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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#451

Post by vidarh »

alpaca128 wrote: post #370
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it as easy as that? Upvote assuming you were being sarcastic.

No, based on their keybindings it sounds like they use dwm, a window manager which you have to compile yourself, configure yourself in a .c source file, and comes without window decorations by default, I believe. It's neat but made for 0.1% of computer users at most. Although I want to add the "Windows Key + Left/Right Mouse Button" bindings are incredibly convenient and should be supported by every OS by default imh…

I use bspwm, which is still not easy for beginners though not as extreme as dwm, but it's also kinda besides the point which is that a lot of the complaints about borders really are complaints about the difficulty of moving and resizing windows or otherwise manipulating rhem, and once you look at it from that point of view there are alternative solutions, one of which is this one.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#452

Post by speeder »

Zekio wrote: post #386
hulitu wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> screens are a lot brighter now aren't they. No. You just use them in the dark.

screens output way more nits these days, I remember not being able to see a screen properly because a lamp was on due to the monitors only having 200ish nits, these days you can get +1000 nit monitors, this is especially true for HDR monitors

You just reminded me of something funky.

To play PS5 I bought a monitor instead of a TV, because the place where I had to install the screen in the rented apartment is tiny, and tiny TVs are just crap with tons of input lag. So I got a gaming LG monitor.

Many PS5 games, specially those with HDR support, offer help in adjusting the brightness, often in the form of showing a very dark and a very bright image side by side, and telling you to adjust your settings until both are visible.

I found out that no matter what I do, this never happens. In the end the best setting is when NEITHER are visible. If the dark image is visible, the screen is so bright it feels like staring into a flashlight. If the bright image is visible, the screen is so dark that I can't see the contents of the screen with my curtains open or the lights turned on. I can't wrap my head around how someone can make a screen be so crap.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#453

Post by vidarh »

foresto wrote: post #176
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...)

The point is not to deny your preferences, but rather that they shouldn't be forced upon everyone else, especially when they break decades of proven usability design and practice.

My point is that the "proven" usability design and practice isn't all that proven.

There is a whole lot of unexplored or underexplored design space, and when people are complaining about having space to grab a window border away from them due to a tension between competing needs it's worth considering that there are alternatives where that tension just goes away:

You only need wider window borders because you've already decided that you need to grab the border, rather than decided you just want an efficient way of moving or resizing the window. Maybe that genuinely is the only option that works for you, but most people haven't tried alternatives.

I'll note that lots of user interfaces has this kind of modal mechanism to indicate which class of action you want to take on an object so you don't need to target some tiny visual area, which is always going to be too small for some people nearly no matter how big you make it. We're used to doing that. Most people just don't do it with windows.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#454

Post by taskforcegemini »

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…

at least on linux you usually have the option to drag windows by holding down ALT-key and left mousebutton

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#455

Post by [deleted] »

jchw wrote: post #180
marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

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 absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment. That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades,…

[deleted]

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#456

Post by vidarh »

tambourine_man wrote: post #174
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...)

That’s nice as a pro feature, but completely undiscoverable for a regular user.

Even if we were going to dumb computers down to that level - and really there are tons of things in any modern UI that is entirely undiscoverable - that is something trivially solvable by popping up a tooltip explaining the options the first few times a user grabs the border.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#457

Post by jacobgorm »

I agree the scrollbar is dying and becoming unusable. A scroll bar needs to be:

- Wide, clearly visible and easy to hit.

- Proportional sized, indicating how much of the document is currently in view.

- Movable parts should have features indicating friction, as opposed to slippy-ness.

- With arrow buttons, placed together instead of at opposing ends.

- It should change colors to indicate hover and mouse press.

Of the classic scrollbars shown here https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/ , the Nextstep one comes closest to having it all and the Mac OS 8 is the overall prettiest. IMHO.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#458

Post by beernutz »

For chrome and firefox there is an extension I use that helps dramatically. "Scrollbar Anywhere".

The way I have it set up, I can right click and drag anywhere on "whitespace" on the page and scroll in any direction I drag the mouse. You can set it up to go as fast or slow as you like relative to the amount you move your mouse, and you can even have it "glide" when you let up on the mouse if you like.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrollbar-anywhere...

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#459

Post by eastern »

shiroiuma wrote: post #375
nerdponx wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but in hindsight endearingly so. And the UX itself was still really good. The start menu in particular was an actual improvement over the old one, as were the clickable login screen icons.

The usability was very good. The appearance was goofy and Fisher-Price-like. The two things are mostly orthogonal.

You could switch the theme (at least in SP2) to look basically like 2000, which is what I always did. You could actually do that in 7 too.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#460

Post by eastern »

worik wrote: post #269
MenhirMike wrote: post #193

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

At least till XP, and maybe 7 too, you had progman.exe and fileman.exe in the Win folder.

All you had to was set shell=progman.exe in (I think) win.ini. Or maybe in the other .ini but it was possible.

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