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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

#541

Post by pornel »

j1elo wrote: post #156

> I feel like the designers of this new theme have never sit down with anyone who's not a "techie" to explain to them how to use a computer. The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind…

macOS has the same problem: everything is flat. There are no borders around many buttons. It's hard to tell what is a label and what is a button, or which controls are disabled, and which are merely de-emphasized.

Apple used to be held as the pinnacle of design, but what does it say when their latest UI is indistinguishable from an amateur design?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#542

Post by AlanYx »

grishka wrote: post #269
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…

Borderless buttons to have the right to exist, but you should be very careful with their use. For example, take this UI I made recently: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107998100334356147 , 2nd screenshot. The button to decline invitation looks like a link (same color) and it's next to a real button. No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable. But a black word in a larger font among bla…

>No one would ever get confused by this, it's pretty clear it's clickable.

It's pretty clear that it's clickable, but I definitely wouldn't think it's a button. My best guess would be that it's a navigation element, and that clicking on it brings you to some other page where a decline invitation button might be found, or where you have to fill out some form to explain why you're declining.

Part of it is because it looks exactly the same as "Test User", and presumably that isn't a button... I imagine that is a navigation element. But part of it is also because quite a few recent Microsoft corporate products (Sharepoint, Dynamics, etc.) seem to use the idiom you're trying to use for signaling that something isn't a button.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#543

Post by Forgeties79 »

znowcone wrote: post #455
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audacity is a piece that made me learn its hotkeys. Once you do that, it’s pretty nice actually.

It works, I guess. But after I've worked with a proper DAW (Reaper in my case), Audacity felt like a toy

A toy with the best noise cancellation tool of any audio program out there though.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#544

Post by michaelsalim »

matsemann wrote: post #522
toqy wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Precisely. And the text isn't even guaranteed to be there (I don't use iOS).

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#545

Post by michaelsalim »

matsemann wrote: post #284
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…

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.

Seconded. Wasn't able to unlock one the last time I touched an iPhone. And I even owned one - iPhone 5. Some people I talk to share similar experience.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#546

Post by harry8 »

simion314 wrote: post #306
harry8 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're Apple and you make your desktop more attractive and pleasant you drive sales and market share. If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Is that still the case? It would be a huge disincentive for other distros to contribute…

>If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Fact check, Gnome was filled of memory leaks and performance issues until some competent Canonical developer started working back on GNOME and fixing them. So while Ubunut was not using GNOME…

Who? When? What? They hired Henstridge to work on nothing to do with gnome? Redhat hired a bunch of core gnome devs to work on gnome? No? Happy to find out I'm wrong if there are facts involved...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#547

Post by account42 »

cout wrote: post #230
Sunspark wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you really want to go against the grain, may I suggest radial menus, which allow the user to muscle-memory through menu selections: https://bindpose.com/custom-marking-menu-maya-python/

This and many variants of the idea has been explored in games a lot - in particular in point and click adventures and isometric (or at least top-down view) RPGs. Probably also in strategy games and anything else that has both a cursor and context-specific actions.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#548

Post by kaba0 »

cornel_io wrote: post #334
sgt wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jetbrains really should just update the JDK they use.

With a slightly larger max memory setting than default and using at least G1 garbage collector (ZGC for even better results) they would get a buttery smooth editor, but it is configured quite badly by default.

Though sometimes they just have threading issues, which won’t be solved by above.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#549

Post by thesuitonym »

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...

I recently had to use the Outlook web client to send an email and the experience was nothing short of horrendous. The autocomplete feature kept eating keypresses unless I typed exactly what it was expecting, or accepted what it wanted me to say, and pressed tab. Of course, I can type faster than it can predict, so I'd be done with a word before the prediction would show up, and the damn thing would eat the space and the first two or three letters of the next work.

Who the hell is working on this stuff?

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