallow wrote: post #122

While folks are rightfully bashing macOS’s hidden scroll bars, I would like to advertise an iOS feature that is actually pro-scroll bar. As of iOS 13, you can grab the scroll bar to scroll at hyper speed rather than repeatedly flicking the screen. Not sure if there’s a proper name for this feature but it’s explained here https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/08/05/scroll-faster-iphon...

We used to call that "using the scroll bar".

iOS devices were not nearly performant enough to allow that until recently ;)

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#297

Post by rriepe »

xur17 wrote: post #108
vbsteven wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the macOS monoculture is going to go away in the next few years because on one side macOS is becoming more and more developer hostile with each release and on the other side WSL (and WSL2) is improving the Windows developer experience a lot. I use Windows as my daily driver OS now for both native/web/mobile/devops work and I expect to see more and more developers making that same switch in the coming years.

For folks considering the switch, I highly recommend considering linux as well. I've used both macOS and ubuntu as a development environment, and bug wise they are on par, but linux really excels at having a true "native" development environment. Docker without a weird VM, true bash, etc.

I feel like GIMP and Inkscape have finally caught up to the Adobe offerings. It was my reason for not switching for so long. But over the past year I did and I just-- wow. GIMP in particular is just really good now.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#299

Post by baggy_trough »

danso wrote: post #286
reaperducer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features You don't even have to be elderly. The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears. How did that conversation go? Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go? Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or…

My suspicion is that Apple’s design mentality is to strive toward the minimalist ideal of an interface in which everything necessary fits on one (phone) screen, and users are acclimated to ask Siri for anything/everything else, e.g. “Siri show me a print/download dialog”

Using Siri is like working in boxing gloves that randomly smash you in the face. It's trained me to avoid it at all costs.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#300

Post by awiesenhofer »

and then there is the new firefox for android which decided to just remove the scroll bar entirely in its new tab list. so if you have lets say the now usual amount of open tabs, you don't have any idea where or how far along in the list you are. i wonder what the reasoning behind that was?
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