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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

#391

Post by IshKebab »

lmm wrote: post #91
traverseda wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of cathartic watching this happen to a new generation of developers. They can't say I didn't warn them! Ultimately I think this will be quite good for QT/kde in the long term. Gnome/GTK gets a lot of corporate support, especially from red hat, but seeing the issues pop OS had with GTK makes me hopeful that more companies will adopt QT.

I've been hoping that for 20 years but it hasn't happened yet. It seemed like American companies always favoured GTK/GNOME (I guess because Qt/KDE development was more European?), even though Qt/KDE generally managed to do more with less. But I can appreciate that if you're aiming for the corporate market, customizability may be a downside.

Qt is far more popular in corporate software than GTK. It's way better, and companies don't care about Gnome or KDE so there's no reason to pick GTK.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#392

Post by GekkePrutser »

bacheaul wrote: post #373
lelanthran wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Yes!! This seems to be something from the last couple of months. It's so annoying. Though in terms of teams it has many annoyances to compete with..

Also for some reason I often seem to bring up the edit menu on the comment above the one I wanted to pick

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#393

Post by ratww »

peebeebee wrote: post #341
cornel_io wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha, I love the “My IDE is so sluggish, it must be doing important stuff”. It really isn’t. IntelliJ is just horribly laggish. VSCode, an electron (!) app with 100 plugins isn’t even that slow.

Yes. Even if it were doing important stuff, this "important stuff" shouldn't be affecting typing. We have multicore machines now, there's no excuse anymore.

Imagine if it were the opposite, and moving the mouse or speaking into a microphone caused the compilation to fail in subtle ways. Well, background compilation/typechecking/whatever is messing with user interaction.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#394

Post by hulitu »

rezonant wrote: post #299
eqvinox wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.

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…

> The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File?

Does it ? This is the issue when people see no more as their own OS.

In the past, just like today, there were multiple modes to exit a program. One of them is to press Exit and the programm will exit cleanly. The other is to press the X in the window corner in Windows ( or send a close message from a window manager) which, depending on the implementation, might lose data. There is also the option to kill the process. Now in my opinion this Exit is a good thing and it is clear what is doing.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#395

Post by _abox »

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…

At least in the windows 2000 time every app was using the same UI toolkit. That helped a lot

What made some stuff hard was that there were not many pixels available for icons due to the more resolutions in those days, which made icons hard to recognise.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#396

Post by yhbtgvrfc »

I hate rounded corners, giant title bars, no clear borders or 1px borders for grabbig, disappearing scrollbars. I hate when artsy minimalistic designs waste my screen space. Win95 & co got these right for desktop. (touchscreen would be a different matter I admit)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#397

Post by hulitu »

k8sToGo wrote: post #347
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…

Notepad is not old anymore because it has been recently replaced.

> Notepad is not old anymore because it has been recently replaced.

They said the same thing about my parents dog which died last year.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#398

Post by microtonal »

hulitu wrote: post #385
prox wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Expert level means using keyboard shortcuts. This is true when you use only an editor and a debugger. When you need to use 10 programs each with its own keyboard shorcuts (which, BTW you need to search in internet which they are because the company doing the software did not bother to make them accessible in a help menu) you're gonna have a hard time. In the (1985) past you had for such things a holder attached to…

which, BTW you need to search in internet which they are because the company doing the software did not bother to make them accessible in a help menu

At least on macOS and Windows the shortcuts are shown in the (traditional) menu bar. With GNOME's use of hamburgers, it's anyone's guess. As someone who likes shortcuts, I found it very hard to figure out shortcuts in GNOME apps that have a lot of functionality hidden away. (Aside from keyboard shortcuts not being very consistent between apps on Linux.)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#399

Post by microtonal »

rezonant wrote: post #299
eqvinox wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.

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…

On macOS, both the Quit and Preferences items are consistently in the application menu (the menu left of "File" that has the name of the application). And the shortcuts are consistently Cmd + q and Cmd + ,

Well, unless it's an Electron app. Which is another good reason to avoid them altogether.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#400

Post by hulitu »

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…

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance

Or as Statler and Waldorf would have put it: it is a victory of care over matter - we ( developers) don't care and you ( users) don't matter.

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