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,…
> Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up"
No, it required pressing some button to show the password box. Just like windows. If you don't have a keyboard you can also swipe up instead.
It's mainly the mobile "experience" seeping into the desktop. Undiscoverable UI incantations and improv galore. All to get rid of the healty PC ecosystem to hail in the brave new world of walled garden platforms with juicy store taxes.
I'm young (25) but my first (family) computer used to run Windows 98 (that's what we could afford). And I can recall well, UI had one "meta-language": menu bar (file, view ..., help), toolbar, and if you'd hover your mouse pointer over a widget, a tooltip would show up with explanation about what the widget does and the keyboard shortcut for that action. Once you learnt how to use one application, say Paint, you'd pr…
Even computer games like Civilization II and SimCity 2000 used traditional OS menus.
Amiga version of Colonization went further and used multiple native windows. Looked way better than the PC version.
I dislike it too, but doesn’t Windows 10 do the same thing?
Windows 10 is even worse. It swipes up for you when you press a key, but it won't pass that key on to the password box. So you have to press a key and then type your password. At least with gnome you can just type your password and it works as expected...
Learn this habit: press backspace a couple times first, to wake up the screen and show the password input.
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,…
I've always guessed that the infinite feature creep that is plaguing modern UI's is caused by salaried visual designers who aren't being given new projects to work on. Once the visual templates are fleshed out, the icon sets are put together, the pallettes completed, there's not all that much to do. Unless you start playing around with NEW icon sets, pallettes, mouse aware buttons, etc, etc... I would be so much happier with a consistent, self explanatory UI than anything that is "sleek" or "dynamic". Those properties, excepting very specific situations, really detract from UX. Visuals improve with user familiarity, not with constant changes. Imagine if the Department of Transportation decided to redesign stop signs to be yellow, triangular, with a sleek looking matte finish... Traffic accident deaths would go up 10x in the first week.
Every time I see a screenshot of someone theming Linux to look like Windows, the most obvious thing that stands out as not being quite right is the font rendering. Even when using Microsoft's own TTFs, the font renderers that Linux use seem to put the pixels in a slightly different place than the MS one. Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of insi…
If the font is not a pixel font, it will render differently depending on your settings and the choices of the rendering engine. Subpixel rendering for the different LCD-screens, aliasing for the pixels to look smooth on low res screens, hinting for those small details to be visible in vector fonts.
Vector fonts are made of lines that can sometimes be smaller than a pixel wide. Font engines solves this in different ways. It both depend on the quality of the font and the settings of the engine. (I'm no font expert though so names might be off. But I have been playing on and off with pixel fonts and vector graphics since 30 years)
I love the article! Couldn't agree more!
One of the trends was set by, who else, Microsoft. They went mobile first, failed miserably, but still kept the concepts.
It's prevalent in their UWP apps - especially settings, in Win10 - one of the worst UI's I've ever seen.
You put an iPhone in the freezer and booted it, and that fixed it? Wow. I thought that was just for saving spinning disk drives and preserving the contents of RAM for an attack.
A cold boot means shut off all power to the device. The normal "off" button the iPhone puts it in standby mode, not off. This is so it can still listen for calls.
I tried to power off an iPhone today for 5 minutes, failed, and just gave up. Why Apple, why would you make this simple action so damn obscure.
Time shifting doesn't require a clock, if you are home to start recording, but a clock helps with programmatic recording.
That's an extreme nitpick. The whole argument for time shifting is to be able to record something while you're not at home.
Let’s hear them out in the spirit of debate. I’m curious how this hypothetical VCR is programmed, what the remote and interface might look like. I might even like it, or at least want parts of it as concepts to integrate with other things that already exist. Could shake loose some ideas.
Honestly I don’t know why VCRs are so hard to program but all of the buttons can’t help. I might be getting old but the Roku remote seems about right as far as complexity in the device goes and I can see how a nice interface with relative timekeeping could do what you need without a clock per se. Inertial guidance for timekeeping? A self winding DVR?
Windows 10 is even worse. It swipes up for you when you press a key, but it won't pass that key on to the password box. So you have to press a key and then type your password. At least with gnome you can just type your password and it works as expected...
Learn this habit: press backspace a couple times first, to wake up the screen and show the password input.
Lol, you've just described such a beautiful regression...