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Scrollbar Blindness

svenkadak.com

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Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#321

Post by silverwings »

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) For a long time, I have belived that these were problems that the elderly somehow could not figure out. I blamed it on them for a long time.

Then I opened Adobe After Effects for the first time and it suddenly made sense to me, the UI I found intuitive was just years of practice. How is an x in a corner a close button? What's so intuitive about swiping up to see a menu?

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#322

Post by jasomill »

chrisco255 wrote: post #224
narag wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better yet, use any keyboard you like, and remap (left) Windows to a different key code, ideally corresponding to some key that's not present on your current keyboard layout and that, unlike the Windows key, is fully remappable by AutoHotkey, in-game options, etc., using something like

https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#323

Post by OOPMan »

Asking Mac users to think about the existence of other OSes?

Grab your ptichfors brothers and sisters, we have another heretic to burn at the stake!

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#324

Post by sizzle »

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…

Reminded me of this great piece by Don Norman on Apple's undoing of design as of recent:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

"Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.

No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.

The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage."

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#325

Post by liability »

wtallis wrote: post #257
liability wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer good mice and good trackpads to poor mice and poor trackpads. But trackpads vs mice? Your comment insinuates a that a clear good/bad dichotomy exists here but I don't think that's generally the case. My above comment notes one context where I do believe that's true, but in the general case? For standard desktop interactions? I don't think mice are objectively better. If anything the proximity of a trackpad m…

I feel like a good touchpad (meaning Apple) is superior to most good mice for general desktop usage. What pushes touchpads clearly ahead is when you make good use of multi-touch gestures. Using third-party tools under macOS, about half of my most commonly used keyboard shortcuts can be replaced by gestures that are quicker and easier than reaching for the keyboard. The handful of apps with native multitouch and suppo…

I do like and use multi-touch gestures a lot, though I think 'hot corners' and additional mouse buttons could probably fill the same roll for me. My intellimouse (P/N X08-70385) has five buttons and in the past I've mapped those two extras to forward/backward browser commands and it worked pretty well. If you can get your hands on an intellimouse, I highly recommend it; mine is somewhere around 15-20 years old with yellowed plastic but it's still going strong. Best product ever sold by Microsoft imho.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#326

Post by saagarjha »

olyjohn wrote: post #301
saagarjha wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think paying more for hardware significantly changes the problem that was brought up.

I think what he is saying is, don't buy a cheap-ass Dell that runs Windows 10S, then expect to be development powerhouse where all the hardware works properly. He is suggesting buying a developer-oriented laptop that is designed and supported to be running Linux. You'll have less weird hardware quirks that way.

You can buy a $1000 laptop and still run into issues where your computer won't connect to a projector or a major application refuses to support your platform.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#327

Post by KayL »

A lot of developers I worked with only using their MacBook & iPhone to do tests. Many sites do not fully responsive also. For example, the github.com only support 1280px width and above. Below that, padding & buttons rendered incorrectly.

And I think this is a trend in the open-source that developers reject Windows patches, or never really try to fix the bugs.

Now a lot of tools are only designed for MacOS first. Linux is extra because it's easy to migrate. For example, Facebook Watchman. It's about 5 years but still unstable for Windows I think.

And many web tools, even Android development, I found it's no errors in MacOS but have to fix the config or do extra yourself to get it to work properly.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#328

Post by SCNP »

soco wrote: post #95
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…

Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays, their huge width goes unused 99% of the time anyway. So there's an only 1% incentive from usability side to remove the right vertical scrollbar... As a matter of fact, I actually use in my Firefox vertical tabs stacked left, to spare me some vertical space on the laptop screen.

If I might ask, what are you using for vertical tabs? I haven't found a good add-on that shows the tabs on the side and also hides the tabs on the top.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#329

Post by ianlevesque »

eatingCake wrote: post #240
Klathmon wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a windows feature like this which I hate with a passion. If you grab a window and shake it side to side, it minimizes all open windows... So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I wo…

That thing is the worst! HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced set DisallowShaking dword to 1

This thread has come full circle. An undiscoverable registry key to disable an undesirable feature.

Re: Scrollbar Blindness

#330

Post by MH15 »

I fell victim to this while implementing my personal website. An easy fix to be sure, and one that I think is worth it for the hidden scroll bars (which I prefer), but kind of annoying.
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