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The end of the nice GTK button

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#131

Post by ben-schaaf »

amelius wrote: post #92

The problem with buttons that have shadows (even subtle ones) is that you can't rotate the screen 180 degrees and have it look nice. This is a problem if you put your phone or tablet flat on the table and someone sits opposite to you and looks at the same screen. Better to keep the design flat. It's also simpler.

The old non-flat button styling looks entirely symmetrical to me. Not to mention that designing applications to look nice when viewed upsidedown is just silly. Even if it was your primary use case to have two people opposite each other view your app your biggest problem is all the text being upside down!

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#132

Post by Forgeties79 »

Sunspark wrote: post #81
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

The flatness of some UIs along with the removal of some visual cues has happened that I have tapped on things that aren't actually a button thinking that they might be one. When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.

Just go full-audacity and drown people in drop down menus lol at least I know what to click!

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#133

Post by mananaysiempre »

dheera wrote: post #47
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

Raymond Chen commented on the fashion cycle back when Office XP started drifting in the flat direction[1].

[1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040728_291_...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#134

Post by eternityforest »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #117
azinman2 wrote: post #42

So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be…

I think the problem Gnome, and Microsoft, have is they keep throwing money at designers. So designers keep making designs for the sake of designing. They should stop designing, stick to the design they already have and only do incremental updates when new widgets come out.

Why are designers so different from the rest of us I wonder? They value minimalism above all else, with little debate, but everyone else has a lot wider of a range of preferences it seems like.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#135

Post by Aeolun »

bodge5000 wrote: post #111

Perhaps I'll be crucified for saying this, but I actually like flat design. Or at least, I think I do. I always thought flat design was as the name suggests; flat. As in, no gradient, no faux 3D, and I guess no borders. I'm not such a fan of rounded buttons, I think they often scale badly (pretty much anything round will unless its a vector I guess), but I didnt think that was a requirement of flat design. That being…

> I think they often scale badly (pretty much anything round will unless its a vector I guess)

I don’t think anyone makes UI these days and not makes it a vector.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#136

Post by norenh »

jabbany wrote: post #44
von_lohengramm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any font rendering looks amazing on HiDPI panels. Have you ever used macOS on a normal monitor? The text looks worse than anything else.

This. The devs and designers are all using 4k, 5k displays these days. Trying to use modern apps etc. on just "FHD" (1080p) displays is painful.

I guess that is the reason why every musician should copy their master to a cassette tape and go to a shitty car with a tape-player and listen there, why every developer should have a very old crap-computer to run their software on and why every UX designer should have a crappy screen to view their design on. :-)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#137

Post by Aeolun »

woah wrote: post #82

Non techies have been using flat design interfaces for like a decade now and the world hasn't ended. If you personally like another style, totally fine. But it's odd that programmers always think they know more about usability than people who study it for a living.

> But it's odd that programmers always think they know more about usability than people who study it for a living.

I’m sure it has something to do with them needing to justify their existence. No reason to have a designer if nothing has changed in the world of design. Programmers learn new languages (or go back to old ones), designers do the same with interface design principles.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#138

Post by loeg »

> Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. Apparently not liking flat themes makes me a madman in this world. Why am I not allowed to even have opinions about the look of the operating system I'm using?

Ah, it was the same way if you didn't love the direction they went with GNOME 3. If you don't love the design-of-the-day GNOME is chasing, they don't want you. I recommend KDE.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#139

Post by zozbot234 »

eMSF wrote: post #116
von_lohengramm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux font rendering has come a long way in the last couple years. With TrueType2 and Windows fonts taken from an installer ISO (and not the ancient corefonts package), you can actually get some overall mostly okay font rendering. Every now and again, the hinting bugs out and it looks unreadable, but its far better than the olden days.

What exactly has happened in the last couple of years? And how would installing those newer Microsoft fonts affect font rendering elsewhere than where they are used (not at all by the desktop environment by default, and as to web sites, it depends on what you use)? IIRC the last big-ish change for me was around 15 years ago when some patent-encumbered patches were enabled by default by (some) Linux distributions. Whi…

> What exactly has happened in the last couple of years?

Some subpixel rendering techniques became unencumbered quite recently. So newer versions of freetype should have nicer subpixel rendering enabled by default.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#140

Post by arcbyte »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it. Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks . And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough. And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They did…

honestly i would rather remove the ability of developers to make shitty controls and widgets. GUIs either ask you for some set of data or display it to you. Weve had a basic set of controls that work great for decades now. Im all for a platform that just requires the use of those and maximizes the ability if users to theme away.
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