Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Killed the Scrollbar?

ello.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 325 posts

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#121

Post by rhizome »

organsnyder wrote: post #83
buboard wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's nostalgia, even though i m old too. It's just a lot more efficent and faster to use, mouse and keyboard-wise. I often think to roll back to my windows 7 as a more sane desktop environment. Some of the biggest offenses i 've seen are google's web apps. Total loss of hierarchy and replacement with elusive self-hiding buttons, even when it's clear from their use case that they should never have been hamburg…

I'm mystified every time I try to find my contacts from Gmail. I understand that it's a separate app (I think), but did anyone stop and think that the two apps might warrant a bit tighter coupling (at least in menu placement)?

Google will use three different button schemes in a single app, nobody does product there.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#122

Post by F-0X »

buboard wrote: post #23
agumonkey wrote: post #12

I'm born in the 80s so it's not totally objective, but I know there's something wrong when I boot up a win95 box and I don't miss 99% of so called innovation regarding UI.

I doubt it's nostalgia, even though i m old too. It's just a lot more efficent and faster to use, mouse and keyboard-wise. I often think to roll back to my windows 7 as a more sane desktop environment. Some of the biggest offenses i 've seen are google's web apps. Total loss of hierarchy and replacement with elusive self-hiding buttons, even when it's clear from their use case that they should never have been hamburg…

Considering that Windows 95 powered many people's first exposure to computers, they clearly had to put a lot of thought into user experience. And they did a fantastic job.

I definitely believe almost everything since has been "innovation" for the sake of "progress", regardless of whether it was really better or not. Usually novel but worse.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#123

Post by baddox »

city41 wrote: post #65
yeldarb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it only does this on sufficiently "small" screens. This is what it looks like on my external display: https://imgur.com/a/DJBiYJ6

Oh you're right. Interesting. My browser is 1134x1080. I guess maybe in today's world of super high res phones that could be considered a "mobile display".

I don't really understand what's wrong with a full-screen modal menu, or how that means "this is for mobile." It's true that it looks a bit stark on their homepage where there are only 2 links, but it's probably a fairly sensible extensible design that works well when there are many more links or things to see.

It's fair to criticize specific visual and UX design details, but it's a bit much to take this as any indication that Dropbox doesn't care about desktop users (especially Dropbox) or that everything is being "mobilified."

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#124

Post by rhizome »

buboard wrote: post #104
rb808 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But our A/B testing shows a 5% increase in engagement by making it crappy.

Oh yeah, i was pressing all your buttons randomly because none of them were obvious what they do. I was surely engaging with your app very much, while swearing.

Voice recognition is still a few revisions off, thank you for your patience.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#125

Post by dredmorbius »

mthoms wrote: post #85
RaiseProfits wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err isn’t this a problem remembering your file hierarchy as well? Search is the answer in both scenarios.

Well no, the point of a file hierarchy is that it should be well, a hierarchy. In other words each level should sub-divide your files into further obvious (whatever that means to you) subcategories.

Very few classification schemes are unambiguously DAGs.

We're used to them for use with physical objects, which can only occupy a single space. When the search interface is the representation (as with files or data stores), cross-referencing across categories is readily facilitated, and (in the extremely rare instance of well-designed ontologies), useful.

I've created several collections using extensive tagging schemas, and not infrequently run out of tags. I've also been looking at various ontologies suggested over the years, dating to Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Diderot, and more recent (often library or encyclopedia) schemas. Some are useful, none are perfect, all incorporate biases and anacronisms.

Another feature of folders (directories), or physical storage locations (for physical items), is that the classification / relation is created automatically by virtue of where an item or file is located. For tagging systems, you've got the additional overhead of specifying (or creating a rules-based tag-generating system) to apply tags to content. Otherwise you end up with a morass of "My Document0012811.docx", "untitled", "unclassified", "misc", etc., content. Cataloguing itself is a role, process, and step, and requires maintenance. Even within library science, the tendency has been to move toward self-describing works, full-text search, and imputed relationships.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#127

Post by eropple »

gnode wrote: post #98
eropple wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.

The screen real estate isn't particularly precious on a desktop / laptop with a large, high-resolution screen (much less precious than mobile, for sure), but I also like to get rid of menu bars, tool bars, etc. just because they're visual clutter, and like you say, a keyboard makes up for them. Ironically, I do enable them on my tablet, because I don't always have a keyboard attached to it. Tablets generally have eno…

I use three 1440p 27" monitors and vertical real estate is still something I'd seriously inconvenience an adorable puppy for more of. If my desk was a little better-shaped for it and I didn't need a place to put speakers, etc., I'd go back to using at least one vertical display.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#128

Post by aeyes »

m4r35n357 wrote: post #38

Idiots removed the triangles at top & bottom that you could use to scroll without dragging. I think they did it because they are stupid and evil.

What OS?

Even without the arrow buttons I can scroll without dragging, just click the scrollbar wherever you want.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#129

Post by eropple »

JohnFen wrote: post #84
eropple wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you turn on the menu bar. To me this isn't a "tablet" feature at all--it's just a "screen real estate is precious" feature. Even when hidden it's only an Alt press away.

I always turn on the menu bar on the desktop. Screen real estate is valuable, but using some on a menu bar is a very worthwhile expenditure, in my opinion. I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.

I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#130

Post by dredmorbius »

yellowapple wrote: post #62
tw04 wrote: post #28

The same people who killed folders "because tags". Don't get me wrong, I love tags, but why on earth can't we have BOTH???? I don't always remember what I tagged something with, and searching through 8 years of work to find something is useless.

Tags would be okay as a folders replacement if they, you know, actually replaced folders. That is: if a tag can in turn have tags, and those tags automatically apply to the tagged files, then it should be trivial to not only emulate a folder hierarchy, but even improve upon it by offering more flexibility. It'd also help substantially if more tag-centric applications were up-front about which tags are already defined…

LoCCS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_classifica...

Seriously.

(Or one of a very few equivalents, possibly the Colon Classification.)

Post reply on HN