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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#541

Post by bluGill »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #306
treyd wrote: 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.

Distros SHOULD be theming all applications. Once thing a distro can do well is create a theme for their distro so everything looks the same.

Maybe distros are not doing a good job of this, but that is one thing they have the power to do. QT, GTK2, SDL, wxwidgets, and more toolkits I can't even think of should all fit together on my desktop and look the same. xfce, gnome, and kde all have some nice apps, they should mix and match. This is a HARD problem, but that isn't an excuse to not face it.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#542

Post by sreekotay »

callalex wrote: post #253
sreekotay wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OS do you think you were running in 1996?

Sorry, it was 1998. I’m pretty sure Mac OS 8 had drop shadows but even if it didn’t, I took that machine all the way to 10.4 and every version of OS X had drop shadows.

Yep OS X wasnt til 2000/2001 and absolutely NOT smooth even on relatively new high end Macs at the time.

OS 8 and 9 were winXP like in terms of desktop effects - no soft anything.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#543

Post by kps »

keyringlight wrote: post #464
tom_ wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 darke…

Whatever the monitor, you will want to adjust it after buying. Default ‘showroom’ settings are much too bright unless you're working outdoors. Start with something like https://www.photofriday.com/info/calibrate or http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test

For me, with (mostly-corrected) astigmatism and some (uncorrectable) higher-order aberration, dark on light is the only thing I can read fluently. The worst case is ‘black holes’ on a light page, as are fashionable for illustrating command line examples (and f—ing github's CI log view), especially combined with Las Vegas syntax colouring of varying brightness.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#544

Post by bluGill »

bee_rider wrote: post #168
callalex wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.

I’m surprised Linux doesn’t have some ubiquitous “use the camera to do auto-brightness” option (pinging the camera on a proprietary OS would be creepy, but if it is open source…).

I know a lot of people who have covered their camera with tape. Some laptops even come with a physical shutter. This is something company policy often recommends - if the camera is physically covered an attacker can't see the next product we are working on.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#545

Post by CoryAlexMartin »

It’s very funny and strange that one of the defining characteristics of modern GUI design is that everything is very large. Lots of whitespace, buttons twice as tall as the cursor, windows that have to be maximized in order to see more than seven lines of content, and yet the scrollbars are the size of a toothpick.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#546

Post by NekkoDroid »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #521
cabirum wrote: post #518

Umm, scrollbars nowadays are just to indicate something is scrollable. You almost never have to actually drag them. Touch devices: swipe the content. Laptops: touchpad two-finger swipe, hold middle button and use trackpoint Desktops: mouse scroll wheel, pg-up/dn What am I missing?

> Umm, scrollbars nowadays are just to indicate something is scrollable. Which makes the often-default behaviour to autohide them all the more ridiculous! > Touch devices: swipe the content. Agreed; scrolling is one of the things that touch input just beats everything else at hands down. > Laptops... Desktops... Those still lack the 'click to move instantly to given point in document' functionality, right?

not just that, but for example my mousewheels sensor is basically unusable (when I scroll either direction its just roulette if it wants to scroll up or down or a mix of both) so I often use the middle mouse click to scroll... ends up not a lot of applications other than browser based ones support this.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#547

Post by bluGill »

mort96 wrote: post #522
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.

I won't argue against Windows 2000's usability. But I will say that to me, as someone who first started using computers in the XP era, any Windows earlier than Windows 7 looks so god damn ugly to me, and Windows 2000 even more so than XP. Interestingly though, I don't have the same impression when looking at the old Apple OSes. To me, Mac OS 9 looks old, but not ugly.

Pretty/ugly and usable are very different things. Sometimes they are in conflict, but mostly they are unrelated.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#548

Post by accoil »

Kerrick wrote: post #182
accoil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for native speakers too. Numerical contractions aren't part of normal English (i.e they don't seem to exist outside of IT).

Numerical ones don’t seem to exist outside of IT, but other fields do the same strategy of abbreviating common long words by keeping only a letter or two. The non-numerical way is to just replace the rest with an “x” like “txn” for “transaction” in finance or “pax” for “passengers” in transportation or “sx” for “symptoms” in medicine.

Neat, that's one mystery solved. I have seen "x" used like that, but didn't know how it worked.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#549

Post by LeanderK »

Podgajski wrote: post #476
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…

If we are talking UI we need to talk about Apple. The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.

> Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.

I have used MacOS every day for 10 years and i've never, except in exceptional circumstances, used the scrollbar to scroll. I don't see anybody in my circle using it. They all have the "Only Show When Scrolling" setting on.

I don't think this is ridiculous and I would enable the setting if turned off by default.

I also spend 99% percent of my time in full-screen mode in safari, vscode or terminal. So the top bar is also hidden by default. I think this is much more focused.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#550

Post by jorvi »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #366
jorvi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Alas, Mac is one of the biggest offenders of crappy design and anti-usability. When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline? Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consi…

> Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default

They are if you use the touchpad, and appear whenever you scroll. The logic is that as you are scrolling with the touchpad, you will not click on the scrollbar, so in that case it is a useless appendage.

> Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all)

I am not sure what you mean by “editing keys”, but Apple takes painstaking effort to make sure most shortcuts are global, and in text entry fields, Emacs shortcuts always work.

> And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.

Sorry but this is just a laughable complaint. Apple’s touchpad and accompanying gestures are considered best-in-class and have been so for more than a decade. Microsoft and various Linux distributions have tried to catch up during that decade+ and still aren’t close.

There are many things one can complain about with macOS ever since Lion started the iOS-ification, and I’d be right with you, but saying the old Mac OS X UI was lower standards than Windows 95 (and I assume XP) is a supremely contrarian statement that few people of that era would have made.

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