Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 666 posts

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#521

Post by lkxijlewlf »

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…

Used to be they had time to get UI better. Now, if you have the same UI for 6 months people think you've stalled and start looking for new. Everything has to be constant churn, constant change. Far too many people today get bored way too easily.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#522

Post by matsemann »

toqy wrote: post #476
matsemann wrote: post #284

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.

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

But that text is a lie! You can't swipe up to open. You have to swipe up from the bottom to open. So not just a general upwards swipe.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#523

Post by zozbot234 »

wakeupcall wrote: post #484
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #76

> 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…

Which is why QtQuick controls always looked like absolute garbage. And firefox degraded as well when webrender got enabled. 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 wh…

It looks like garbage because of poor rendering quality. There's no theoretical reason why a screen could not look quite sharp even at 768p, and literally perfect at 1080p; anything higher would then be pure overkill or at best catering to a tiny minority of users with superhuman eyesight. You don't even need hinting or fitting to a pixel grid for "correct" rendering, it's just generally easier that way. But you can't let the rendering itself blur stuff and waste screen resolution - you need a good resampling filter to preserve sharpness even at the highest spatial frequencies, and the typical bilinear/bicubic approach doesn't do that.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#524

Post by kaba0 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #501
OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GP's (I think reasonable) point was that typing A on the keyboard of a locked (or worse, sleeping) computer has no reason to be interpreted as "input the letter A into the password field that will be displayed on screen", which is what the original post is assuming it should mean. There's no real reason it should even mean "input the letter A into the first field that comes into focus", which may anyway not be the pa…

Well, you usually see the logged in user’s name and icon on the screen, and presumably you left your own computer there.

And frankly, UX is about finding the little practices that make the experience better — arbitrarily waiting for windows to bring up a prompt is not making me any good, since I know what I want to do. So in my opinion in this very special case, windows is simply doing an incorrect thing — making the common case slow.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#525

Post by kaba0 »

mjevans wrote: post #333
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…

That is the worst thing. Updating a UI while the user is interacting with it. Everything that reaches the screen should remain FIXED in place unless moved //by the user//. This might happen E.G. because something was loading and now gets a resize event; so some list suddenly changes the position of everything rather than force the user to click something else to resize the misbehaving entry. (Scrolling could also do…

I would add that adding to an end of a list dynamically can be okay (if it doesn’t cause previous content to jump as you mention).

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#526

Post by MarkusWandel »

When it comes to UI stupidity in general, here are two from my work machine (Windows 10 laptop).

- there's the prominent notification speech bubble on the bottom right, which seems to be very inconsistently used. Almost all the notifications are duplications of an already popped-up notification, and a lot of important stuff doesn't end up in there. So it's just a nuisance. The worst is that for one application, the notification essentially says "you need to push this button to proceed" while covering up the freakin' button I need to push!

- If you have a Word document already open and minimized, and you open up a second one - at least triggered from the browser in Sharepoint - what happens is the already open document opens up, with the newly opened one underneath! If these are based on a common template, I frequently find myself scrolling up and down looking for the graphic I need to refer to, only 20 seconds later realizing I'm in the wrong document again.

These don't have much to do with UI skin annoyances, but they do have to do with this:

Apple stuff had really good UI while Steve Jobs was in charge. Someone powerful enough to get anything changed who is fanatically devoted to good, usable UI was gold there. All these weird inconsistent UIs are "design by committee" or worse, no design at all. Nobody has overall veto power, or at least nobody who cares enough.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#527

Post by marwis »

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…

Indeed Windows sucks but PowerToys has a much faster launcher replacement on alt+space

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#528

Post by petesergeant »

Sorry to side-swipe this. The pictures in the article all have a fuzziness I've come to associate with Linux GUIs over the last couple of decades. Is there a specific reason for it? Is the font the problem? Some kind of font-hinting patent they can't impinge on?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#530

Post by andai »

fxtentacle wrote: post #370
Derbasti wrote: post #348

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.

JetBrains did a lot of work to reduce typing latency of their IDEs:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-la...

As an aside, I find it amusing that more latency is introduced by a USB keyboard than existed in an entire 80's computer (from keypress to rendering on screen). See also: Carmack's rant about how it takes longer to put a pixel on the screen than ping across the Atlantic.

Post reply on HN