801–810 of 944 posts
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Don’t underestimate how much pulling the rug out from under people via constant UI churn negatively affects their lives and interactions with computers. Leads to lower confidence, helplessness, etc.
I mean it's been basically one change to the scrollbar in 40 years. And you can turn them on again if you care.
You cannot restore the scroll bar width or buttons.
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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.
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You could turn off Active Desktop and IE Windows Explorer? And what in Windows 98 or Windows 2000 took attention away from the work?
It can be turned off, but it can't be turned off. It's still there, lurking just around the corner, and still showing up in some dialogs. And I think this is exactly what many people's complaints are in this thread: an interface that is faulty out of the box that needs to be "tuned" in order to change it from an entertainer back into a workstation. I haven't played with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in a while, but I r…
The article complained about things which were not configurable or not easily configurable. So did many comments.
Judicious animation has well studied benefits. I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
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> It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people. No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms. I fundamentally agree with usability…
> To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). [...] However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs. Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability. Yes, when you pu…
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What was worse in Windows 98? Or Windows 2000?
https://gekk.info/articles/images/explorer/98_explorer.png All this crap to the left in Explorer windows that takes up space for no good reason. Active Desktop. Uglier icons that are inconsistent with the many older Win 95-style icons that remain everywhere in the OS. It's not that bad on the whole, and you can reverse most of it, but it's a bloating and bastardization of the (unironically) finely honed aesthetic of…
Windows 98's icons look very similar to Windows 95's. Windows 2000's look better and more consistent to me.
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This is the most intensely 90s software aesthetic I have ever seen. Edit: Holy shit, Bryce! I think I had that on my family PC. We were really into Myst and Riven at the time and I guess someone thought it would be fun to try to make our own 3D worlds. It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills and I don't think I ever created anything with it.
>It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills it used to. now, you're only skills in art need to be to properly describe the scene and let some generative model do the work for you. i hope we continue to have distinctions made from digital art created by a generative model and not actually give the artist title to the people driving the prompts. to me, that's no different than me telling Bob Ross…
AI can't do it, doesn't understand it. Generative art makes excessively beautiful wallpaper, right now.
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…
It almost seems like the people who make this stuff don't actually care about usability. They probably have top notch motor skills and can click tiny stuff instantly, or they're not actually using the GUI much, they do everything in CLI and have no idea what a GUI is even for.
We need better input tools to deal with this. AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse, combined with algorithms that can cancel out stiction-related jumps. Maybe even eye tracking that knows what you want to click and pulls the mouse towards it. A zoomed view for when you're trying to highlight some text that auto pops up on click and drag.
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There's also an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays. Though some of these are colour-capable, most are monochrome, and I've definitely had challenges negotiating apps and content which use colour as a key differentiator.
I doubt Apple began removing color years ago for a display technology they never used.
... though Apple has had monochrome devices (the original Mac, the handheld Newton) ...
... and often makes preparations years on advance for long-term strategic moves.
I'm putting very low emphasis on that last, as e-ink really doesn't seem to fit particularly well with the Apple ethos, except, perhaps, for watches.
But if Apple were planning, or even contemplating, an e-ink device, ordering a flat white UI/UX might be precisely the first step in getting there.
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> 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…
Works on both Windows and Mac
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…
The only solution I've found for addressing this in any meaningful way is AltSnap[0], which lets me avoid needing to find window borders for any resizing or moving operations. [0]: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap/releases
I mostly stopped grabbing window borders and title bars about 15 years ago.