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Scrollbar Blindness

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#221

Post by syspec »

asciimov wrote: post #214
supernova87a wrote: post #18

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…

> For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features. I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability. Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display i…

Double press

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#222

Post by NegativeLatency »

baggy_trough wrote: post #187
reaperducer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features 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…

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

EX mode in vim

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#224

Post by chrisco255 »

narag wrote: post #195
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

Windows keys started the nightmare for me decades ago. So nice hitting one of those while gaming full-screen! This conversation happened a thousand times: "but you can hit them again and restore what you were doing"... no, I can't, specially if I have pressed a dozen keys since. I used to buy IBM keyboards from more civilized times, but my dealer disappeared, maybe he was arrested?

Get you a gaming keyboard with a Windows key lock.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#225

Post by svachalek »

leonidasv wrote: post #150
xur17 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For folks considering the switch, I highly recommend considering linux as well. I've used both macOS and ubuntu as a development environment, and bug wise they are on par, but linux really excels at having a true "native" development environment. Docker without a weird VM, true bash, etc.

Just a minor nitpick, macOS has true bash. It just doesn't have the GNU coreutils, instead it uses the BSD-based equivalents. And yeah, they suck a lot[1], but there's a way to fix if you use Homebrew: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57973942/8280773 [1] Performance-wise and also when you take into account that most shell scripts/tutorials on the internet are written with a GNU userland in mind.

As I remember it, this is the whole reason OS X became the de facto standard for developers in the first place, consumer-grade windowing and device drivers coupled with a familiar development environment.

zsh has replaced bash as the default shell, btw.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#226

Post by madeofpalk »

snazz wrote: post #193
madeofpalk wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"to be fair" - on Apple's site they arent controlling how the user's scroll. They aren't scroll hijacking, they're just progressing video playback based on the native scroll position. It's still janky (and buggy?) as hell on Chrome on Windows with a mouse with a scroll wheel.

Those kinds of pages are janky on macOS with a low-sensitivity scroll wheel too. They're really satisfying on touchscreens and touchpads; I wonder if it's possible to make them smooth on devices with junky mice without implementing the equally-annoying smooth scroll hijacking that is popular on some sites.

I guess you would just have to "smooth" out the animations also.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#227

Post by Sindisil »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #205
derefr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated. 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 deskto…

Speaking of title bars, the trend to move content into the title bar is terrible for usability. There is nowhere left to click to move a window. Not to mention each app choosing a different color/style for this region. Do designers assume everyone runs 1 full screen window at a time?

Yes. Yes they do.

And because their designs make windowed use problematic (both because of the title bar issues, and because space is used poorly in the name of "clean design"), they encourage even full screen use.

Add to that the fact that more than a few applications default to full screen at first run, and ...

This is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#228

Post by Steltek »

tiborsaas wrote: post #192
jakub_g wrote: post #71

If you read between the lines, you should understand that the root cause of issue is the macOS developer monoculture. All you need is one Windows or Linux-based developer in your team to catch those kind of issues. But so many dev teams are macOS-only those days, whereas, apart from US and 2-3 other rich countries, 80%+ or even more of actual desktop users are Windows-based. (There are many other problems with macOS…

Our company offered me a choice between a Mac and a PC, but also said that the former is heavily recommended so I picked that option. I didn't want to be the guy who constantly cries for help because stuff is just not designed and never tested on windows.

Don't forget the constant peer pressure and lame jokes from your coworkers! Oh and if you're a Mac newbie, be prepared to figure it out for yourself. Not that people are unhelpful but that they genuinely don't know any other workflows beyond their cloistered little OS with a barely-usable kernel.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#229

Post by madeofpalk »

vvpan wrote: post #172
madeofpalk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, it's all about the tooling. For better or worse, more is moving to web/electron, but for teams using Sketch, good luck trying to open Sketch file on Windows. After getting a Windows gaming PC, I've been spending more and more of my time, developing and otherwise, on PC. I prefer it because it's where I have my large (low DPI :( ) monitor, but Windows is still full of so many papercuts in general usage (I m…

Didn't Microsoft make an effort to bring Linux into Windows a few years back? Is that no longer a thing?

That's WSL. It's still there, and it's super easy to use (new Terminal tab > Ubuntu), but I just find I don't have much of a need for it. I do web development with Node, which runs fine under windows. https://imgur.com/a/n19qb8M

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#230

Post by Yizahi »

narag wrote: post #195
baggy_trough wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.

Windows keys started the nightmare for me decades ago. So nice hitting one of those while gaming full-screen! This conversation happened a thousand times: "but you can hit them again and restore what you were doing"... no, I can't, specially if I have pressed a dozen keys since. I used to buy IBM keyboards from more civilized times, but my dealer disappeared, maybe he was arrested?

My rather new HP laptop has scroll lock hidden on the unlabeled combination fn+C which is obviously right next to the daily used ctrl+C. It is trigger, and it doesn't LED or any OS indication that it's on or off. Good luck understanding why arrow keys are broken in Excel :)
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