181–190 of 666 posts
Meanwhile, the visual design has been hashed over and over: I've lost count. Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities?
I don't understand why modern toolbar icons are basically abstract shapes represented by lines. It's 2022, we have 32 bit colors, but toolbar icons have less color than back 30 years ago in Windows 3.1.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like everything was perfect in the past and so we're done. Far from it. Even beyond that, the world is changing. New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either. Linux DE's have never had a particularly well thought out, well designed look. There's been a lot of themes that people create to mimic ot…
> New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. The article focus on the settings control panel. What new needs and expectations does the new settings control panel in 2022 have compared to 2010?
Settings panes are still largely confusing on all platforms, commercial included, as you broaden your user base. They've also grown in utility as iOS has pushed the idea of a centralized place for settings for all aspects of the system (apps included), which you're starting to see elements of on other platforms as well. There's plenty of room for improvement, including simplifying everything down so that few settings can make big differences where the heavy lifting is done for you. Linux in particular suffers from this, from a legacy of a million .conf files everywhere that many people blindly copy-pasta'd random configurations they found online (I'm looking at you XFree86).
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…
That's sort of what happened with ElementaryOS, isn't it?
[1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=...
I may be alone here, but maybe there are mountains of functionality never tackled in Gnome. Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. Meanwhile, the visual design has been hashed over and over: I've lost count. Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities?
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.
It's not just programmers who complain about modern UI/UX trends. The Nielsen Norman Group, a UI/UX consulting group that was founded by HCI legends Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, have written articles against the overuse of flat design (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/).
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…
> 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. Exactly this. I often help others use computers and phones. In the old days it was easy to see what could be clicked. Now input and output look the same. It makes it harder to use. In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designe…
Is it? Style is no style at all if the thing in question does not fulfill its function. The whole point of something stylish is that it accomplishes its end so well and respects the appropriate constraints that is pleases the intellect when it recognizes this perfection.
So if someone is designing a UI that is difficult to use, that is a failure of both style and substance since there is no style without substance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
FWIW, Macintosh System 6 was just black and white (and only 640x480px), so 3D wasn't really tenable. System 7 and 8 had support for color, and was as 3D as it could muster, like highlight and shadow treatment on buttons and other widgets, and embossed, draggable thumbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7.... Mac OS X brought Aqua, which was a pinnacle of 3D and skeuomorphic design. You know y…