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The end of the nice GTK button

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#241

Post by silisili »

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…

100% agreed. I want buttons to, at minimum, indicate that my click or touch was successful. Even a little wiggle. Flat design has me wondering with no visual indication, and I hit this all the time.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#242

Post by ogurechny »

warning26 wrote: post #113
flukus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. Professional designers seem to be the ones creating these problems. Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Now everything is pretty but harder to use.

> Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Keep in mind that programmers also gave us this: http://www.martin-achern.de/wgetgui/images/linux_wgetgui.jpg People across all disciplines are capable of making poor design choices

There are many crappy UIs made by dragging buttons and labels in visual editors, but I believe this example comes from a discussion of a different problem. Namely, how to make a non-shitty non-toy GUI for a console tool. And the answer is, you can't, unless you'd already had the mental model, the hierarchy of options and modes of operation that could be projected onto both types of interaction before you made them.

Essentially, this is not even a GUI application, this is a printed cheat sheet for console program with interactivity, like HyperCard or '90s context help systems, but with “callbacks” affecting the program state. It is made for people who know and understand the console version, and just want to choose options with the mouse. Of course, it may be advertised as something made for regular people, but that's a honest false belief. It's more of a convenient shell alias transferred into 2D, something which is not expected to be super nice, or handle all corner cases if it helps you in general.

I think it is, actually, something to be encouraged. There are some tools that people made in Flash for their own use or some fan group because that's what they “programmed” in, not to mention big examples like (Visual) Basic, etc. A user is not just a consumer of what comes to the dumb personal device, a user is someone who can make it work in some unique way, because that's what computers are made for.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#243

Post by chipotle_coyote »

chrismorgan wrote: post #184
dheera wrote: post #47

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.

Recently I’ve been enjoying serif fonts in more places than I used to, because I instructed Firefox not to allow sites to override my font choices (so I get exclusively Equity for serif, Concourse for sans-serif and Triplicate for monospace), which is quite pleasant and relaxing in general (Google’s foolish/poorly-implemented ligature-based icon font technique is the only notable breakage/uglification I’ve found in t…

> Equity for serif, Concourse for sans-serif and Triplicate for monospace

Are you a lawyer? (There is an in-joke here, I swear)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#244

Post by userbinator »

notriddle wrote: post #150
userbinator wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that programmers also gave us this You're basically proving the point. That is so much clearer and obvious to use than the screenshots in the original article, and it doesn't treat you like an idiot.

Yes, I know which things are buttons, which things are text entry, and which are checkboxes. This was a strength of early 2000's UI design, and it's a shame that so many applications don't give such clear indicators any more. This application still has an absolutely crap design. * How do I specify where the downloaded data goes ? Why are there onscreen options for literally everything else, but not that? * Which text…

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's better than the "small mysterious monochrome hieroglyphics floating in a sea of white/darkness" that "modern" UIs seem to be gravitating towards. At least textual labels are searchable.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#245

Post by azinman2 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #232
azinman2 wrote: post #127

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…

> Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either. I think your example points to a peculiarity of UI/UX: cars have changed a lot since the 1950s, but their interface has remained surprisingly constant. I think there is a point to be made that an interface can reach a point at which it cannot be improved, or at least not without a whole paradigm change.

But even that is not true. Windows are now mechanized, with child locks. The ways to open and lock doors is different, both in the car and from afar. The entire center console now is different, to the point where Tesla has just a touch screen on many models. There are cup holders, EVs have fruncks and often are largely driven using 1 pedal, side mirrors are adjustable with motorized buttons, seat placement is totally different and often a setting that can be memorized by the car, stick shifts and clutches are largely gone, the wheel inner shapes are different and often contain buttons, starting/stopping the car is usually a button, etc etc.

If you’re focused simply on the steering wheel itself that’s like saying there’s still a mouse and keyboard. Yes, that’s true — and even that will likely be disrupted over time. But everything else has changed.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#246

Post by ddingus »

To me it all looks like an effort to push all of the work related to discoverability on to the users, in a way not unlike this move to self serve self check-out self serve this self serve that...

And it is efficient, from an MBA point of view. This is pushing evermore cost and risk away from the enterprise, creating externalities along the way. The whole thing is pretty toxic to users overall.

And yes, those users can self serve their way back to competency, and eventually reach a point where they're productive again, but they had to pay a lot harder than they would have otherwise.

Remember all those studies that were done in the 70s 80s and into the 90s? IBM did them, some of the major CAD companies did them, others did that too, and there's too many to list.

We should do that again. And if we were to do that, we're going to find out those other studies weren't bulshit, all those points made sense, and what's really changed is the value judgments related to the development, and who makes those judgments and why.

And I bet the root of all this, is far too many enterprises are in a place where they just don't have to care about the users anymore, and they know it, and they're acting on it.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#247

Post by chipotle_coyote »

lwkl wrote: post #118
dheera wrote: post #47

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.

Is macOS 11 a lot different than macOS 12? I'm using macOS 12 right now and there are a lot of 3D elements especially if you compare it to Windows 10 or Gnome in the screenshots of this post. It seems to be a mix of both approaches (similar to GTK 3).

It's not very different. I don't know if "flat" was ever the right word to describe the look it started moving toward post-Aqua; I think I'd be more inclined to call it "minimal", occasionally to a fault. With a few exceptions (most notably the bonkers choice to make all keyboard shortcuts gray in menus so at first glance they all look disabled), though, I mostly like the look that Big Sur's ushered in.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#248

Post by notriddle »

malermeister wrote: post #115
jeroenhd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that they don't care about the themes their end users pick, though. You can theme your app just fine. They just want operating systems using their software (with their logos, trademarks and support links) to stop shipping their custom themes by default. They just don't want Canonical or Fedora to ship a theme that makes all applications that didn't come bundled look like shit. If you like the Windows 95 Hotdog S…

But end users use the same mechanism to theme their apps as vendors and that one is being removed.

Exactly.

Now you know why the application developers are so loud and angry. We can’t have nice things because distributions shipped broken default configurations, and that’s messed up.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#249

Post by charrondev »

layer8 wrote: post #208
jchw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of this stuff can be made to work. We’ve tolerated a great degree of complexity just to make fonts look good at 96 DPI. Looks like we’re able to tolerate a bit more complexity to enable GPU rendering. However, many years into having high DPI displays, it’s not obvious people are willing to take the complexity to make low DPI and high DPI screens look good simultaneously. The thing is, with fonts , we already be…

I’ve come to the same conclusion. Making hi(-ish)-DPI work would be possible with the right APIs. But it’s virtually impossible to also make it work for traditional low-DPI displays at the same time. The departure from pixel-art icons to vector icons alone has already degraded the low-DPI experience substantially. It doesn’t help that developers and designers tend to not use low-DPI displays anymore. But many regular…

This is the reason I skipped 1440p altogether and jumped to 1080p@2x.

My eyesight isn’t the greatest so to run 1440p I need to run 1.5x which makes a lot of things work really badly.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#250

Post by azinman2 »

chillfox wrote: post #224
azinman2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. It largely was a copy of Apple, unfortunately. However I think it at least pushed the bar of what might be possible with Linux, and they're no longer around [1]. I'm hoping someone can come and give real high quality work to the FOSS community and take on a wider perspective. They had to basically do their own thing instead of pushing GNOME/KDE along, which may have to be unfortunately the case. It would be…

Wut... what, when how??? I love ElementaryOS, it's great, everything just works, I didn't have to tweak a single thing or mess with drivers earlier this year when I installed it on a new laptop that even Mint was having issues with. Going off to read that link now.

Funny, I tried it last year and keep getting kernel panics. That’s the thing that’s hard about Linux — a million different hardware configurations.
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