171–180 of 719 posts
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Double tap to zoom to paragraph has been a standard touch gesture for the last ~10 years at least.
Only on iOS. On Android and all desktop OSes, double-tap selects a word.
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Double tap to zoom to paragraph has been a standard touch gesture for the last ~10 years at least.
Only on iOS. On Android and all desktop OSes, double-tap selects a word.
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One nice thing about recent Ubuntu is that even though they hide the password box, you can start typing on the unlock screen and your text will be entered into the password box.
Why hide the password box, then, unless you think that users learning to type and have magically it go somewhere invisible is a good UI design… (Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the t…
There was a time (roughly between 1982 and 1993) when very few could sit down in front of a GUI. I do feel like I am returning to that time. Here are some interfaces I could do without, except that I can't: → The command line. In 2020, I need to do a lot of things at a command line because there is no other way. For example, starting and stopping sshd needs to be a checkbox. → Tabs. Tabs. and more layers of Tabs: boo…
That's how you get something like this: https://www.jensroesner.com/wgetgui/
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> Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on... Maybe we shouldn't strive for uniformity across many different interfaces. My office has switched to MS Teams, which is an abomination on the desktop. But would b…
Microsoft even had MSN Messenger. The former commenter has no excuse, but lazyness and a great lack of understanding of 90/00's computing environment. W9x-w2k/KDE's paradigm were the best ever for a DE based multitasking. This is a PC. Why does the parent commenter want to _downgrade_ its user experience to the one from a mobile user?
On a tablet, MS Teams would be (mostly) adequate. The tabbed interface is somewhat natural:
+----------------------------------+
| |search/command field| |
+---------+--------+---------------+
|Activity |Person1 |Chat Files Org |
| |Person2 +---------------+
|Teams | |Some stuff |
|Calendar | | |
+---------+------------------------+
It actually works well as a model for how to do chat/collaboration with a tablet. It makes good use of space (the first two columns take up almost as little space as needed). It's touch-friendly. If it launched files into their own editors, it'd be a perfectly reasonable tablet application.
But on the desktop, I'd really like to chat with more than one person at at time. I'd like to view the files and chat with whoever sent it. The desktop computer offers one of the most flexible GUI systems we have, don't force users into a singular mode of use unless you're running on a kiosk.
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I'm picking on MS Teams, but look at Slack and Discord as the things it's imitating (or all are imitating each other). Restrictive single-window applications neglecting what makes the desktop so flexible/capable and distinct from tablets, which their present UIs are more suited for.
Speaking of the Firefox version 75 bar: Why has there been a change in the way the selection works? Now it takes three well-timed clicks to select an entire url. Is this an improvement?
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Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.
My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned…
Native macOS apps get to be a bit clever for this, in that there are two kind of button-highlight-state per dialog (the "default action" button, which is filled with the OS accent color; and, separately, the button the tab-selection starts off highlighting, which has an outline ring around it.) This means that there are two keys you can mash, for different results: mashing Enter results in pressing the default action (i.e. colored) button–which Apple HIG suggests be the "Confirm" option for dangerous cases; while mashing Space results in selecting the initially-selected (i.e. outlined) button—which Apple HIG suggests be the "Cancel" option for dangerous cases. I believe that, in cases where the action isn't irrevocable, Apple HIG suggests that the default-action and initially-selected attributes be placed on the same button, so that either mash sequence will activate the button.
I really wish that kind of thinking was put into other systems.
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I just started a new job and they use Gmail for the email, it has been probably well over a year since I logged into gmail on web. That’s side hamburger button throws me for a loop every. Single. Times. For some reason I keep thinking it’ll bring up the other gsuite apps, but instead the whole page shifts awkwardly aha then the sidebar disappears, “that was not what I was expecting” is my reaction every time.
You may want to try this one: https://simpl.fyi/
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Microsoft even had MSN Messenger. The former commenter has no excuse, but lazyness and a great lack of understanding of 90/00's computing environment. W9x-w2k/KDE's paradigm were the best ever for a DE based multitasking. This is a PC. Why does the parent commenter want to _downgrade_ its user experience to the one from a mobile user?
I wouldn't even go so far as to say that the mobile experience is a downgrade. The issue is one of respect for the medium the program is executing on. On a tablet, MS Teams would be (mostly) adequate. The tabbed interface is somewhat natural: +----------------------------------+ | |search/command field| | +---------+--------+---------------+ |Activity |Person1 |Chat Files Org | | |Person2 +---------------+ |Teams | |…
Physical keyboards as a cover should be a must shipped item on every tablet.
A tablet is a consumer/broadcasting device, like the smartphone. You are not producingwith it. You are either consuming media, or sharing it. It's the perfect ad device. And zoomers are blindly embracing it as if it was better and more "modern". They are not right.
Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops. Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change,…
As I recall history, using icons was a main way the rest of the industry tried to copy the usability of the MAc UI, as it conquered a lot of mindshare in the 80s and 90s. But the Mac almost never had just icons in the ui. There would usually be an icon and a text. With little space you'd revert to text only. Apple had a team of expert Usability experts. Others... did not. So they just copied something that looked coo…
The menu bar was always just text.
The toolbars offered several options: large/medium/small/no icons, text/no text.
(Not all of those options were always available.)
This let you progress as a user of a system. When you first experienced it you could use the large icons with text because it made the things you were searching for standout. As you learned the icons you could start shrinking them, and eventually remove the text. This opened up the toolbar to fit many more actions (often less frequently used). And the tool tip from hovering remained throughout, so in the worst case of an ambiguous (or unknown) icon, you could hover over it and learn what it did. Additionally, you'd often get the shortcut for the action when hovering over the button (or viewing it in the menu bar).
Many contemporary applications don't provide their users with this notion of progression.