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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#161

Post by graycat »

codalan wrote: post #135

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…

Along these lines, recently happened to see at the Web site "Big Red Car"

https://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/returns-driving-retail/...

Edit: Somehow this URL leads to some spot on the Web page of the URL but does not always lead to the actual post. To find the post on that Web page, the post starts with

"To me, all of retailing has one"

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#162

Post by callalex »

o11c wrote: post #133
Pannoniae wrote: post #10

I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…

"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point. The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white". ** That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivia…

This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#163

Post by tom_ »

Pannoniae wrote: post #149
tom_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are you? I bet you a pound you're 40, or thereabouts. Trust me, your eyesight is becoming worse...

I am 20 years old^^

Actually a mildly interesting response! - thanks. If we ever meet, £2 is yours.

When I was 20, the idea that my eyesight might have become meaningfully worse over time never really occurred to me. Fascinating.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#164

Post by bitwize »

jwells89 wrote: post #68
hypercube33 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. I'd get it if these companies making the UX were small, because yes its super hard to deal with accessibility and different color blindness but I agree - we've lost anything but the extremest of the extreme colors.

The ironic thing about icons losing their color and detail is that it happened right as high DPI displays began to become commonplace in consumer hardware. We have these amazing screens with barely visible pixels and excellent color reproduction being wasted on rendering monochrome lines.

Forget Gtk or Qt, we may as well link against libXaw. It's a perfect match for the detail in "modern" UIs.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#165

Post by barrysteve »

codalan wrote: post #135

It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…

It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore.

All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random layout for it's menu-ing, often with links to external sites, for what could be set locally.

It is geniunely confusing to try and understand the designers intent. I can never tell if I missed a setting, or if it was never meant to exist in this menu at all.

The amount of times I've had to Google how to change basic settings is way too high, even for Games where the experience is half the ticket value.

CS2 has a settings menu with text buttons at the top (like a tab) that drag you down to an arbitrary point in a long list of settings. There is no tabs, it's impossible to mentally separate what the text button represents mentally, from every other option, because they all point to the same page anyway. Why bother with the buttons?

The semantic meaning of concepts don't relate to each other and are not structured accordingly. It is waaay too unnecessarily difficult to navigate around computing.

I miss Macromedia Flash's UI. I didn't use the program much, but it was so simple and easy to use.

One my biggest drives for privacy and self made solutions, is to get away from the experience and knowledge pollution we've been seeing lately.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#166

Post by Pannoniae »

tom_ wrote: post #163
Pannoniae wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 20 years old^^

Actually a mildly interesting response! - thanks. If we ever meet, £2 is yours. When I was 20, the idea that my eyesight might have become meaningfully worse over time never really occurred to me. Fascinating.

You seem like an interesting person^^:)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#167

Post by whartung »

nine_k wrote: post #59

The author sees half the problem and offers the worse half of a solution. A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator . It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background. A solution e…

Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control.

Assuming a properly responsive document (not something you can take for granted today, especially on the web), you can readily use the scrollbar to navigate large ranges within a document, especially large ones.

Countless times, on large, old PDFs with no links and that use that kind of “B-29” section page numbering have I essentially used the scrollbar to binary search the document for some buried page.

Of course the modern web has practically destroyed the applicability of the scrollbar as indicator because of the rampant use of lazy loading and endless scrolling. Many times on the Mac I’ve tried to use Cmd-down arrow to jump to the end of the document, hoping that there IS an end, and that it will load all of embeds that wreak havoc with the formatting.

But, alas, I find I’m on some endless train, with no hope of knowing how far I’ve gone or how far I have to go.

All that said, I happen to have a weighted mouse wheel on a bearing that is specifically designed for high velocity doom scrolling, partly because the scrollbar is effectively useless.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#168

Post by bee_rider »

callalex wrote: post #162
o11c wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point. The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white". ** That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivia…

This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.

I’m surprised Linux doesn’t have some ubiquitous “use the camera to do auto-brightness” option (pinging the camera on a proprietary OS would be creepy, but if it is open source…).

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#170

Post by tmtvl »

Eduard wrote: post #131

> blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. you make it sound as if FOSS GUI toolkits ever had a pleasant user experience.

The way I've heard it told GNOME 2 was the cat's meow. I myself only switched to GNU/Linux in 2012, so I missed it. Unity (Ubuntu's erstwhile competitor to GNOME 3) with the HUD was quite the joy to use, though.
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