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Scrollbars are becoming a problem
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Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#862It'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 problem is also waste of real estate, empty space for aestetics. Reading a conversation in teams etc. is outright painful. My suspicion is that it's some company internal engagement metric gambling ala every click on the scrollbar is a "use", much "use",less time spend in other apps equals promotion.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#863Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is common on sites like YouTube as well. Try to scroll through your front page without your mouse accidentally hitting random videos and causing them to auto play. It drives me insane. The best spot for the mouse that I've found is a small maybe 20px area between the menu bar and the leftmost video. Other than that, you're autoplaying something. I agree with everything you said as well. Huge complaints from me o…
The YouTube autoplay annoys me too. Would be nice if it could be turned off in the settings
Oh, it can be, but it loves to just turn itself on. And I doubt anyone in charge of allocating FTE-time at YouTube gives a crap, because autoplay drives "engagement" and "views". Just actively user-hostile and safe to assume purposeful. My subscriptions don't randomly disappear, so why does this setting on my account?
The "autoplay on hover" thing can also be turned off, but get this, it's seemingly stored client-side so you have to turn it off on every computer you use, and if you reset your browser or clear the cache, it turns itself back on. I'm sure YT couldn't find the space to store a boolean.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#864Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most employers I've had are all about getting engineers to be everything. Designers, infrastructure, QA, UI/UX, and even product/project managers.. everything.
Sounds like you need new employers. The only people who want that are shortsighted managers who don't care that they know nothing about users' needs, and that's certainly not a universal disposition in the software business.
This has been true of every employer I have ever had. It's true outside of "tech" as well but nearly all of my experience has been as a software engineer.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#865Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article specifically mentions eye tracker users as an affected group. Everybody who tries to actually use the scroll bar as a handle (rather than a non-interactive position indicator for use with the other scrolling methods) would have a problem, because they're not really meant to be used that way and most people don't use them that way (which is why they keep shrinking). Unfortunately the article doesn't mentio…
> because they're not really meant to be used that way ...how do you think people scrolled documents in Word before mice had scroll-wheels?
Very painfully. Have you ever noticed how fountains in cities are increasingly impractical to fill water jugs from? (Just because eons ago it was meant to be used that way, doesn't mean it still is.)
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#866Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
The UI is not terrible, but it feels very unpolished. The font line spacing seems off and too narrow, the toolbar and other UI components drift and shift when you switch tabs, the main window menu is in the wrong location, etc.
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#867Earlier quoted context omitted.
If everyone would design against properly calibrated monitors it would be fine, you could just set it to the standard calibration, but they don't so there is no universally good brightness you'd never need to change for. It's like webpage sizes, if everyone built and tested their UIs at the standard physical screen scaling then you would run into a lot less variance in website sizes.
If everyone had calibrated monitors and every app and website was the same brightness , yes. Instead, it varies wildly, often for good reasons... and then switching windows exposes you to extreme shifts. E.g. switch between photograph editing and a giant white text document, nothing's gonna save you then - stuff that looks correct and good for photography is absurd when most of your screen is the same as the sun. Cal…
Calibration in this case isn't about providing "and so everything then looks like it's the same brightness, because it's calibrated" it's about "and so the same modifications can be applied to everything consistently, because it's all calibrated". I.e. just lowering the brightness a bit below the intended value now is impossible. One thing built on a monitor with it's brightness curve undercalibrated and one with its brightness curve overcalibrated will look two different kinds of wrong when shifted by such a transform. That would not be the case with calibrated sources, everything would shift in the same way and you're able to have it look "wrong" (i.e. darker, capped, brighter, whatever) exactly the way you want, consistently.
Taking it to the DPI example, having things built at a standardised DPI isn't about making everything appear the same physical size it's about making everything tuned against a consistent physical size for the exact same reason, default is always intended and your global adjustments are always consistently resulting in the source material being larger than intended or smaller than intended instead of "well, depends how uncalibrated the source was if it's still smaller or larger than intended".
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#868It'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…
That's the point of stuff like alt dragging or super dragging
Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem
#869Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I'm ok with adding more functions to the titlebar, it's something I experimented with myself for a desktop app some 15 years ago. I found there was a heck of a lot of special behaviours tied to the titlebar and that overriding them meant a lot of work to fix edge cases like - being able to move windows. So I never followed through with it.
Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?
That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.