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Scrollbars are becoming a problem

artemis.sh

871–880 of 944 posts

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've worked in the software business for the better part of 25 years and my experience differs.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Active Desktop and IE Windows Explorer, for one thing. But also, generally, the difference is that Windows 95 still feels like a "workstation" computer, designed for maximum readability and clarity, while staying in the background and not drawing any attention to itself. With Windows 98, the OS begins trying to look pretty, which means having more elements and style choices which take attention away from the work.

You could turn off Active Desktop and IE Windows Explorer? And what in Windows 98 or Windows 2000 took attention away from the work?

If I remember correctly turning off active desktop on 98 was almost a requirement if you wanted a ... I was going to say stable system but lets be real this was 98 the best you could hope for was a sort of stable system.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a (marginally) HDR monitor, and I run Windows 10's HDR mode. Immediately it was noticeably blander than non-HDR, but I've quite grown to like it. I find it very pleasant to use for long stretches for work and such. When I play games I get the vivid colors and contrast so all good.

Interesting, I have an HDR monitor but never tried actually using the HDR function. It does seem to make a difference and feels nicer on the eyes. I'll have to see how it affects games too.

Windows map sdr color in HDR mode in the way that srgb profile monitor display sdr color. So it is actually what it intended to be.

It's just that monitors nowadays don't even default to SRGB profile.

Windows in hdr mode with hdr monitor(vesa certified) and windows in sdr with a monitor set to srgb mode should have an almost identical visual.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#876

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't actually use reason to understand modern UX/UI designers choices. I've just got Windows 11 at work. They've increased the blank space between all the items in the file exporer quite significantly. They clearly don't care about vertical space because I know have to scroll first in places I could click first before.

Just so you know, you can disable that spacing in the file explorer: in the explorer -> View -> Show -> Compact view

I feel like I periodically have to do that

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't "agree to disagree", they offer a function that's unusable. It would be the equivalent of MacOS breaking the ability to double click on an app. But it's okay because you could use Spotlight. That's great and all, but if everything else allows double clicking and MacOS allowed double clicking but only on the absolute centre pixel, we would all consider it broken.

For me it's more like being disappointed that there's no way to start the engine in my car with a hand crank, instead of using the key.

Some older (pre 21st century ) motorcycles have a kick starter in addition to the electric one, and it does actually come in handy.

On newer bikes if the starter fails or the battery dies you need to unceremoniously push the bike to speed, jump on and put it on first.

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#878
post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There were live resizing hacks on classic MacOS that often worked pretty well, depending on the app. So it seemed pretty shocking to me how huge the regression was in the early days of OS X.

I don’t think the graphics hardware was always “insanely fast” back in those days, but even so, there must have been some terrible bottlenecks in the software.

As a user there was no way around it, and if I recall right, even as a developer it was hard to get decent resizing performance out of the system widgets.

One of the very few times I can recall where Apple has shipped something with such poor performance. Maybe most people didn’t notice or didn’t care because they just don’t resize windows very often?

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#879

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…

I don't know what windows has, but in gnome, you can grab anything in the title bar to drag the windrow. You don't have to search for some empty pixel there. The edges of the window also easily work for resizing as well

Re: Scrollbars are becoming a problem

#880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not. What does that even mean? That's the whole point of the discussion - standard UI elements have been bastardized so much, might as well just keep the trend going.

Bastardized yes, but you can't truly get rid of it in all circumstances. If there is a clean way to get rid of it, then sure that's a good option for some programs. (But there are a couple bits that you need to keep.) But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.

> But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.

No, it is a question about design. Window environments like Windows 11, macOS, Gnome or lots of other Linux window managers are designed for desktop PCs, not tablets. I would include Laptops under desktop PCs for this discussion, since most people -- that are working the whole day on their laptop -- add one or more screens to it. And on those large modern displays, it is more effective than ever to use overlapping non-fullscreened windows. Then it is absolutely necessary to have good standardized UI components to manage those windows. But those customized title bars break that standardization and customization. On modern Gnome I often have to search for the window that is in focus. It used to be clearly visible with a significant color difference in the titlebar. Today, there is slight difference in gray shading. That is ridiculous. And half of modern programs redefine the colors of their title bars, so you have to know for earch application which shade of gray stands for focus and which stands for not in focus. This is fucking stupid.

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