481–490 of 666 posts
It launches apps, provides me with workspaces, and abstracts all the low level details away so I can focus on actually using my computer.
If people want to customise every minute detail of the themes they shouldn't be using Gnome/GTK. The devs don't have to cater for everyone's needs, they are allowed to focus on a target audience.
My word of choice is amateurism.
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The flatness of some UIs along with the removal of some visual cues has happened that I have tapped on things that aren't actually a button thinking that they might be one. When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.
we started using Full Story at work. It tracks clicks on non clickable items. It is staggering that this is even a problem. Having to explain to people that links and buttons and radio boxes and checkboxes should look uniform has gone the way of the dodo and now we must instead have people clicking random items to hope something happens.
This rattled my brain, that this is a feature now, says volumes about the quality decline in UI. I am a developer, and mainly use tools on the command line, or with TUIs.
But whenever I use android apps and websites, I constantly find myself longclicking or rightclicking things, hoping for stuff to happen, that just doesnt.
> The only issue with it is that font rendering looks horrific, but that might just be my machine. This is because GTK4 enables pixel/scaling-independent fractional vertical positioning, even with hinting enabled. There's a long (somewhat ongoing) discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 , though I haven't followed the last few months of discussion. Even though GTK4 aims to achieve scale-indepen…
I'm not sure I follow the upstream reasoning, in either gtk/qt/firefox/chrome... I'm reading text all day. The UI is still built around 90%+ text, except in very few edge cases.
I'm using 4k monitors, and I'm still a minority. Despite this, at 4k, we're still several years away from the point where we can turn off hinting. Probably a decade away for universal support. A lot more if we include existing monitors.
Between 92 and 270 dpi text still looks bad without proper grid fitting. Under 120dpi we're talking about garbage-level quality. And between 250-300 the difference is still noticeable to make it worth it.
I'm not sure what these people are smoking.
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…
Since Windows 7 (or 8, I can't remember) and the "Metro" style apps, in the Control Panel in particular one of the controls (IIRC it was something like the 'show/hide icons in task tray'), that was previously a button, became a "hyperlink", essentially clickable text. Clickable text that was the same colour as unclickable text. What. The. **
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> 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. A…
I... am sorry, but I think that is extremely bad practice. You should not put yourself in that position, and your experience in that position does not excuse the design flaws in windows. > 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. Well firstly, that isn't what the prompt is for, so I'm struggling to see the relevanc…
Completely correct - I'm not excusing my lack of attention there.
> Well firstly, that isn't what the prompt is for
That's exactly my point. There is no prompt displayed on the screen, you have not been asked for input. You are pre-empting the next prompt before the system is ready for it.
> When I type C-l right now, I can _immediately_ start typing 'news.ycombinator.com'. There is no delay, no animation, nothing. I didn't go through a learning experience of finding out how long I should wait before typing- it's just ready.
Agreed - but that's with the application already open. From the lock screen, it won't do what you intend. With Firefox running and in focus, Ctrl + L tells the application to focus the address bar, but it only works in that context, you first have to prepare the correct context (computer unlocked, Firefox running, in the foreground and focused).
On Windows, Ctrl + Alt + Del tells the system to wake, not 'the next characters entered will necessarily be the password of the most recently logged in user'.
In fact, I tested a little bit, and often Ctrl + Alt + Del on a sleeping system actually asks me to enter a username first, not a password, although in some cases the username is pre-filled for me, and the password prompt will be focused. I cannot necessarily know a priori which I will be asked for until the system wakes and decides.
As soon as Windows displays the prompt, you can type into it (same as Gnome). The only difference is that Windows requires you to first wake and then authenticate once the system is woken, while Gnome allows you to do both simultaneously.
There is one particular 'pro' to the Windows approach of requiring Ctrl+Alt+Del which is that it's an interrupt sequence. If a malicious actor created a full screen application that mimics the Windows password prompt, it would not be effective because the Ctrl+Alt+Del sequence cannot be handled by an application. The same is not true for Gnome - if a malicious actor created a full screen application that mimics the login prompt on Gnome, you could be tricked into entering your password.
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Delays on keypresses.. in 2022. Are we going backwards?!
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.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-la...
There were big improvements over time. IntelliJ performance seems to vary a lot between people. For some (like me) it's great. Others complain of huge delays. Probably, the differences are OS related and/or project size or plugins related. There are so many different configs possible for an app like that.
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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 s…
> 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. This is exactly what I was “hinting” at when I said coming up with a universal function that would work for anything. You can’t just snap some/all things…
Are we talking about single-pixel rounding errors, or something else? The former are already practically undetectable at 1080p, and nearly-so at 768p. Given a high standard of "pixel-perfect" rendering, there's basically zero reason to push resolution any higher!
Of course one can even make pure subpixel-based rendering (no fitting-to-pixels at all) look correct, by starting either from pure vectors or from a higher-resolution raster and then using a Lanczos-style filter to preserve perceived sharpness near the resolution limit of the display. This gets us as near as practicable to something that's almost "pixel perfect", without distorting spatial positions to make them precisely fit a pixel grid.
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> 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
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> 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...
But the best part is throwing in some rdp. The teams share screen rect is carefully designed to cover the entire Remote Desktop title which is required to resize it.