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

441–450 of 944 posts

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#441

Post by troupo »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #396
EGreg wrote: post #243

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!

slack hides their settings in absolutely awful places teams is constantly broken on linux discord's ACL system is... a mess. meanwhile IRC clients are brutalistic and painful to look at (or really any open source chat app) nobody (commercial or open source) has an incentive to make a truly intuitive app that doesn't screw the user or ignore their needs.

> slack hides their settings in absolutely awful places

So does Discord. The 15000 notifications settings it has is spread over three or four places behind completely different settings/dropdowns/sheets: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1695121977118245145

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#442

Post by masklinn »

shiroiuma wrote: post #402
masklinn wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> No, they aren't.

Yeah they are.

> ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s.

Leaving side your wilful misunderstanding of fairly standard concepts, no they are not: the monitors you are talking about were generally tiny, and the minor increase in median pixel density was largely counteracted by the blocky precision of LCD pixels.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#443

Post by troupo »

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…

Unfortunately modern-day Apple is taken over the same shitty "designers" that have taken over every other company.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#444

Post by troupo »

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.

Designing with accessibility in mind makes software better for everyone, period.

You design a clear, visible, distinctive scroll bar and buttons? Boom, you've catered to everyone with bad vision (for any reason: from blindness to eye surgery), reduced motor skills (for any reason: from arthritis to old age to hand injuries), non-technical users (so they don't have to hunt around the interface hoping to discover hidden features).

And this goes for everything in software.

Disability is a spectrum, and you yourself will be disabled in one way or another, multiple times, during the course of your life. Be it from old age, surgeries, injuries, strain from sport or mundane tasks like holding a baby.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#445

Post by SebastianKra »

I'm imagining similar post about the removal of dedicated copy/paste buttons. "But I don't want to use the keyboard to copy"

> Ok so a lot of folks have fine motor control problems

That's what accessibility settings are for. These aren't an afterthought. Good interfaces are designed with them in mind.

> somewhat inaccurate pointing devices like eye-trackers [...] voice/sound controlling their computer

Desktop interfaces aren't a good fit for these modalities anyways, and I don't want a 1% use-case detracting from my ui. If you designed an interface from the ground up for eye-tracking, it probably also wouldn't have any scrollbars (see Apple Vision)

A bigger problem are signifiers that something can be scrolled. Mostly it's self-evident that there's more content outside the viewport, but sometimes you run into edge-cases: iOS used to have some bad spots in the share sheet and Apple Music.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#446

Post by Muehe »

adevopsguy wrote: post #363
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…

I agree. The distro I am using lets me move windows by holding down Meta/Super key and left mouse button - anywhere in the window. Firefox is an example of how terrible it can get, see this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zs2wekv.png . To move this window I can either click to the left of the Firefox icon (to the left in image) or between the arrow down and minimize to the right.

This is a X11 feature AFAIK. Meta+Right-click resizes the window by the way.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#447

Post by vidarh »

thwarted wrote: post #201
vidarh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's pretty much as big an issue now, because my field of view has not gotten any bigger.

And I think you missed the essential part of my comment: The reason it's a waste of screen real estate for me is that there is no need for any edge to grab when I can grab the window anywhere by combining with a keypress.

I have more real estate to "grab" than you can ever get with borders that way, without dedicating any space to it at all.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#448

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

autoexec wrote: post #20

Once again I have to give firefox credit for giving users the tools in about:config to disable this. It's cute fluff at best and annoying/abusive at worst. The browser's UI should more or less be fully off the table when it comes to what a website can change, and that includes scrollbars.

The problem with about:config options is that Mozilla sometimes decides to remove them (based on telemetry numbers perhaps). The usual path for an unpopular option seems to be GUI -> about:config -> The Void.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#449

Post by vidarh »

AlexandrB wrote: post #267
vidarh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Modern design looooves wasting screen real estate on white space. Partially to look "clean" and partially as a result of avoiding any hint of skeuomorphism. Have to separate different UI elements somehow . Trying to claw some of it back from window borders seems like it's attacking the wrong problem.

I hardly have any UI elements to begin with, it's almost all text. But that's also largely besides the point, which was more that window borders only matters beyond visual separation in the first place because of a UI paradigm that wants you to hunt for a specific place on the edge of the window in order to move or resize it, but it doesn't need to be like that at all.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#450

Post by panzi »

speeder wrote: post #69
Pannoniae wrote: post #10

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…

I don't use dark mode for contrast, I use because a lot of software "light mode" is just plain white. And screens been getting more and more powerful. Often using software without white mode the thing is so bright, that the walls near me get lighted up as if I was using a flashlight or something. Thus I have to make the screen less bright, but often this also make the screen colors and contrast get all screwy and I s…

Yeah, I run my monitor at 20% brightness, unless for watching movies. Then I change to 50%. Wish it would had presets.

Anyway, I prefer the ever so slightly beige Interface of Windows 2000. Same contrast and GUI esthetics, but less drab grey.

Post reply on HN