The end of the nice GTK button • Hacker News Board

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#371

Post by gurkendoktor » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:29 AM UTC

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…

> Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion.

Here's another one: "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone"

Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-different...

The whole point of the settings app shown in the OP's screenshots is to quickly find the relevant section in the sidebar. But even before the great design madness of 2012, designers have started to remove icon colors everywhere. (Except for app icons, where Google and Apple have now removed shapes instead, sigh.)

From the sidelines, it doesn't look like the trend is reversing in GNOME land. https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#372

Post by hulitu » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:31 AM UTC

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…

Win 10 tought me to type again at least CTRL+ALT if i want my password to be accepted from the first time. Clicking with the mouse sometimes works before entering the password. It seems that at MS and also in other areas (Android, Gnome) people want just to code new things but not debug or fix bugs. They also must be as simple as possible because: 1. code reuse sucks. 2. Thinking is hard.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#373

Post by bacheaul » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:31 AM UTC

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…

Oh, don't get me started... MS Teams has been doing this recently at work. Everyone is pinning messages, because when you hover over the Edit menu item for a message and go to click it, two more menu items load asynchronously below it, and switch the Edit button out for a Pin Message button right when you go to click it. And it's not even consistently like that, just sometimes. It's infuriating...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#374

Post by fxtentacle » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:32 AM UTC

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…

I still remember the good old days where keyboards had Function keys and apps would prominently display a F2 next to the save button, an F10 next to quit. Even for computer illiterate people, that made using keyboard shortcuts a bliss. Save was ALWAYS on F2 no matter what you did, so people would put physical stickers on their keyboard to make the F2 button say "Save" on the keycap.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#375

Post by d1sxeyes » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:32 AM UTC

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's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do.

Although I agree this is annoying, to be completely fair, it doesn't suggest that you should start typing your password immediately.

You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to.

Arguably, you have been 'taught' or you have inferred yourself that you should expect a sleeping system to immediately accept your keypresses as a password, which although reasonable is not necessarily a good practice.

For example - I have two computers connected to the same keyboard, one is indeed Gnome, the other Windows. I have twice now typed my password into what I thought was my sleeping Gnome system, hit enter, only to have to apologise to someone on Teams because I accidentally sent them my password because my keyboard was sending my keypresses to the Windows PC.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#376

Post by ephbit » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:33 AM UTC

AnonCoward4 wrote: post #342

spoils19 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day I definitely agree with this, and I like your use of the word disrespect. I think the younger generation has encroached onto the sanctity of "the platform", if you will, and now us old timers are suffering. I time myself for my actions every day since I started noticing these despicable UI trends, and on average I waste about 2-3 hours a week trying to discover w…

> But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today. Coming from that era, I strongly disagree. While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era and that one just…

> While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era ...

Maybe that's the thing. More coherence might be nicer, yes. But it might also not make UIs easier to use. Maybe sqeezing apps into a tight framework of UI coherence, makes the overall appearance of what's on the screen more appealing but at the same time loose usability.

Think of special applications like technical ones (Blender) or office (Thunderbird, LibreOffice) and also simple ones like a notepad application. Now try to find a common set of UI elements to use for all of them. What you'll probably get, is an OK notepad but a disturbingly bloated Blender.

TLDR Niceness does IMO conflict with usability and the former sure shouldn't be prioritized over the latter.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#377

Post by fxtentacle » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:34 AM UTC

porker wrote: post #326

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. 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…

Oddly enough, I switched towards the JetBrains IDEs precisely because my impression is that they never lose keystrokes or change the ordering.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#378

Post by hulitu » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:34 AM UTC

linguae wrote: post #300

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…

I feel the same way. It's like we're back to the MS-DOS era where every application had its own interface and you had to learn each application's way of performing tasks. macOS and to a lesser extent Windows prided themselves on consistency across applications. But this required developers to voluntarily conform to those platform's guidelines, and in the case of Windows, the goal of consistency was challenged by (1)…

If you look at Windows 1.0 GUI and Windows 10 UI they look verry similar. Makes you think what Microsoft was doing all these years.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#379

Post by hulitu » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:35 AM UTC

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?!

Yes.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#380

Post by ho_schi » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 8:36 AM UTC

linguae wrote: post #300

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…

I feel the same way. It's like we're back to the MS-DOS era where every application had its own interface and you had to learn each application's way of performing tasks. macOS and to a lesser extent Windows prided themselves on consistency across applications. But this required developers to voluntarily conform to those platform's guidelines, and in the case of Windows, the goal of consistency was challenged by (1)…

I've never seen any consistency MS-DOS, Win9x and WinNT. The worst offender is Microsoft itself with the file-browser, settings and office-suits. They don't maintain and evolve their toolkit, they just add new ones and recommend to use them instead:

  Win32: Win32, Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC and probably more   
  Gtk: Gtk+, Gtk2+, Gtk3+, Gtk4
  Qt: Qt1, Qt2, Qt3, Qt4, Qt5, Qt6

Gtk and Qt didn't just maintain but provides major upgrades and changes. People complained that Gtk changed stuff, which is unfair. The various feature removals in GNOME3 after the first release provided bigger problems. I'm rather sure the changes between Qt major release also require work from developers. Custom theming is an issue with Gtk but also something I cannot recommend as developer and user. It is complicated on toolkit side and faulty on user side. Qt seems do to better in this regard but the user side problems remain. Apple just says just no to theming at all. I've also never felt the desire to theme Gtk because it looked good by default since Gtk3+ and even backported to some stuff to Gtk2+. There is of Java and Swing, yes, but I'm afraid the first error was including a toolkit into a language library.

With Gtk and their HIG most stuff looks decent and usable. Windows? Nobody cares about the HIG. Micrsoft provides more toolkits than I know. And a lot developers just do whatever they want on Windows. Or worse, they use Electron. Microsoft Teams is the worst "application" in this regard.

By the way:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

The font rendering issue. I recommend ignoring the blaming (users) and ignoring (developers) on both sides and instead reading the details involved. Looks like mostly intended and used during development on HiDPI-Displays and they need people experienced in font drawing matters. Some fixes are landing already. Taking into account how much effort was put in Harfbuzz, Freetype, Pango and Cairo I think they can only learn from this - being more careful and keeping backward compatible solutions alongside until the new stuff is working fine for all.