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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

731–740 of 944 posts

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#731
post #463
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

There are some tools out there that will allow you to bind hotkeys (or at least provide a widget) to send brightness-adjustment commands via DDC/CI over the HDMI/DP cable to your desktop monitor. This may improve your UX. My 2015 and 2021 Dell monitors both support the functionality, with differing degrees of finesse.

Non-exhaustive list:

Linux: https://github.com/ddccontrol/ddccontrol || https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil

macOS: https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

Windows: https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Linux (e.g. KDE), you can simply Ctrl + mouse drag the window, and then click anywhere you want. This makes it even much simpler than the need of clicking on the border, even with larger borders. You actually don't need any window border at all then, or it can be full of other utilities. There is also some software for Windows to do the same.

> You actually don't need any window border at all then Even if that was a great solution for everybody, you still need a window border. Or at least I do. I need that visual separation from all of the other windows on my desktop, and I need it to be thicker than one or two damned pixels.

I use a window shadow for that. The shadow is maybe 10-20 pixels or so.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#734

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…).

The Lunar dev has a variety of recipes for a hardware widget you can build which allows their macOS-only brightness-control app to implement adaptive brightness on any monitor that permits backlight control over DDC/CI. I'm sure a more-motivated and clever person than me could tap into that hardware and use it to drive ddcutil/ddccontrol outputs on Linux.

https://lunar.fyi/sensor

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#735
post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, okay, problem solved then.

I mean, don’t buy those. There are enough suitable monitors on the market.

About 3 years ago, I actually did research about monitors before buying one, for the first time in my tech-using life (which started around 1990, as I recall). Up until that point, it was never a question of "what is the best monitor for my application?", but rather "what's the biggest, highest-resolution monitor in my (pitiful) price range, that Best Buy (or whoever) has on hand right now?"

That's pretty much the issue here in a nutshell.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable (until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack). Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in…

> until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack SP2 was fantastic. For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

The only thing I remember is that I would never install SP2 because of EULA. I don't remember the specifics though. Around that time I started mostly using Linux anyway.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#737

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…

For years I thought it was odd that GitHub didn't let you do basic tasks in their mobile site. You couldn't browse releases. You couldn't look at the files in a PR. Then one day I accidentally hit my thumb over the middle of the screen and it scrolled. I had no idea all this info was there but required horizontal scrolling because there was no scrollbar. Moreover, the tabs all perfectly fit on the screen so there was no indication that anything existed beyond them.

It's still somewhat of a problem, but now I see GitHub doesn't perfectly align its tabs. It's obvious that some text is cut off and you need to scroll to read it all. Other UI elements are now placed behind a menu button and that's nice, too. But, it's amazing just how poor the mobile UX is everywhere overall.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#738
post #248
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what a gesture is. > If someone among your friends and family has an iOS device, remember how many times you had to show them that certain screens can be scrolled down? I don't know, zero? Maybe let's say once to be charitable. This is not a real problem faced by most people. IMO, this is just people being used to doing it another way.

On the contrary, I've professionally seen even technical users get confused by their OS hiding the scroll bar, and them not realizing what they're looking for requires scrolling. Frankly, it's broken behavior.

Then change the setting? It’s configurable in MacOS. “Always visible” or “Visible when scrolling”.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#739
post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only programs I have that are putting things in the titlebar are putting tabs there, and those programs do not cause me notable problems. For me the positives are much stronger than the negatives.

Well, MS Excel , Word etc. put a search widget and a user widget in the.title bar which occupy the whole thing. Moving Office windows is a pain.

Some occupied parts of the titlebar accept mouse-down-drag to move the window in MS Office apps, including:

document-name-dropdown, search-box, username, user-icon.

Elements that do not allow dragging the window, because they react to mouse-down, include:

application-icon, quick-access-toolbar, notifications-bell-icon, and the standard titlebar icons.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#740
post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only programs I have that are putting things in the titlebar are putting tabs there, and those programs do not cause me notable problems. For me the positives are much stronger than the negatives.

Well, MS Excel , Word etc. put a search widget and a user widget in the.title bar which occupy the whole thing. Moving Office windows is a pain.

Visual Studio actually puts the menubar in the titlebar; I never have any place to click left unless the window is maximized (or, at least, full width).
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