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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#251

Post by girvo »

j1elo wrote: post #156

> I feel like the designers of this new theme have never sit down with anyone who's not a "techie" to explain to them how to use a computer. The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind…

To back this up, the "actually has a degree in HCI" UX profressionals I worked with at a previous job railed against flat design and ensured our output was clear and intuitive. Though there was only two of them, so I can't say all of them would be like that!

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#252

Post by chrismorgan »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #243
chrismorgan wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

No, but Matthew Butterick, who made them, is: https://mbtype.com/, https://mbtype.com/bio.html.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#253

Post by woah »

capableweb wrote: post #105
woah wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inherently, good design requires top down authority to force a consistent look, and implementing it requires a bunch of programmers to spend time on boring work. That just doesn't work well in open source where people only want to work on their own thing, sometimes, and in their own way.

Same could be same about good software design (as in programming), but we've found to design well written software before in a open source manner, I'm sure we could (if we focus on it) figure out something for UI/UX design as well that works in a open source context. For example, style guides written and enforced by a small team can allow open contributions for the UI design. I think it's mostly that not many have tr…

No, definitely not. Good software does not require all the code in it to be written in the same style, and it never is.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#254

Post by eMSF »

dv_dt wrote: post #49

Can I also mourn the loss of title bars as I carefully hunt for a spot to grab a window to move it?

For me, what you're referring to is one of the reasons I don't like to use Windows as a desktop OS (because you need to hunt for these relatively small target areas to organise multiple windows). The alternative which I greatly prefer is outlined in the other responses.

In the past, I used to disable title bars entirely even on full-sized monitors. These days it's not so easy to do that, though.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#255

Post by RedShift1 »

cout wrote: post #230
Sunspark wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you really want to go against the grain, may I suggest radial menus, which allow the user to muscle-memory through menu selections: https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/

Visually nice but it's almost always going to overlap the thing you've right clicked. Under any circumstance I still want to see the thing I've right clicked.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#257

Post by Izkata »

wolpoli wrote: post #48

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 don't understand why modern toolbar icons are basically abstract shapes represented by lines.

Eventually it'll mutate into cuneiform and no one will realize they've learned an ancient script.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#258

Post by rtpg »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #178
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…

> 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?

To play a bit in this space, if you check out the settings panel in Ubuntu compared to, say, the Windows XP control panel, you'll see that Gnome's settings panel is more usable. Mainly on account of having a single entry point, and the search bar on the top.

I think a lot of this is influenced by modern MacOS and iOS settings management (much like, to my recollection, Gnome 2 settings panels were very influenced by how Windows was doing things). It's not like it's 100% better, but for my usage it's felt nicer.

There are also a lot more work in this idea that there are many different ways to get to a settings pane. That way it's easier for people to get to a thing even if they have different ideas of where it "should" be

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#259

Post by aidenn0 »

traverseda wrote: post #220
aidenn0 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a pine-phone and the virtual keyboard just refuses to pop up for some apps (like firefox!!). I keep looking in the settings for "force virtual keyboard on" or something but can't find it.

Firefox does use GTK unfortunately.

But this was running under Plasma Mobile

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#260

Post by lenkite »

RachelF wrote: post #124
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…

> 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…

We probably need to start paying UI folks NOT to change stuff. They can do all their flat-experimenting in custom themes.
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