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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

#331

Post by mise_en_place »

The Linux ecosystem is having a similar identity crisis as Microsoft and Apple. Some are of the opinion it should be mobile first, desktop first, or server/IOT/embedded. These are all competing concerns and will lead to further fragmentation in an already fragmented ecosystem.

The design of libadwaita is very reminiscent of the time I was at Apple. Around the time they decided to unify the codebase and lay off the entire OS X team and reorg it into a new software team. I noticed the design changes as part of dogfooding internal OS X versions and design changes were jarring to say the least.

In short, a product cannot be all things to all people. It should play to its strengths and delight it’s existing and new customers/users.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#332

Post by reidrac »

> The feedback I get is that I should move to QT/KDE [...]

That, at least, has been consistent since first release of Gnome 3 over 10 years ago.

Honestly, I don't know why I tried that hard to like the new Gnome. I'm so much happier using XFCE.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#333

Post by mjevans »

lelanthran wrote: post #320
Flow wrote: post #270

I 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 s…

> And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well. The worst of which are dropdowns, lists or menus that inserts new items right over where your mouse is so that you accidentally click on the wrong thing. All browsers do this for the dropdown that appears when typing in the URL bar. I type a few letters, see the site I want is 3 down in the dropdown, hit the down arrow three times and press enter, only…

That is the worst thing. Updating a UI while the user is interacting with it.

Everything that reaches the screen should remain FIXED in place unless moved //by the user//.

This might happen E.G. because something was loading and now gets a resize event; so some list suddenly changes the position of everything rather than force the user to click something else to resize the misbehaving entry. (Scrolling could also do this, if it's based on a distinct UI element that is not 'activate the list'.)

I think of this frequently when I interact with bad offenders, Like Waze on my phone. I have like 2 addresses starred in addition to the home and work slots. It should PIN those, in a fixed (probably alphabetical) order under the home and work slots. If it's not going to do that for starred items (maybe I have 300 addresses?) it should give me a different widget to pin them.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#334

Post by cornel_io »

sgt wrote: post #329
porker wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. On Win10 I'm getting regular delays in keypresses and just enough lag when typing to be noticeable. I've been trying plugging in two USB keyboards as a poor man's split keyboard, and the amount of software (looking at you IntelliJ in particular) that does…

Delays on keypresses.. in 2022. Are we going backwards?!

IntelliJ is really bad about this sometimes. I get that their software does an incredible amount of really tough stuff behind the scenes (which is why I won't be switching any time soon), but God I wish they prioritized input responsiveness over everything else.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#335

Post by adhesive_wombat »

fho wrote: post #328
Flow wrote: post #270

I 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 s…

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses This does not seem to be the case, is it? I recently, accidentally hit Win+term+Enter into a Windows VM (intending it to hit the Linux host machine) and was surprised when a terminal popped up.

If it's some kind of timing/performance/hardware interface issue, it's quite possible different machines will act differently.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#336

Post by seanhunter »

Just last week I found myself in a position where I was at a major event (SXSW in Austin TX) having to support normal users trying to do various things on mobile and it's really eye-opening when you see first-hand how bad the experience is. I had a conversation with a user recently which went something like this:

'Yeah I know they have an app but your thing won't show up in the app for about a day so you need to go to their website on mobile to see it. Right, you're on the mobile website and I know your thing is still not showing up now. To see it, go to the hamburger menu in the top right. Yeah I know it doesn't look like a menu, or a hamburger. The three lines, that's a menu. Now go "account -> profile". Now you see the text where it says "XXX"? That's actually a tab. I know it doesn't look like a tab, just a word. You can't see any of the other tabs because they are actually off the right-hand side of the screen. I know it doesn't look like you can scroll, but just drag it across and you'll see the other tabs. Ok now click on the tab marked "YYY"'

Trying to figure out this user flow for myself so I could help people reminded me of charging around hitting random walls in "Dark Souls" trying to find out which ones were illusory. It's really embarrassing how bad things have got.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#337

Post by lelanthran »

ghosty141 wrote: post #99
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 too hate the material design kind of flatness. For me, only apple somehow gets UI right (at least for me) and it feels very intuitive for me while also looking very good. The new "flat" design that pops up everywhere sometimes just feels like a lazy version of UI design, where you basically don't need proper styles anymore and just make everything b/w with maybe a border here and there.

> I too hate the material design kind of flatness. For me, only apple somehow gets UI right (at least for me) and it feels very intuitive for me while also looking very good.

I dunno about that (both Apple using flat, and the "gets it right" part).

I'm looking at activity monitor now, under memory pressure, and the table of memory types has "Memory used" row expanded, and yet none of the rows are actually clickable. I spent a few seconds yesterday trying to click the other rows.

Then I looked at system preferences, and it's not actually flat widgets - they have relief for those things that can be interacted with. Things that are clickable are visually marked as such.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#338

Post by cornel_io »

heisenzombie wrote: post #309
rezonant wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File". Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think…

There are guidelines for what should be in menu bars, what order the items should be in, and how they should behave for different sorts of application. For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m... > "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help? On Mac, it sh…

Wait, there's a standard for ribbon menus??? I thought that was just a horrible failed experiment that drove a huge number of people away from the MS suite towards Google Docs and was abandoned...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#339

Post by bredren »

seanhunter wrote: post #336

Just last week I found myself in a position where I was at a major event (SXSW in Austin TX) having to support normal users trying to do various things on mobile and it's really eye-opening when you see first-hand how bad the experience is. I had a conversation with a user recently which went something like this: 'Yeah I know they have an app but your thing won't show up in the app for about a day so you need to go t…

What was sxsw like this year? Haven’t been for a while, but am curious after the break and current covid context.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#340

Post by zozbot234 »

grishka wrote: post #269
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…

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 bla…

That's an action link, not a button. In a UI context it would be rendered in a different color and underlined, to highlight it being an active element rather than a simple label.
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