100% agree.
The end of the nice GTK button
261–270 of 666 posts
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. 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…
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Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I'm not saying it's perfect
I didn’t stop listing problems because I ran out. I stopped because I got bored. Now you got me going again:
* Why does input-file have no “Browse” button?
* Why does log file have no “Browse” button?
* What is the point of showing the command line flags? I’ve seen a few GUI apps that let me “export CLI” commands that match what I configured in the GUI. That would be a much better way to do this.
* Why does nothing indicate that the exclude/include lists are only used for recursive fetching?
* Extra Params can potentially be very long, yet the box is tiny.
* I assume quota=0 turns the feature off. Why no check mark?
* Why do the exclude lists have check marks, when leaving them empty should be equivalent to turning them off, if quota has none.
Wget’s CLI is better than that thing.
> 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.
I did intentionally start my post by saying I agree with this part. iOS 7 was a mistake.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#264I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design.
I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average.
But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user friendly. You usually know when something is a button because the context makes it obvious. If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs, but I think they're usually channeling a hatred of something else, like monopolies or proprietary things.
Moreover, I think flat design is not a fad but an inevitability. As a rule, designs become more abstract over time, because as users get more used to UIs, they need fewer clues. It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job.
Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs.
You could argue that we've gone too far too fast. I don't have a dog in that fight. But I would bet my big toe that we're not going to reverse time and end up with skeuomorphism again. Instead, we're going to take advantage of faster GPUs to visualize abstractions in ways we couldn't before. We're seeing that with blurred background effects becoming more common. I for one am excited to see what's next.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
XMonad has also escaped the visual design fads quite well.
Does it have any visual elements at all, isn't it only showing other applications visual content?
Well, I was a bit tongue in cheek.
There's some minimul visual elements, eg if you choose the tabbed layout.
So the comparison for XMonad wouldn't be all of KDE or Gnome, but just how those two choose to decorate their windows. Eg their 'minimize' and 'close' buttons and window borders.
To be slightly more serious than my original comment was:
If you can rethink your UI in such a way that some things can become invisible, that can be a very ergonomic choice.
To give a better example: look at the bad old days of C and memory management via malloc and free.
One direction you can go into is Rust. Compared to C, Rust has a greatly improved user interface [0] for handling memory allocation.
Another direction you can go into is Python. Compared to C, memory management is basically invisible in Python. It just works.
Now, of course, Python gets to simplify its UI by essentially removing control from the user. But for many programming tasks, that's a good trade-off to make.
Similarly, iOS gets to drop the UI elements associated with manipulating windows, because it puts every app in full screen. (And XMonad greatly discourages you from fiddling with Window placement and layout manually; but has some less-intuitive less-discoverable means to do that manual fiddling, if you need it.)
[0] The user of Rust being typically called a 'programmer'.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#266> 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 t…
Gnome3 is a disaster. When Ubuntu made the switch to Unity and dropped Gnome2 support, I played around it and said, "nah", and went for Gnome... And after using it a bit I suddenly thought they Unity Desktop is not all that bad. With time it even grew on me, especially the saved vertical space.
Current Gnome is still unusable crap, with all those ugly buttons in window titles and lots of wasted space.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#267I 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…
> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at.
Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/
I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about as long, and regular FOSS users since the late 90s. Like most other designer/developers I know— there are way more than you think— I contribute code regularly but never design work. Why? Because it's a sucky experience.
Most FOSS UIs are akin to someone's first website made from cargo-culted code from free tutorials. Fixing it is harder than starting from scratch and either approach takes significant intellectual work before even seriously proposing changes... and those proposals are received with something on a spectrum of suspicion to outright hostility.
Would you contribute code to a project run by people with no coding experience but were extremely opinionated about code, bikeshedded and poopooed all code changes as a matter of course AND referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt you and so many other developers here displayed in your comments? Gosh I hope not.
I often hear FOSS developers lament lack of designer involvement, but won't even entertain the prospect of having any culpability for that. I mean, come on.
UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. The problems you see in UIs are because the people running the projects Solicited the wrong kind of designers or let people without subject matter expertise trampler on some core features of the design.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#268To 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 ca…
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Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#269I 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…
Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147, 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable.
But a black word in a larger font among black text would definitely NOT be recognized as a button by most people. Context matters a lot.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#270I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion.
Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something.
Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up".
And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.
Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues?
Things like "Hide cursor while typing" in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad.
Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.
I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I've been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there's less consideration of almost everything.