161–170 of 575 posts
Another one of such thing: please try to scroll on your site using a mouse wheel from time to time, even if you're normally using a touchpad (from your laptop or an external one)! Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad. Example: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ is horrible to use on anything that isn't a mobile device or a Mac.
While folks are rightfully bashing macOS’s hidden scroll bars, I would like to advertise an iOS feature that is actually pro-scroll bar. As of iOS 13, you can grab the scroll bar to scroll at hyper speed rather than repeatedly flicking the screen. Not sure if there’s a proper name for this feature but it’s explained here https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/08/05/scroll-faster-iphon...
I think it's called using a scrollbar. :) That's typically how they work.
To spare readers the content marketing piece: tap and hold to grab it.
I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…
You don't even have to be elderly.
The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears.
How did that conversation go?
Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go?
Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or ever think to look for it.
Who thought that was a good idea?
I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
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Indeed. I just set scrollbars to always show on my Macbook per the author's suggestion and there are 4 scrollbars on their page! Makes me wonder if I'm missing the point of the fairly simple post?
That's clearly intentional to make the point. Made me appreciate the article more.
I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem. For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when…
At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling.
Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than desktop computers at this point—including many old people!) and has built the OS around the idea that, just like on a touchscreen, scrolling is a gesture that you can attempt to apply anywhere, whether there's an affordance for it built into the app or not—i.e. that scrollability is a universal, system-level operation, not something up to the application. Every application in macOS/iOS is inherently built in terms of having some kind of "viewport" with a "document" loaded into it; and scrolling moves the "document" around within the "viewport." Even if that's a pointless thing to do, it still attempts to perform the operation.
(Though in terms of feedback, iOS has a more coherent responsivity to "attempted" scrolling than macOS does. You can "tug" at the top and bottom edges of the screen in pretty much any iOS app and get some extra out-of-document blank space, with a snapback when you let go. Whereas, in macOS apps, this only happens for "content" regions; whereas for "chrome" regions—e.g. the top-level icon listing in System Preferences—the region will only have snapback if the window is small enough for the region to be scrollable. If the window is large enough that everything is presented, your scroll gestures just go unacknowledged, as if the window wasn't a "document" in a "viewport" at all. Interestingly, you also can't resize such all-chrome windows; you only ever get a scrollbar on them if running on a computer with a too-low display resolution.)
What is missing, though, is a visual indication of whether scrolling will do anything, before you try it. Scrollbars used to help with this, yes. But the fix isn't simply reintroducing them. The world scrollbars were built for no longer exists: both web apps and modern native apps now do progressive loading/"infinite scroll", where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware of whether more content will be discovered when it tries to demand another chunk of data from its backend. Even when you force-enable the scrollbar, the size and relative position of the "scroll-thumb" now communicates no information about your "actual" scroll position in many apps.
As well, there are now real infinte-canvas apps (like Maps) where a scroll "position" wouldn't even be a coherent concept, because the document under the viewport is a self-connected torus. Universal gesture scrolling adapts well to this concept; scrollbars don't.
IMHO, I'd like to see a slight fade-to-black or 3D "bend away from camera" applied to the inner edges of the scrollable viewport, whenever the document in the viewport is not sitting flush with that edge of the viewport. This would provide a visual affordance of "scrollability" without providing any often-misleading information of relative scroll-position. Infinite-scroll documents would just always be "faded out" on all edges. Seems obvious?
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look?
Nah, it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. Stick a title/tab bar, tool bar, and maybe an always-on bookmarks bar on top of the window, and an always-on start menu at the bottom, and you'll find that the PDF only gets about 400px of viewport real-estate. And now you want the PDF's own controls to steal more of that? There's a reason that Chrome first made the status bar into an overlay, and then merged the title bar with the status bar — it's trying to reclaim vertical space for exactly these constrained scenarios.
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All you need is a round of testing for cross-browser compatibility. It's a pretty much solved problem by now, doesn't take that much time and can be automated. There is nothing stopping every developer from doing it - besides the usual pressure to deliver features in place of proper engineering.
> All you need is a round of testing for cross-browser compatibility. It's a pretty much solved problem by now, doesn't take that much time and can be automated. Please show me a solved automated test for the issue in the post.
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Infinite scroll often make it nearly impossible to click on the site's privacy policy or terms of service in the page footer without going into dev tools. Whenever I come across that issue I wonder whether it's a feature or a bug.
Does this actually happen frequently?
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yes, that's pretty terrible, I always scroll with the mouse wheel, since I'm tool old to be rubbing a plate of glass and not feel like a moron. But this one, made my finger hurt a bit and I din't even make it half way down.
I have a "Mitsumi Standard Scroll" mouse that has a scroll button that you can hold down instead of a wheel that you have to keep spinning. It's so much easier on the fingers that I'm amazed I haven't been able to find it anywhere else.
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I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of US desktops were Windows. Their users are probably also less tech literate than the Mac users.
More like 95%
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Full stack dev, 8 ~ 12 hours a day on my 2015 MBP 13" touchpad. No regrets.
Interesting. Despite my efforts to consider that people have different preferences for almost everything in life, I am constantly surprised by my assumumptions about how other people do things that turn out to be very wrong. It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wron…
Remind yourself that it works exactly like the screen of an iPhone or iPad, that’s when it clicked for me.