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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

291–300 of 944 posts

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#291

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…

> 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

That’s more of a truth universally acknowledged. XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#292
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Maybe scroll bars are kind of obsolete except for visual clues. On mobile maybe. On desktop absolutely not. And in that case it's detrimental for them to be small.

For my desktop I usually use the wheel.

How do you scroll to the middle or end of an incredibly-long document? e.g., 200+ pages, if printed.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#293
post #7

I don’t think this is UX/UI designers not knowing/caring about accessibility. It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better. Who cares about the 0.5% of disabled people that weren’t likely to buy your app anyway. Same for browsers, FF may care about accessibility, but they won’t lose the browser wars (bit of a moot point by now, but eh) because m…

> Who cares about the 0.5% of disabled people

But it's not just disabled people. I'm not disabled, but curse the scrollbar and window frame situation every day. Their minimization makes actually using the UI a greater pain in the ass.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#294
post #2

>gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface overlay-scrolling false "Don't rely on gsettings. They are private and users are not supposed to be setting them theirselves. Don't complain when they suddenly stop working." -- every gtk dev I've ever talked to. That said, I've applied those firefox about:config fixes and it's much better. Whew.

gnome is unusable

gsettings don't just apply to gnome desktop environment. They impact the entire gtk ecosystem of dozens of desktop environments and innumerable gtk programs.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#295

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 a basic evolutionary principle. When there's no selective pressure, species breed for superficial beauty at the expense of other traits. So to get rid of that problem, we need to allow users to apply selective pressure. But the question is how. Individually our voices are lost, and when you need to log into app X to use the service within, you get no choice of app Y with a different UI.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This is the main reason I switched to MacOS. Was sick of everything on Linux being contentiously broken out of the box with the excuse "Oh you are meant to just configure the icon colours and toolbar padding yourself" The programs can still be open source so you can recompile with whatever look you want, but they should bundle a working experiance by default. But linux users seem more obsessed with curating custom th…

I shouldn't have to recompile something to customise it. Make the defaults whatever you want sure, but even if you don't provide GUI config, provide an environment variable or a config file. "just recompile it" is incredibly user-hostile.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#299
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

That article is excellent. Fascinating history and a great trip down memory lane. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#300
post #191

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…

Reminds me of Mac-assed Mac apps[1]:

> Mac apps that are unapologetically _Mac_ apps. They’re platform-specific and they’re not trying to wow us with all their custom not-Mac-like UI (which often isn’t very accessible).

I wonder if there's a directory of such applications somewhere, actually.

[1] https://inessential.com/2020/03/19/proxyman

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