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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#201

Post by thwarted »

vidarh wrote: post #155
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…

I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)

Things being "a waste of screen real estate" was a bigger issue when we only had 1024x768.

Now we have extremely high resolution monitors, and we use that to get really smooth angled lines and anti-aliasing, scaling up the visuals and decreasing the logical DPI, but the lack of a hard edge to grab doesn't get wider when the visuals are scaled up: it's still a single pixel wide.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#202

Post by addicted »

lstamour wrote: post #197
marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable (until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack). Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in…

> until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack

SP2 was fantastic. For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#203

Post by Pannoniae »

syldarion wrote: post #177
callalex wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t a heavy drop shadow solve the window border problem? Although these days those seem to be fading or disappearing as well.

I'm sure it's negligible these days, but there's also the concern of an increased graphics load since you'll have to do an extra pass for the transparency. But I don't want to dive too far into the mindset of "everything must be optimized to the max".

Computers are very fast. GPUs are way faster than you think. Of course, it doesn't feel like that way since all the abstractions and layers kill performance by a thousand cuts.

Remember, "Aero" was a thing almost 20 years ago and that was a graphically intensive window renderer at that time. Nowadays we could have 50x better effects without a problem but UI designers are not willing to.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#204

Post by strken »

f33d5173 wrote: post #172
dbetteridge wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the wrong mentality tbh Design for the best accessibility first and foremost, then try and make things look "prettier". Disabilities can affect anyone at any time and shouldn't be an afterthought.

"Accessibility" here refers to one person's very particular disability. You can't possibly predict the entire gamut of disabilities people might face. Trying to do so "first and foremost" is utter madness.

Nobody's asking you to predict anything, they're asking you to leave the functional design elements of a scrollbar alone and not fuck them up. Probably if you rent an angle grinder and remove the handrails from the steps at your local library it'll look nicer, but you don't do that, because there's a good reason for those steps to have handrails.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#206

Post by Pannoniae »

Gigachad wrote: post #190
Pannoniae wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. GNOME/GTK is a lost cause in my eyes. Literally worse UX than Windows. The developers basically say "fuck you" if your use case does not perfectly align with their "vision".

Honestly I want the app to just set its look exactly. I really don't care if different programs look slightly different as long as its internally consistent in app. What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack. Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same o…

"One complete and verified experience." These words sound sickening to me. None of these have anything to do with accessibility, or respecting the user.

The user should be in control of his computer. That includes the programs on it. Locking it down so you can have "verified authentic design" is just straight-up user-hostile.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#207

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150
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…

I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.

Win95 default was peak Windows UI for me. It had proper shading so you can see the window edges. Min/max/close buttons were high contrast and easy to see, and were big enough to easily click. Window titles were high contrast and clear. The UI was light and snappy unlike XP’s.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#208

Post by dylan604 »

jorvi wrote: post #191
barrysteve wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it…

>your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t.

Anybody else remember the UI from the Photoshop plugins from Kai[0]? You clicked the plugin, and then you were looking at some alien organic texture full screen with a few adjustment sliders. That was someone that said, "I see your UI suggestions, but I have other ideas"

[0] https://mprove.de/script/99/kai/

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#210

Post by masswerk »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #146

Literally just ran into this problem 15 mins ago. Went to the HTTP RFC 9110 to check on the proper meaning of a HTTP response [0]. The list of sections on the right is scrollable, but there's no indication that it is, and no scroll bar unless you click on it and try to scroll it. The page as it loads on my screen looks like it stops at section 4.2.1. and there's no indication that there are more sections. Took me a f…

I defence of that web site, I do see a vertical scroll bar for this section. But I'm also one of those funny individuals who check that "Show scrollbars" is set to "always" in the system preferences, after each update. (On macOS, it's not the default, but it's still an option.)
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