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The end of the nice GTK button

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#361

Post by Moru »

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?!

When I was in school we had 286 computers with windows on them. Some of them had input lag of about 7 seconds in the text editor we were using. Think it was Word but not sure any more. But at least they didn't miss keyboard input, every key stroke came out, just with more or less delay. I did most of my text editing at home on my Atari where there was no delay at all.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#363

Post by solatic »

johnqian wrote: post #264

I'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 fr…

> 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.

This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. Take the original article as an example. How did 3D buttons take away from the "more important things"? Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable from the "To Do" title help to enhance, somehow, the "To Do" title? Does not the strong blue in the flat button ("Add Tasks...") draw user attention to it, distracting from the rest of the UI, rather than withdrawing from the rest of the screen to allow "more important things" to shine?

If flat design really succeeded at helping to direct users' attention to what is important, it wouldn't be subject to the criticism that it confuses users. Users would be helped, not hindered, by such design, no?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#364

Post by zozbot234 »

jchw wrote: post #236
hedora wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but there's clearly an existence proof, and it ran fine on 32 bit machines with slow processors (or even embedded CPUs in the 80's!) way before all the piled hacks you are describing were invented. As I understand it, all that's needed is a vector renderer, and you keep everything (even text) in vector format as long as possible. RGBA then becomes a special case, as it must be for any DPI independent rendering pi…

> OK, but there's clearly an existence proof, and it ran fine on 32 bit machines with slow processors (or even embedded CPUs in the 80's!) way before all the piled hacks you are describing were invented. Yes. Driving ~1024x768 framebuffers, on single core processors, with far less demanding workloads, but still, yes. (They still badly needed good glyph caching to accomplish this.) (I’m assuming a Windows XP-tier mach…

The underlying logic for rendering "hinted" line borders and UI widgets is a lot simpler than for hinting arbitrary text. It's a matter of snapping a few key control points to the pixel grid, and making sure that key line widths take up integer numbers of pixels. Much of the complexity you point out only arises because we now insist on having physically sized rendering for "mixed-DPI" graphics, like a single window spanning both a low- and a high-resolution display. That's not necessarily a very sensible goal, and it's not something that would've been insisted on back when achieving "pixel perfect" rendering was in fact a major concern, regardless of display resolution.

A similar concern is the demand for arbitrary subpixel positioning of screen content, that basically only matters in the context of on-screen animations. Nobody really cares if an animation looks blurry, but it's somewhat more important for static content to look right. Trying to have one's cake and eat it too will always be harder than just focusing on what's actually important for good UX.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#365

Post by Moru »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #335
fho wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It might also be working today but not tomorrow, then you accidentally start "Archies terminologies dictionary" as a websearch instead.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#366

Post by prox »

eloisius wrote: post #305
happymellon wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there. Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design…

Yep. It's the miscellaneous everything bucket. It also seems to only be motivated by either scarce screen real estate (it first showed up in mobile interfaces), or graphic designers who think everything is "clutter" and by sweeping it away into the hamburger menu they can have their beautiful screenshot-worthy interface. I have a 27" monitor, but tons of websites and even Firefox itself hide half the functionality be…

Originally the top menu was to have a way to access to all functions. Many still do (say LibreOffice)

The hamburger is kind of a weird breed of design signaling because of it. In some desktop apps it still is the original top menu, but not always. On websites and apps it can vary tremendously.

However, a top menu is not an expert level mode, it’s a beginners / proficient level mode. Expert level means using keyboard shortcuts.

Context driven display and modes are far more valuable when meeting spacial constraints. But that can be hard when you are dealing with many form factors and so the quick fix is the hamburger.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#369

Post by Sophira »

Ambroisie wrote: post #316
Sophira wrote: post #304

The design of HN has similar issues, honestly, especially on links you've already visited: https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-original-style.png Which parts are links? Which aren't? It's a little more obvious that the main text is a link but not obvious that you can click to view the comments. (It can be inferred, of course, but I don't believe that should be necessary.) A little styling to add underlines back to links, p…

Could you share your style? I'd like to use it too.

Sure! I've cleaned up the CSS a little bit since it was originally only for private use, and published it under CC0 at https://userstyles.world/style/3825/hacker-news-underlines-c... . You should be able to use it with an extension like Stylus[0].

[0] https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/#readme

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#370

Post by fxtentacle »

Derbasti wrote: post #348
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, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. On Windows, the first…

That is one of the main reasons why I switched from XCode to CLion. XCode lost keystrokes, which drove me crazy. The other thing was that I could reliably type faster than XCode could display the letters, which made me feel like I'm drunk.

CLion seems to be quite excellent at recording and replaying everything, including stuff I type while the auto-completion is loading. Plus it has a really fast key to screen loop.

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