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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

471–480 of 666 posts

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.

The first time somebody handed me an unlocked iPhone asking me to send a SMS (she was driving) I wasn't able to do it. I had to ask her where to touch. She was really surprised. I had a few years of experience on Android and 10+ with feature phones. On the other side, I asked another friend of mine to take a picture with my Android phone a couple of weeks ago and she (an iPhone user) wasn't able to find the camera ap…

On iPhone you can swipe left on the Lock Screen, or press the icon on the Lock Screen, or you can pick it from a menu you pull down from the top of the screen, or find the app via icon, search, full app list. Maybe other ways I don’t use or know.

I would assume that it’s similar on android, access the camera from lock screen or app. I’d probably try the iPhone style swipe the lock screen if I didn’t see a shutter or camera looking icon, otherwise I’d use search (if I could find that) to find the app.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#472

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. 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.

All of the Jetbrains editors also have these bugs in some places too unfortunately. The main one I run into is when you open the fuzzy goto modal (CMD + O) there’s a delay before the window opens where if you paste/type anything it goes into the file you’re editing instead of the search box. It’s been like this for at least 5 years.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#473
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More modern apps (— early 2000s should be “modern” enough by X11 standards, but my memory is foggy and I’m too young to really be an expert here —) instead blit pixmaps sent over shmem, defeating both network transparency and the inherent “vector” nature of many of the old drawing commands. X11 didn’t really handle anything other than knowing the DPI (… that you told it …) This is entirely untrue. Did you even try…

> This is entirely untrue. Did you even try ? Qt even at version 6 still supports rendering through X11 commands, and afaik does that by default when ssh'ing on Debian distros. When you connect over SSH, it will fail to setup XShm and then it will work as expected, only slower than the speed of smell, because now it’s shipping pixmaps over the network. Not all X11 clients continue to work properly if XShm can’t be es…

> When you connect over SSH, it will fail to setup XShm and then it will work as expected, only slower than the speed of smell, because now it’s shipping pixmaps over the network.

no, this is false. Here's a video of dolphin, KDE's Qt 5 file manager, run over ssh on another computer: does that look like it's blitting pixmaps over the network ?

https://www.veed.io/view/d822f1b3-305a-4af1-8df6-61439515ccc...

When checking nload, this uses ~8 megabyte/second, I can let you imagine how much it would be to blit a constantly scrolling UI at 140 fps - I can assure you that even gigabit ethernet does not cut it unless compressing a lot :-)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#474
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…

The app search in both iOS and Android do this to this day. Every time I launch an app I didn’t intend to launch because it popped into the results suddenly, I nearly throw my phone. It’s literally rage inducing.

How hard is it just to grep The list of local apps on a device entirely before showing me the results? Why on earth does it even take a notable amount of time?

I don’t say this lightly when I say someone should be fired. Everyone on every level of every who let this exist should be blackballed by the entire industry. Managers, QA. Someone should’ve spoken up. It’s an absolute moral failure.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#475
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> how can it be so slow? Because it is trying to be all things to all people: including supporting sponsored content and integrating with any fancy new/copied idea that the company is pushing (which may be quietly deprecated in the next major revision, but the hooks left adding abstraction load to everything else so that the few who actually found it useful don't complain).

Just you wait until they want to be able to run apps inside of it. Because they probably will want to do that. Unfortunately

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#476

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…

I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.

If they can’t read “swipe up to open” then they’re going to have a rough time in life in general

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#477

It's the cycle of GNOME. Every few years they introduce something new that causes lots of regressions. Some of these regressions are then being worked at, some are defended as "design decisions" (no theming, Nautilus opening a new window for every folder, broken filechooser dialog, desktop indexer you can't turn off). Bugs are worked on and thing stabilize. People learn workarounds for their issues. Then another iOS-…

> Then another iOS-inspired thing comes and things break again.

This always puzzled me, there's been a time around 2010-2011 where everyone thought desktop was doomed, tablets would take over its space so you had to design everything to be mobile friendly. Those times have fortunately long gone, tablet are almost a thing of the past, desktop is here to stay, yet GNOME and RH designers still take iOS design as a reference... why?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What system was this? I've used every version of Windows (literally), DOS since the 80s, Macs since the 90s, Linux since the 90s, Atari ST, and several different 8-bit micros and I don't recall ever using F2 to save. I do believe your anecdote but it's completely escaped me what platform might have used F2. Also worth noting that keyboards do still have function keys. In fact I use F2 as my `tmux` control prefix. :)

I remember F2 being save in the DOS era, or maybe I'm misremembering and it was F3... But for many years I've associated F2 with edit or rename.

I do remember when ctrl+shift+insert was common for paste (rather than ctrl+v). I can't remember off hand was copy was beyond it being a similar key combination. Still trips me up these days using cmd instead of ctrl on macs.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#479
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just call it fuzzy search and now it's a feature.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#480
>Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback.

This is so typical for the open-source community. For a supposedly 'open' culture, its full of ivory towers and (layers of) cool kids clubs, meaning if you want to build an app, or change something you don't like, and want others to be able to use your changes as well, you are met with layers of people who are at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, but the thing is you absolutely NEED their approval unless you can make your own distro (your own club) and fork their code and try to somehow keep up with the main branch.

The last thing I want to do with my free time, is solve an issue, only to be met with draconian authority telling me how to build my app, and then have to solve my issue again in 6 months, when the platform people break everything.

I think the culture of abusing volunteers on a volunteer-driven project is exactly why desktop Linux can't break out of the niche OS category.

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