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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

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Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#311

Post by dredmorbius »

masswerk wrote: post #291
dredmorbius wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple's interfaces have definitely evolved, but the changes have tended to be, compared to other platforms, minor and reserved. The overall motif of menu fixed to the display (rather than windows), three window buttons, hotkeys, etc., haven't changed, though colous, styling, and some features (multiple desktops, dark mode) have come and gone.

My preferred desktop, Windowmaker, is even more conservative, as it's seeking to emulate the 1980s NextStep desktop, though there have been a few changes, and I noticed many of them sharply.

But contrast Microsoft, which had fairly sharp changes from the Windows 1 days to present, or the gratuitous changes tossed out by the major Linux desktops (GNOME and KDE), and it's no contest. Mac has an incredibly stable GUI. I don't much care for it but it's stable.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#312

Post by dredmorbius »

agluszak wrote: post #220
dredmorbius wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On various apps, with Google Chrome/Android being the worst, it can take minutes to scroll through pages / tabs. I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open (well over 1,000 on desktop Firefox, which actually is fairly managable), and on Android there's simply no way to deal with more than ~20 (which I can easily hit in a minute or so). Firefox/Android is far better in this regard, but on my device is so slow (literall…

> well over 1,000 on desktop Firefox, which actually is fairly managable How? :O What's your workflow?

Tree-style Tabs.

I tend to keep various projects/tasks organised by windows, and am increasingly using Incognito sessions not to hide anything in particular, but simply to keep myself from accruing yet more history.

I'm pursuing a wide-ranging set of research across numerous topics, and there's a large amount of material which seems at least potentially relevant. Cutting through what I've found and categorising it is a major part of what I'm trying to do, though how well I succeed is ... debatable.

There are also programming and sysadmin tasks, and other projects that I dive into. Those typically get some sort of state, whether it's a tab tree within a window, or a separate window.

Tabs are horrible. But they're better than all the other state-management methods which have come along from time to time.

On Android, the problem is that past a small handful of tabs, management, place-keeping, and showing relationships between tabs (parent/child, generally) becomes impossible. I've been trying to close out the open tabs I've got for ... a couple of years now. Sites have come and gone in that time.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#313

Post by Stevvo »

A big part of the problem is it's not possible to customize the appearance of the scrollbar in most browsers. It's pretty much the only thing you can put in a webpage that can't be changed with css, so designers avoid them.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#314

Post by acqq »

coribuci wrote: post #257
acqq wrote: post #217

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. I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so. Insane!

> 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…

What I refer to is the picture like here:

https://superuser.com/questions/642978/change-the-behavior-o...

Clicking on the File menu gets you

"Protect Document -- Protect Document"

"Check for Issues -- Inspect Document"

and

"Manage Versions -- Versions"

effectively as the only "obvious choices" with two different wordings (why?) and with a lot of "stuff" left and right "Properties" "Related Dates" "Related People" ? It's specifically not obvious that the "menu" is in the blue area on the left and that the three buttons are... what are they actually? How come these three came to be the major actions one would want to do in the File menu?

And why the document disappeared like I'm on the small mobile screen? I'm aware now they did that for many years, still... it's... confusing on the big screen.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#315

Post by tomjen3 »

discreteevent wrote: post #208
jjoonathan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hamburgers and Heiroglyphs, GUI of the future! At least Dropbox hasn't gone full in on the Heiroglyph side of the fad, they still have text labels for buttons, so you can understand what they do by looking at them and reading them.

The hieroglyphs are beyond me. It's literally making up your own alphabet not to mind language. Might be the ultimate sign of the over indulgence of developers/designers. Each gets their own perfect world which we must spend the time decrypting

That is pretty easy - you don't need to support text in multiple languages, which is both difficult, a tad expensive, and slows down your velocity (I think the last on is the biggest issue).

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#316

Post by dingo_bat »

> But no, take a tablet, add keyboard,

Don't do that. A tablet is not a laptop. All your problems originate from your confusion between the two.

Also, don't use "flipping" so many times, it is fucking incomprehensible.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#317

Post by nine_k »

dredmorbius wrote: post #197
JohnFen wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Yes, in principle. But it becomes less than useful when the common schemas get in my way, which has been an increasing problem over the past few years. The aping of Apple's decisions appears to be a large part of why.

Agreed. As jwz has noted, UI is different , in that changes to it provide relatively little payback: [I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software. https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o... (HN-safe archive link.) The bulk of present UI/UX metaphors can…

This is "easy" to solve!

Come up with a really good UI concept, implement it, and see everybody love it.

Avoid patenting it through the nose, and let everyone copy most of it. This is how it will become the standard and win the world adoption.

It seems like you'd need millions of R&D budget spent in a large part for public good, or at least to seriously change the market landscape without a guarantee you'll dominate it.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#318

Post by galangalalgol »

zrobotics wrote: post #296
frosted-flakes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

There hasnt been a good excel released in 20 years. Libreoffice is pretty hideous, gnumeric is maybe a bit better. I rely on excel key shortcuts which didnt change even when the menus they referenced disappeared. Libreoffice has some but not all of them. Google sheets does better but my dev network is airgapped so that doesn't help.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#319

Post by a_e_k »

mappu wrote: post #241
a_e_k wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run XFCE (via Xubuntu) on my home desktop for the same reason. The lightness is a bonus.

Going off on a tangent, but KDE is lighter than XFCE these days. Or at least https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-... has been making the rounds.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That's quite interesting. I'd ended up settling on XFCE aound the time of the Gnome 2 / Gnome 3 / Unity schism. At the time, XFCE had felt a bit snappier than KDE. I've lately been thinking about giving KDE a try again, so this is good to know.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#320

Post by RaiseProfits »

romwell wrote: post #269
RaiseProfits wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that doesn’t explain how you magically remember where you stored the file. I suppose it does help with making you unable to store files in the root directory and forcing you to store it somewhere with some meaning. This seems like it would just resolve into a documents directory and you’re back where you started with a flat bag of files that you need to organize arbitrarily. Also, you can use hierarchies wi…

>I have never seen this implemented Great argument for tags! Sure, it's never been done, but it's possible that someone will re-implement the inherent properties of filesystems with tags in the future , so let's take your filesystem away now !

Hey I am just describing interfaces, I don’t care about how it hits the disk. Filesystems are certainly nothing to get excited about; links are a dirty hack to get around a forced tree anyway.
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