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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#851

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #175
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…

“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…

[deleted]

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#852

Post by lostmsu »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #336
rayiner wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two…

Just use a tiling window manager. In mine you move windows around by holding middle mouse button anywhere on the window, or left button with some key combo.

https://github.com/StackWM

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#853

Post by chiefalchemist »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #618
chiefalchemist wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope (read: pray) that on HN a11y isn't jargon. On a thread about scrollbars (i.e., UI and UX) a11y should be as accessible as saying UI or UX.

It's absolutely obscure jargon. One should never use "a11y", just say "accessibility".

Again, obscure and jargon are a function of context.

Spitballing...Keep in mind, without context, "accessibility" is also jargon in the sense not everyone is going to know what and how that means. My mum certainly wouldn't understand a11y, I agree. But she also would understand "accessibility" or even "website accessibility."

Full disclosure: I'm 5x more picky than the next person when it comes to comms. Absolutely, words matter. But one of the foundations to comms is context. The context in this case is HN.

Let's move on now.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#854

Post by kaba0 »

eternityforest wrote: post #807
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…

"Pretty" is subjective. I think a lot of it just looks like an experiment in minimalism, by people who forgot that there are colors besides jewel tones. 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…

> AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse

I recommend trying out an iPad with a mouse — there the cursor sort of locks into the closest clickable element, and has to have a sort of “escape velocity” before it will leave the given button, only living as a free-form cursor in-between.

Apple has here a unique way ahead - due to those UIs being designed for touch-first, they have surplus information compared to desktop-only software (e.g. certain apps understand touchpad gestures as well, simply from the appropriate swipe gesture on mobile).

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#855

Post by kaba0 »

iainmerrick wrote: post #431
callalex wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Classic Mac OS drop shadows were opaque, hence a lot cheaper. I don't think OS X is a good example of your point because resizing windows was incredibly sluggish for a long time. I always figured it was somehow due to the combination of live resizing plus ubiquitous compositing, but I never understood why it was so slow.

Resizing is slow because it is a back-and-force between the compositor (insanely fast, no bottleneck here) and a given user application, which receives a resize event multiple times a second, has to relayout its UI (CPU-bound - OS X might have had a phase when it had to run a constraint solver), and then rerender every widget in the new size. Shadows don’t matter here at all.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#856

Post by kaba0 »

NL807 wrote: post #364
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…

> Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets. Sadly Tunderbird devs drank their coolaid, as evident in the latest release.

The border between UI churn and “I am old and dislike any changes” is very blurry. I have only tried it for a short time and I think they did a good job.

The same for Jetbrains’ new UI. If you put every UI change in the same bucket, how can the situation improve?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#857

Post by kaba0 »

miramba wrote: post #725
pjettter wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wish we had more analog control in the digital world. I wish there were turn knobs instead up/down buttons with 10 steps (where it is easy to accidentally leave a menu... When trying to get back to where you were, you are suddenly adjusting something else entirely). Manual control with digital devices has become too digital and too cumbersome. It used to be easy to adjust contrast and brightness on a display,…

It seems we are so amazingly primitive that we still think touch screens are a pretty neat idea for anything. But I’m sure analog controls will come back at some time in the future: First in really expensive cars, as expression of luxury. Only cheap cars will still have the cheap touch screens. Slowly, the old new way of interaction will trickle down to anything else. Like it went for the digital watch, ubiquitous fo…

I mean, for most things a touchscreen is pretty much the ultimate human interface — we are fundamentally hand-based creatures and the ability to re-render the same glasspane into a controller for anything is still magic.

There are of course things where more specialized inputs are required, but for the rest, touchscreens are here to stay*

* One improvement I would like to see it about their surface — we can no longer blind type on phones, because we can’t feel the borders of the buttons - but I think we have the tech to dynamically make the screen’s surface rougher/smoother. Another idea is to bring back 3D touch (and potentially improve on that - maybe it could even take some 3D vector as input?)

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#858

Post by demetrius »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #729
david422 wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. Why even have a title bar at that point. Why not just stick a little tab on the side and get rid of the title bar entirely.

Is "Yes, good idea." the response you're expecting? Because that's my response. But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.

That's actually a case against modern overfilled title bars.

"Real" title bars can be removed if not needed (e.g. by switching to another windowing manager like dwm on Linux with X11; not sure how it's done in Wayland or in Windows but there must be a way).

"Crowded" title-bar from Gnome can't be easily removed, because they are not managed by the window manager.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#859

Post by theyAreThem11 »

ryandrake wrote: post #54
Aeolun wrote: post #7

I don’t think this is UX/UI designers not knowing/caring about accessibility. It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better. Who cares about the 0.5% of disabled people that weren’t likely to buy your app anyway. Same for browsers, FF may care about accessibility, but they won’t lose the browser wars (bit of a moot point by now, but eh) because m…

> It’s their bosses saying the tiny scrollbar is preferred because it sells 20% more due to the aesthetics being better. I think we need to stop shifting blame to "the bosses." The bosses are (generally) not getting involved with the minutia of how scroll bars work or what color they are, or how accessible they are. This problem falls squarely in the lap of 1. the UX designers who think scrollbars are icky and get in…

[flagged]

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#860

Post by theyAreThem11 »

pmontra wrote: post #411
Aeolun wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, take an average person, show them the UI of a current mac, then the UI of windows 95, and ask them which they prefer? It’s not the only factor, but it is a factor.

To prevent a familiarity bias we should ask them the same question in 1995 with time machined screenshots of current MacOS downsampled to 640x480px.

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