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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

461–470 of 944 posts

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screens can get brighter now, but if your screen is too bright, that's entirely on you. Adjusting the brightness is trivial and you can even do it without using the buttons on the display (DDC/CI).

On the contrary, some new monitors are so bright even on their lowest setting that you have to find alternative solutions.

That’s really just bad tech not fit for the purpose, though.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#462

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…

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

Huh, I've never really thought about that but it does make sense to have them next to each other instead of at the opposite ends. Wonder why it's so rare to see that, apart from "it's always been this way".

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#463
post #133

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…

"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point. The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white". ** That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivia…

> screens don't autoadjust their backlight

CRT monitors had easy dials to quickly adjust brightness and contrast. You almost did it automatically without thinking when you had developed the motor memory. Nowadays monitor controls are often fiddly and awkward. But I still use them to adjust brightness to the environment.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#464
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 20 years old^^

Actually a mildly interesting response! - thanks. If we ever meet, £2 is yours. When I was 20, the idea that my eyesight might have become meaningfully worse over time never really occurred to me. Fascinating.

One thing that I've found interesting (in my 40's and slight astigmatism) is how the effects of eyesight show up in interfaces or where there's contrast with brightness/darkness.

In the physical world that'd be issues like bright points like car headlamps or street lights having a large corona/starburst, or if you're looking at a bright object against a dark background such as reading a book where it's lit in a darker room the 'bloom' will obscure what's behind it. On a screen with much brightness I'll get similar effects if there's contrast. I've been window shopping for a HDR display for a while now and wondering how much benefit I'd get out of it seeing as the main selling points are the brightness/contrast, especially when you're getting into the various forms of local dimming to present the media at its best.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#465
The general degradation of GUI usability over the past 10-15 years is honestly the most depressing development in computing. It’s a constant fight to keep things halfway usable, and it seems to be getting worse with each major (and sometimes minor) software update.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody says "floating windows are dead", but I fail to get sold on the tiling concept. For people working on 3 windows, that may be acceptable, but if one's juggling 10 windows on a couple of desktops, things get hairy fast. Window resizing also helps a lot of things in terminal. Sometimes programs write log lines so long, I have to resize the terminal wider than the screen itself to make sure that every log is wr…

I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing I myself mostly use MacOS without tilling, I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces. I prefer to have a single big (32'' at the moment) monitor and just switch workspaces instead But if MacOS had better tilling support I would probably use it more.

> I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing.

If using a 13" MacBook, yes. If using a 16" MacBook, maybe, but if using a 27" Linux desktop, the answer is definitely no for me, unless I'm running a multi-pane IDE or other specialist software.

MacOS is very optimized for that kind of workflow (I'm writing this comment on a 13" MacBook), but as the screen goes larger, the wasted space becomes too much. I even sometimes divide a workspace to two applications on this machine, to see more on a single screen.

For manual tiling, I sometimes enable Magnet and snap windows to corners, esp. if I'm away from my Linux desktop and need to do some system administration across a couple of machines.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#467
post #34

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 think it's just become common belief among developers that scrollbars are bad... (facepalm)

My experience is 'developers' have no issue with scrollbars; it's the higherups and designers that find scrollbars antiquated and obsolete in a world with touchscreen devices.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#468
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. Especially with this new "don't theme my app" movement. It's really unfortunate. The issues with CSS stylesheets in GTK should be solved with replacing CSS with a better way to describe styles, not with just throwing it all away and not letting the user set their own themes.

"don't theme my app" is not about users theming their apps, but instead against distros theming by default and more importantly the expectation that you could theme every app with a generic theme.

Same difference. If you don’t support theming done by distros, you don’t support theming full stop.

I suspect even their attitude towards theming done by end-users is more akin to ‘well sure, if you insist, you have the full source code, I can’t stop you, but you’re on your own’ than considering it a fully supported configuration.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#469

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…

> 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.

I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.

It is a must have to know because there is inevitably moments where you have a window showing at the wrong place. I remember back in the days I was using windows sometimes when switching from multiple screens to single screen a window would start/appear out of the frame so you'd have to move it using one of those shortcuts.

I would be surprised Microsoft and Apple have removed these. Someone to confirm?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#470
Getting rid of scroll bars was something that the guys with infinity scarves stuck us with, right around the time they started doing 200-weight fonts, and removing all the standard web components we had standardized on since the early 90s. I understand designers need freedom, but a lot of the changes in the last 10-15 years have been focused on "pretty" because the tech finally allowed things to be pretty. I hope the pendulum will start swing back towards usability.

Apple's been on a mission to kill the scroll bar since 2015 or so. Others followed suit. (Here's an article from 2016 explaining how to re-enable scroll bars for all the reasons people stated in this post https://www.howtogeek.com/207749/how-to-enable-scroll-bars-i... )

Hiding scroll bars is a violation of the "Don't Make Me Think" convention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think

Shame the browsers aren't bound by the same rules for the content they are designed to show.

New WCAG 2.2 says:

AAA Compliance "The size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels..."

AA Compliance "The size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels..."

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