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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#11

Post by ggm »

mholt wrote: post #7

The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and buttons baffles me. For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before. MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons…

This. Material design relies on the browser hint to inform you the mouse/pointer has moved to an active element. Viewed with no focus on an active element, how are you meant to tell which pane of flat colour is a pressable, actionable element?

It looks great in print. It doesn't respect the modality of use for an online world.

I'm tempted to think we have to go to browser vendors and ask them to make happen..

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#12

Post by MartijnBraam »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it. Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks . And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough. And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They did…

I handle "random theme breaking my app" as a valid bug report, it's not that hard.

It's either something I'd have to fix in my app or fixed in that theme. Just ignoring the situation is just a shitty response.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#13

Post by goosedragons »

mholt wrote: post #7

The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and buttons baffles me. For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before. MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons…

I ended up reverting back to the old context menu. Those icons are annoying to parse and I have a tendency to look down each row as 20+ years of context menus has taught. And having so many options tucked an extra click away.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#14

Post by mholt »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #10
mholt wrote: post #7

The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and buttons baffles me. For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before. MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons…

In macOS, you can actually right-click many header bars (like Finder) and choose "Icon and Text" instead of "Icon" for what shows.

I do this, but I do not want to do this.

Also it looks funky. The padding is messed up and the text doesn't fit.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#15

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed.

> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action.

This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickability, the current status), but in many cases nothing was added to supplant the loss of those visual cues, so now it is just a label (or a label in a white or grey box) and there is no way of knowing if it is clickable or its current status.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#16

Post by smoldesu »

von_lohengramm wrote: post #5

The font rendering on that example of "the perfect button" is rather atrocious. It's kind of sad that Windows is (was?) the last bastion of serviceable font rendering.

If you think that looks bad, wait until you see what GTK4 was stuck looking like for the first 10 months of it's life cycle: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#17

Post by gjsman-1000 »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #12
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #8

For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it. Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks . And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough. And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They did…

I handle "random theme breaking my app" as a valid bug report, it's not that hard. It's either something I'd have to fix in my app or fixed in that theme. Just ignoring the situation is just a shitty response.

https://stopthemingmy.app

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#18

Post by MartijnBraam »

smoldesu wrote: post #4

All of this is pretty much how I feel on the matter, too. GTK3's interface was a really lovely blend of skeuomorphism and more abstract widgets that came together to make a really unique experience. Even if it didn't work in every context, I appreciated how well it worked for less complicated applications and making great-looking, device-agnostic GUIs. Cawbird was a wonderful native Twitter app made possible with GTK…

This is exactly how I feel about it. The sad thing is that if the whole gnome ecosystem burns down I'd have to use the alternatives that I like even less.

I'm just not designing gtk4 apps untill it's actually better than gtk3

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#20

Post by tshaddox »

> The dark theme, while not officially supported as a normal application theme, works absolutely brilliantly and is a great example of how to design a dark theme.

There are only three small screenshots of UI in the dark theme, but to me it looks very clearly like a naive "invert all the design token colors and call it a day" implementation.

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