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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

#421

Post by Hendrikto »

spoils19 wrote: post #278
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 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!

Because that‘s what you are accustomed to.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#422

Post by qalmakka »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #26

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose). That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number of…

> That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming

They care about that so much that they break Gtk+ every few version, to the point that in 2022 there are still Gtk+ 2 apps around, and there will be Gtk+ 3 apps following old design paradigms for years to come. So much for consistency.

It's 2022 and I don't see Qt 4 around anymore, or apps using it still being widely in use. Guess why? Because Qt developers actually give a damn about people using their library, and they give a damn about people using the _latest_ version of it.

What GNOME is doing today is telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and pushing people towards writing their next app in Qt, which by the way integrates nicely with GNOME and does not look like garbage everywhere else. Now with PySide being finally a first class citizen and working well with QML there's not even the "but C++ is ugly" card to play against going Qt.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#423

Post by birksherty »

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…

> It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job.

Nope. It just makes everything horrible, more pressure on brain to find out and slow in the end to do everyday operations. It's just the designers who love these just for the looks (they don't even know what design actually means), not for any usability.

Tech would have better without these type of "designers".

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#424

Post by InCityDreams »

hulitu wrote: post #397
k8sToGo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Notepad", cool name for a dog.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#425

Post by Aeolos »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #386
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…

> 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. The arguably worst offender in MacOS these days is the emoji picker. Press ctrl+cm…

Yes, this one is particularly weird.

How can a grid of unicode characters take 500-1000ms to display on a machine with an m1, 16GB of memory and a blazing fast NVME disk?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#426

Post by blacklion »

Why. Does. These. Interfaces. Have. This. Amount. Of. Empty. Space?!

Looks like all these "Connected - 1000Mb/s" can be 2-2.5 times more compact in V direction. And huge spaces between labels and controls. Why do we need these?!

It is plague of last years. You have FullHD screen, you see 3-4 options in FireFox settings,when "old skool" UI could pack all of them onto one FullHD screen.

It is everywhere. Huge spaces, scrollbars (which doesn't work with keyboard, as controls intercept focus)... Scrollbars are for text, not for GU!

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#427

Post by formerly_proven »

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…

iirc this is a Windows 8/10 regression and worked perfectly on Windows 7.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#428

Post by dm319 »

I suppose the price you pay of having a consistent desktop experience is that changes to the desktop look affect the look of your app, and you don't have much control over this.

From a user perspective, I prefer this the hodge podge on Windows which I find disorientating. But I agree that a bit of non-flatness can be very helpful for the eyes.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#429

Post by ansible »

sime2009 wrote: post #387
chefandy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

The complaint about flat design isn't levelled only at FOSS, but at the whole industry. Your points may explain the situation in FOSS, but it doesn't explain the poor work being put out by the thousands of designers and UI/UX people working as professionals in industry. The failings of flat design are everywhere .

Part of me wants to throw up my hands in the air and cry out "Why, God, why?" when I encounter yet another UI with flat design.

It is like a mass delusion or something that some segment of the population seems to think it that flat design is actually useful for the everyday user.

We've seen other stupid useless crap spread like a wave across our industry, across our society... so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Though I've started to question my own sanity.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#430

Post by dm319 »

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…

Goodness the start bar on Windows. For something that is meant to be a key part of both the mouse and the keyboard workflow, how can it be so slow? My work computers can hang for so long on it, that it is quicker to find the application shortcut on the desktop.
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