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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

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Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#291

Post by masswerk »

dredmorbius wrote: post #134
JohnFen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. And I really, really wish they'd stop it.

A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is extremely conservative, with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and ongoing, which is to say, longer than the original interface). It is ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself vastly prefering Linux and the opti…

The design and usability history of OS X is actually a bit more diverse. The first iterations ("lickable" Aqua) had serious issues, favoring buyability and wow-effects over everyday usability. (E.g., as Doc icons increased in shape on pointer proximity, they also dodged the pointer as the intended drop target in default settings.) This consolidated with 10.3 and 10.4 was the first real usable version of OS X, leading to 10.6, Snow Leopard (2009), Apple's study in excellence. From there on things come a bit more in flux however, with increasing inconsistencies, until the Jony Ive era gradually introduced what may be considered a new interface. (If you compare the current UI to early iterations of OS X side by side, they are probably further apart than these earlier revisions from the Classic UI, which were at least sharing the same Hunan interface guidelines.)

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#292

Post by saagarjha »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #284
tarentel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know this. Another way to quickly get to the top of tables in iOS, assuming you're in an app, is to double tap the button of whatever page you're in in the navigation bar at the bottom. Some apps somehow disable this but it's the default behavior built into the OS.

Tapping the button of the tab you're on doesn't always scroll to the top; it does always scroll to the default position. In the "All Photos" tab of the Photos app, which is sorted with newest photos at the bottom, tapping the tab again will bring you down to the bottom, as that's the default position.

This is a special case; the default behavior is to scroll to the top.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#293

Post by LeoPanthera »

city41 wrote: post #37
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

I went to Dropbox to try this out but got redirected to "Dropbox Business" which doesn't have a hamburger.

And then spent nearly 5 minutes trying to get back to "Regular Dropbox".

But wait... I'm at the root of dropbox.com. Is... Dropbox "non-business" dead? I stopped using it a while ago because of their inexorable push into "enterprise" features that I didn't care about, but I never expected them to outright kill the product.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#294

Post by erikpukinskis »

clhodapp wrote: post #285
_f1dq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this happening a lot. "Mobile first!" doesn't mean "Mobile only!"

It kinda does though, because modern software companies tend to shift focus away from projects before they get completely "done". The whole reason for "mobile first" is the tacit admission that whatever is not the primary focus will often get drastically less attention because there's already something that sorta "works".

There’s truth in what you’re saying, especially in the “things mostly suck, so expect that” world.

But in the ideal world you’re wrong... it’s fundamentally easier to start with a mobile design and make some specific interventions to make it work well on desktop than to do the opposite.

Whether anyone actually makes those interventions is, as you indicate, somewhat unlikely.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#295

Post by LeoPanthera »

betterbeehome wrote: post #219
lilyball wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS 13 has actually made the scrollbar into a first-class UI widget. You have to long-press on the scroll thumb while it's visible, but doing so gives you direct manipulation over it.

Thanks for pointing this out. Don’t think I would have figured that out.

"Don’t think I would have figured that out."

This, unfortunately, describes half the features of iOS. Apple is deeply in love with the undiscoverable UI - and then NOT DOCUMENTING it.

Drives me absolutely crazy.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#296

Post by zrobotics »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #279
coribuci wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless. Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do and brake it beyond all repair. > I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so. > Insane! I'm shocked you used such a © "word". The new way to h…

> Stupidity is contagious. And Microsoft's idea of innovation is copying what the others do Microsoft Office switched to the "backstage" menu in Office 2010, long before full-screen menus became a popular pattern. Office 2007 had the app menu, which is the same as the File menu in the Windows File Explorer. In my opinion, the app menu is far superior simply because it doesn't change the context and it's easily dismis…

I'm fine with the ribbon, but good God do I hate the full screen save & open menus.

They've obscured the "save as" functionality and really push one drive saving. Even as a one-drive user, oftentimes I just want to save a file on my disk in a specific spot without backing it up to the cloud.

I really wish Libreoffice Calc was a better Excel replacement, because it feels like Excel gets more dumbed-down each year. I get a UTF-8 csv emailed daily from a vendor, and I still can't get Excel to treat it properly. It only applies that setting to that specific file, I can't change it system-wide. Maybe it's possible, I found it easier to just write a python script to convert the files to windows-1250 like it expects.

The ribbon is far superior to the old menus though, this week I needed to create a shudder PowerPoint presentation. Don't think I've needed to do that in 5 years, but it was easy enough to find all the functionality I needed. Plus, the search box actually shows where the buttons are located, so you actually learn how to use the program instead of relying on search. I remember the mess the Office 07 menus were, any time there was a need to use a feature that wasn't familiar was a chore. I remember actually needing to Google for some excel feature and needing to rely on screenshots of the menus to find what I needed. I don't get it, since Visual Studio has far more complexity buried in it than Word, but I've never had anywhere near the difficulty finding features than I did with the old Office menus.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#297

Post by lstodd »

eropple wrote: post #127
gnode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I really wish for are 2000x2000-ish square screens, ~20 inch diagonal with minimal bezel, so that I can stack 3x2 of them and get to work at last instead of flipping wasting screen space and head movements on overly wide screens.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#298

Post by zrobotics »

silon42 wrote: post #209
kps wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did lose height; 1600×1200 → 1920×1080. For a while you could find 1920×1200 if you looked hard and spent more, but at the next increment everything is 16:9.

I have 2 1920x1200 and there is no reasonable upgrade except maybe something like 40" 4K (and not in retina/high dpi mode). 2560x1600 would be ok, but it's too expensive.

Seriously, for coding I absolutely love a 1920x1080 screen rotated 90°. Still wide enough to see an entire (sane) line, but more vertical space is just wonderful. Can't watch video, obviously, but for a work computer the vertical space is the absolute best. Improves web browsing as well for most sites.

I tried a 36", I can't stand it as a display. Fine for a TV, but it's a little much for a monitor. Although I can't stand more than 2 displays, so YMMV.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#300

Post by taejavu »

city41 wrote: post #275
taejavu wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true, their desktop breakpoint is 1024px. If the window is wider than that, there's no hamburger menu, and clicking "Sign in" reveals a menu that takes up 1/3 of the right side of the screen.

This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/nmi0FHQ.png For me the hamburger button's media query is set to a width of 1366px. I don't have a dropbox account. I do notice no matter what I always end up at ` https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv2` , so I may somehow be being put into an AB test. Even an incognito window does that. The name `dbv2` might imply a new version of the site that is in the works? Shrug.

Ah, I think you'll see what I see at https://www.dropbox.com/?landing=dbv1

Yours looks like https://www.dropbox.com/business

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