411–420 of 944 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Gnome and GTK sell any better because they use tiny scrollbars? Or Macs, or Windows? Apps do what the OS let them do.
I mean, take an average person, show them the UI of a current mac, then the UI of windows 95, and ask them which they prefer? It’s not the only factor, but it is a factor.
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…
that really bugs me any time i have to use a Windows computer. on linux (on pop os or zorin os at least) you just hold down the super/windows key and then left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it. pop os also puts a thick border around that active window which makes it much easier to see where you are
I have a lot of respect for designers. What they do is very important. I think we should all work together to help them do it better. For instance, let's rethink the API's they use. Imagine a sleek new minimal API. Now imagine it even more minimal. Keep repeating "minimalism" the word "handcuffs" comes to mind. Think how happy they'll be once we've removed all of that clutter. Let's build that API for them so they ca…
Of course if they pay me. Nobody helps me to do it better. I do it myself because it is my job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is something that's always puzzled me - why is searching in Windows always so gosh darn slow? You'd think with an entire background service dedicated to file indexing, I'd be able to quickly find files in a directory tree with the word "foo" in their file name or contents, but even with a modern SSD it still takes at least a minute on any remotely populated directory.
File search in graphical Linux is terrible as well. Just the other day i was trying to do sone simple file search in Mint and oh god the GUI search function is completely useless. I had to jump around installing 3 "file search" programs, none of them really worked and at the end I settled with some console bash magic. ... its 2023 people.
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…
One thing I just love about KDE is that when you right-click on an "empty" area of a scrollbar, it offers you options to go to the very top or the very bottom of whatever view you're seeing. I seem to recall that something like QtCurve offered buttons to do that within the scrollbar. If only everyone did that, many time wasted in scrolling would be saved and "go to the top" buttons in websites wouldn't exist
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.
I was a fan of Google Desktop Search - that was actually able to find relevant content in my files, and it was fast . But Google killed it as soon as they decided to drive everyone into the cloud. Supposedly all major OSes have such an (indexed) search functionality integrated nowadays, but for some reason it doesn't really work, and I'm never motivated enough to find out how to fix it...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, take an average person, show them the UI of a current mac, then the UI of windows 95, and ask them which they prefer? It’s not the only factor, but it is a factor.
To prevent a familiarity bias we should ask them the same question in 1995 with time machined screenshots of current MacOS downsampled to 640x480px.
You can make the same exercise, trying to run for ex Windows in a virtual machine with a 640x480 screen.
What I miss with scrollbars is being able to jump to a certain spot on the page, e.g. 75% down the page.
Now, computers are infinitely faster, with far more memory to play with, yet software usability has gotten much worse, as functionality has been removed, which logically should result in simpler, faster software, but instead it's the opposite: software has all become dog-slow, even though it doesn't DO nearly as much as the software a quarter-century ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
I was going to add to the complaints but realized I always scroll with touchpad or drag up/down on my phone. Maybe scroll bars are kind of obsolete except for visual clues.
>> 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.