931–940 of 944 posts
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The UI usually maps linear motion quite naturally. In real use the control is mapped to a physical knob via MIDI, if you'll be tweaking it on the fly.
I wanted to learn Ableton and have determined that it,s futile unless I get a MIDI controller
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Because I haven't used windows in over 5 years. I apparently conflated the space bar icon being absent with the idea of the entire menu being gone.
Still quite a bit of time between "after win3.1" and "over 5 years". Like, almost thirty years now where that exact icon has, OK, "been absent" -- but replaced with other icons in the exact same spot. Did you never, even by mistake, click on one of those in all those over twenty years? Wow, you must be a lot better than I at mouse control. And / or a lot less curious.
For chrome and firefox there is an extension I use that helps dramatically. "Scrollbar Anywhere". The way I have it set up, I can right click and drag anywhere on "whitespace" on the page and scroll in any direction I drag the mouse. You can set it up to go as fast or slow as you like relative to the amount you move your mouse, and you can even have it "glide" when you let up on the mouse if you like. https://chrome.…
For Firefox it's this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scroll_anywhe...
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What was your argument? Apple's historic monochrome devices are irrelevant. And Apple used color on color displays in those times.
My argument here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869476 >) is that across all OSes, and for the Web generally , being mindful of monochrome, low-refresh-rate displays is something that should be front-of-mind for UI/UX teams and design. Many of these issues already exist, e.g., for documents which are likely to be printed on monochrome devices. Colour is useful where available , but it is not universally ava…
Any explanation of the anti color trend must explain Apple's participation. Especially because Microsoft and GNOME appeared to imitate Apple.
I did not say monochrome was a display technology Apple never used. You named e ink. And monochrome is not a display technology.
Other trends included more transparency in content areas, links almost unidentifiable without color, and other reliance on small shade differences. And Apple made all app icons the same shape. All worse for e ink.
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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…
You seem to be assuming the commenter you replied to didn't know that. As I understood it, all they were saying is that advice about calibration is useless for people who don't do photo editing, but whose problem is exactly that different windows have such wildly varying brightness that switching from one to another often makes everything look either pitch dark or third-degree-interrogation light in your eyes.
Which category of people do you think there are more of? My bet is on the latter. They need... Well, if you don't want to call it "another kind of calibration", you're free to come up with another term.
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What was your argument? Apple's historic monochrome devices are irrelevant. And Apple used color on color displays in those times.
My argument here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869476 >) is that across all OSes, and for the Web generally , being mindful of monochrome, low-refresh-rate displays is something that should be front-of-mind for UI/UX teams and design. Many of these issues already exist, e.g., for documents which are likely to be printed on monochrome devices. Colour is useful where available , but it is not universally ava…
OK, that does it. You're a Hong Kong viking, not a Seattle baker.
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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…
That looks familiar somehow... How many leaves should I pay you for this insight?
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Does anyone apply formal usability studies anymore? (not just do them - do they apply the results). I was trained in formal UX long ago, and many UIs today outright violate common rules we learned back then. High contrast was considered important for low vision users even if it looked ugly then. Now most UIs are lower contrast and while they look nicer, they are less usable. Of course I learned long ago and so I'm wi…
I go to the store to buy a hammer. I’m a hammer user and I use the hammer. Or I go to the store and I buy heroin. I’m a heroin user and I use the heroin. These UIs we speak of, are they hammers, or are they heroin? Because I’m currently looking at a high contrast screen using a mixture of Unix tools created from the late 60s to yesterday. I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet made by a team of lawyers that is in a UI.…
A hammer is useful for doing stuff, which modern UIs increasingly aren't. So it seems they aren't hammers.
I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down…
> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such … People with cataracts may benefit from dark mode. People with glaucoma or higher order aberrations (e.g. me) may benefit from light mode. Web sites should use `prefers-color-scheme`; native GUI programs should use the native equivalents (or default colours); command-line programs should not assume a particular background. Edit: there's a comment chain that fell off t…
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> Scroll wheels and gestures are paging mechanisms, a scrollbar does that as well but it’s also a “take me to the middle of the document” control. IME, only on Linux am I able to click on an arbitrary location beneath or atop the scrollbar and be taken there immediately. On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the docu…
>On Windows, it seems that clicking below the scrollbar is equivalent to scrolling down once. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of the document or webpage, you have to drag the scrollbar all the way down manually. I actually find it kind of annoying. Have you tried changing the behavior in Settings?