331–340 of 944 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.
Windows 3.1 for me
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…
Is it just me or is Discord super unintuitive? And Slack is becoming that way too. Telegram by contrast is a pleasure!
While voice and video calls, screen sharing is nice, they are not very polished, good quality, and UI is overloaded, but the last useful feature additions.
(useless junk: animated stickers, custom wallpapers, emoji responses (though I use them), premium emojis, collectible usernames, (i get that it needs money to run infra), channels and social-media-platform related stuff (i guess those are revenue drivers and signup-funnels as well)
Discord has one killer UX feature: voice chatrooms. It is great for gaming, and great for remote work too for small flat-hierarchy companies. (no setting up of a meeting, just dropping in to a "meeting room". I have worked on a product with similarly streamlined ad-hoc remote meeting user experience, but it is defunct now unfortunately.)
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'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the bane that is "progressive scrolling". "No, we won't actually load the text at the bottom of the scollbar until you scroll down to it--and we'll only load it in a dribble." @#$%^&*()_+!
And if I go to a different folder and back I have to deal with it all over again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.
Windows 3.1 for me
It is interesting that modern UIs keep removing agency from the user. There is very little space in the system that feels mine because I am the sole owner of it. On Windows 3.1 I managed everything in the program groups. It was not too convenient (compared to that Dashboard shell or Mac), but still, if the system added a group now and then, I could always take it apart and rearrange to my liking.
Now the Start menu is completely taken over. The ability to manually arrange things in a folder is taken away. The folders that should be rightfully mine (such as Documents) are constantly invaded by every program that feels entitled to put things there. As a result “we do not go there anymore.” The only places that are left for me to manage are: the area to the right of the start menu and the desktop. But I do not like the start menu and do not like cluttering the desktop, so the only place I still govern is a tiny custom toolbar I added to the taskbar.
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…
“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without los…
Maybe two-odd decades is about the time it takes for enough people to have forgotten the reasons and decide to just remove Chesterton's Fence[0] because, despite the fact that screen area is at an all time high, we still need to squeeze more shit in around the edges.
I've already whinged about both scroll bars[1].
I'll also whinge about "dead space" rarity on UIs like DevOps and Jira. "No, i want out of all contexts! Did I accidentally switch that slider by clicking like 10cm to the right of it?" (actual example from within DevOps right now).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:
- RC was alpha quality.
- Releases were betas.
and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product. NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.
This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.
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.
I might be getting old, too. (Born 1987.) I have also come to regard Windows XP as the pinnacle of personal computing UI. Almost everything that followed, regardless of vendor, feels like a step in the wrong direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it just me or is Discord super unintuitive? And Slack is becoming that way too. Telegram by contrast is a pleasure!
I wish telegram didn't have so much shady stuff under it. It's by far the nicest chat experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? macOS (and iOS) is designed this way because of the gesture you want! You don't need the scrollbar because you have the gesture. If you want to see where you are in the page you just scroll a teeny bit. It works great, I haven't seen a scrollbar in years and its never a problem. Sure, some accessibility options are nice for some people.
I use a mouse and a keyboard and an external monitor. Please don’t tell me about gestures since they’re absolutely useless to me.