The end of the nice GTK button • Hacker News Board

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#571

Post by brimble » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

0x38B wrote: post #496

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…

Related: If I type 'ha' for "Hacker News" in Safari's address bar on my iPhone, by the second letter it'll show "Hacker News". But if I'm too quick to hit "Go" on the keyboard, Safari instead searches DuckDuckGo for "ha". The UI must update sooner than some underlying state; this bites me multiple times a day.

Mobile Safari didn't used to do that. I wanna say they introduced that bug a year or two ago. It annoys me constantly and it's worrisome that they haven't fixed it yet.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#572

Post by simion314 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #546

simion314 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

Are you new to GNOME? this is a few years old when Canonical dropped Unity. What was happening was that each GNOME release fixed some memory leaks but create a few new ones, the lag was terrible and when Canonical moved back to GNOME a Canonical developer started fixing stuff, GNOME devs were blaming the hardware for the bugs or were busy with removing features.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-sh... you can google the dev "Daniel Van Vugt" and check his work on GNOME, or you can google "GNOME shell memory leak" , as I said I stopped following Linux stuff (I am still a Linux users) and I have no idea what happened in recent years except the major things like GNOME's reset triggering a new fracture in it's community.

Anway, Canonical was not using GNOME so RH did not avoided paying for better developers because Canonical would benefit. Later when Canonical decided to use GNOME they fixed the major performance issues and memory leaks and put back some of the features the users wanted but designers refused to provide.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#573

Post by dylan-m » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:34 PM UTC

brimble wrote: post #569

inetknght wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Congratulations! You were able to recognize that it's a _login screen_ without seeing that there's a hidden password field. The first time I booted to Gnome I waited damn near ten minutes for it to tell me it's ready for my…

Miming mobile OS lock screens is one of the weirdest damn things about modern desktop trends. It's so obviously a bad idea. I can't even figure out what useful functionality anyone thought that would provide. It's a fucking desktop, there's plenty of room to stick notifications or the weather or whatever on the same screen as the login prompt, if that's what you want.

One unfortunate reality is, for a lot of new users - especially people who haven't used desktop computers before - their first computer was a mobile device. If we don't want Apple and Google to take over the entire space, we need to meet them halfway.

The lock screen is weird, though, I agree. The newer (blurry background) one is better than the old one with the tedious swipe animation, but really could use a persistent "do this to unlock" prompt / button, because many people just aren't comfortable poking their computer unless they know what it is going to do. A lot of modern UI design unfortunately forgets that.

For what it's worth, the original design for GNOME's current lock screen involved bridging the gap between it and the login / switch user screen, which _would_ involve some more UI elements, but the actual implementation must have stalled somewhere.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#574

Post by copperx » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

It's certainly not the end of the world, but it's death by a thousand papercuts. I find macOS has fewer sharp edges (but still has plenty of them), and Linux too, once the system is configured and only used for writing code.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#575

Post by minroot » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

I saw a few screenshots of GTK4 apps, it looked nice. But today tried a simple one, as like the author, I was disappointed.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#576

Post by copperx » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

cerved wrote: post #492

fxtentacle wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The quality of JetBrains products are overall high

JetBrains develop the only modern software that makes me go "wow, that's amazing."

Ok, maybe not. Honorable mentions to some Adobe's algorithms and Apple's Sidecar / Universal Control functionality.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#577

Post by d1sxeyes » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #552

d1sxeyes wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Arguably, you have been 'taught' or you have inferred yourself that you should expect a sleeping system to immediately accept your keypresses as a password, which although reasonable is not necessarily a good practice . I fail to see why that wouldn't be a "good practice". Last weekend I read some articles on Canon Cat[1], and Jef Raskin referred[2] to the feature as something desirable: > In many ways it was, for…

Thanks for sharing. I can definitely see why it might be appealing. However, using Ctrl + Alt + Del guarantees that only Winlogon can handle the logon, no other process can be simulating the login prompt.

My dad told me about a program he wrote for a PDP-11 which would just simulate a login prompt. When a username and password were entered, it would append it to a file somewhere, then print the 'Incorrect username or password' message, and exit silently.

The user would assume they'd fat-fingered the password, and try to log in again (successfully) and be none the wiser that their password had just been stolen.

The Windows dependency on Ctrl+Alt+Del makes this type of attack impossible, while systems that don't require a Secure Attention Sequence (as apparently it is called) to log in are susceptible to a slightly more sophisticated version of this attack.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#578

Post by brimble » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

ansible wrote: post #429

sime2009 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Tho…

Modern UI design is optimized for screenshots in a PowerPoint, and from there, to screenshots in a portfolio and on marketing pages where the audience that needs to be satisfied is marketing themselves, and especially people very concerned that every piece of everything be "on brand" and who are entirely sure this matters a ton for making sales.

That's what's going on, as far as I can tell.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#579

Post by pessimizer » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:46 PM UTC

gsinclair wrote: post #381

amatecha wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very clear to me it's clickable.. Is it an action, or a link to a different page/view? If it's an action (accept/decline invite), make it a button. If it's navigation, make it a text link. You are giving totally disparate cues to the user when the actions taken upon clicking are of the exact same type. My initial reaction to a piece of text directly next to a button is "why is there random unrelated text the…

Literally zero reason not to? I think it’s emphasising the “default” action quite nicely, and de-emphasising the other action quite appropriately. “Decline invitation” needs to be something you can do, of course, but it will be used I find that having buttons side by side forces me to think in a mildly unpleasant way, like I have to read two thinks more carefully because there is more onus on me to decide which is th…

> I think it’s emphasising the “default” action quite nicely, and de-emphasising the other action quite appropriately.

What's the reason that the designer wants to nudge me to accept invitations again? I missed it.

Also, what's the difference between that and a dark pattern?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#580

Post by Spivak » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

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.

Yes but on the flip side I don't give two shits about discoverability, I already know how to use my phone. Snapchat is actively terrible for discoverability but it's really efficient once you know.

The best design for someone who is unfamiliar and the best design for the user that already knows how it works are always at odds with one another. Do you balance the game for new players or for diamond league?