Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 944 posts

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#401

Post by adrian_b »

happymellon wrote: post #315
arcanemachiner wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did it because my computer was a POS. But then it turns out I have a minimalism kink, so I've been doing that ever since. I use XFCE btw

> I use XFCE btw No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.

This must depend on how you configure it.

I do not remember how I have configured it, perhaps the window border width is determined by the window theme (I use Chicago95), but I have also been using XFCE for many years and I have decent-sized window borders on my 4k monitors and my mouse theme (Hackneyed 48x48) has extremely obvious mouse cursor shape changes whenever you touch the window borders, so they are easy to grab.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#402

Post by shiroiuma »

masklinn wrote: post #301
jwells89 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Monochrome lines are cool tho, ink or charcoal can be gorgeous, and “barely visible pixels” are genuinely needed to get them. That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.

>That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops

No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#403

Post by rouvax »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #336
rayiner wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two…

FWIW, and I know it's not as good as patching the root cause, on Windows environment I have found relief in using AltDrag (and/or its fork AltSnap [1]). You can grab and move a window by pressing Alt and then clicking wherever you want on the window. There are also a few other tricks regarding window maximizing/resizing etc. [1] https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#404

Post by watwut »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #379
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 amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms. I fundamentally agree with usability…

> To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). [...] However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs.

Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability.

Yes, when you push back a lot, you sometimes win. But it takes too much fighting, you need to be at powerful position to have the chance to win and they simply do not seem to care about usability.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#405

Post by magicalhippo »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #379
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 amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms. I fundamentally agree with usability…

> In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated.

These are the UX/UI cargo-cult morons you're looking for.

It seems in the software world we've yet to establish our own version of industrial design[1] so "regular" designers gets used. And leaders who decide aren't technical so they don't get usability.

I think the lack of competition also make the terrible designs seem successful.

I'm not using Teams because it looks great. I'm using it because my org uses it for chat and meetings. It's not like they let people try a few different looks for Teams and then see which people like the most.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#406

Post by masswerk »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #259
masswerk wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.) *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated ha…

That does make it easier to resize a window from the bottom left corner, which is indeed where you want to resize the window from in the majority of cases. However, if you want to resize the window from the top or from the left, that does not help you much.

To be fair, in the era of dedicated title bars, there used to be a huge drag button for easily relocating the window, wherever you wanted it to be.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#407

Post by fodkodrasz »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #397
fodkodrasz wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Telegram is getting more and more useless gimmick anti-features. It was better 3-5 years ago, when it didn't have so much useless junk. Still the most streamlined experience. 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 (thoug…

I like telegram's slick UI library. making an app using it would be nice. That and stickers, reaction emojis (which I also like in Slack, and teams only lets you have one reaction) calls, video, screen sharing, animated stickers, premium-stuff however... all junk.

Telegram is Qt based as far as I know.

Funny that I would find the other basic comms channels integrated a good thing, if they would be properly polished, and the stuff you like is what I find junk.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#408

Post by hulitu »

imp0cat wrote: post #284
rubyfan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it ironic that in order for your comment to be accessible the reader must lookup “a11y” to find that it means “accessibility”.

And educate himself just a tiny little bit? ;) Then in his next web project, he just might use https://github.com/pa11y/pa11y and make the world a better place!

The new OS M6t W5s 12. Now more accesible. With O5k 365 and M6t E2e. /s

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#409

Post by arcanemachiner »

happymellon wrote: post #388
arcanemachiner wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alt + click-and-drag solves that problem. Also I use i3 so my windows are tiled most of the time.

Having boarders that are bigger than 1px would solve that problem. Anything else is a work around poor UX. The fact that decades later it is still an issue is really disappointing.

Agree to disagree I guess. I don't need a window border when I can drag/resize the window from anywhere in that window.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#410

Post by Tempest1981 »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #130

Can we talk about window borders? I have multiple overlapping VS Code windows open, all with black backgrounds and black borders. No drop shadows. It's impossible to see where one windows frame/border is, sitting on top of another. This should be an OS thing, but apparently it's an app thing. And VS Code "withdrew" support for configuring borders: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160159

More on borders (and title bars) here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865824

My theory is that designers target users viewing 1 full-screen window at a time. Their model user never moves or resizes a window, or opens more than 3 tabs/documents a day, as they sit at their 13" laptop in an ideally-lit room with no reflections.

Post reply on HN