Scrollbar Blindness
svenkadak.com
svenkadak.com
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 that "feature" came out.
I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look? Those are real and important functions I desire. What I actually need is for news and blog sites to stop covering 1/4 of their vertical window space with hovering frames, ads, and banners asking me to subscribe. Which, by the way, subsequently don't properly calculate into that now hidden scroll bar's movement and cause you to overshoot the displayable area when paging down. End rant.
My computer is an 11-inch MacBook Air.
That means that even if I run Safari full-screen, which is inconvenient, I have only 680 vertical pixels for content.
It's amazing how many web sites I run into that throw up fixed-position pop-ups that are bigger than that, and I can't close them or scroll to see their content because the designers or middle managers decided that every person on the planet is rocking a 27-inch 5K display.
Usually I just close the window and never visit the site again. If it's important, I break out the dev tools and start invoking display:none until I hit the right element.
https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-...
I works a surprising amount of the time!
And for Nuke Overdrive mode, add a check for position: sticky, i.e.
(function () {
var elpos,i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');
for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
elpos = getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position;
if (elpos === 'fixed' || elpos === 'sticky') {
elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);
}
}
}
)(); (function () {
for (const node of document.querySelectorAll('body *')) {
if (['fixed', 'sticky'].includes(getComputedStyle(node).position)) {
node.style.display = 'none'
// node.remove()
}
}
})()
Regarding tree mutation - I have to admit, it gives me some petty satisfaction looking at the errors thinking "Where is your sticky NOW!"
I can't live without firefox's reader mode, which is pretty much Gopher-for-html.
I've considered writing an extension to kill them all by default, but I'm afraid I'll break some site in a way that really confuses me and end up wasting more time figuring out what happened than I save with the extension.
There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.
How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.
Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.
The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need any kind of redesigning is small.
You get a similar thing any time a development team runs out of feature work or actual stress points in an application they maintain. They wind up reworking the thing mainly to have something to do to justify the continued paychecks until the business thinks of an actual reason.
Granted, the developer side of the story might happen as well but I'm guessing not that much (all the dev teams I've worked in saw an overloaded pipeline of work so it is very hard for me to imagine otherwise)
We used to achieve this balance with a manual.
A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.
Although, you probably still need to print a leaflet with updates between when you sent the manual out and when you finalized the software.
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 ever think to look for it.
Who thought that was a good idea?
I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
Accessibility can help normal people in extraordinary situations too.
Back on Android, (or Windows, or Linux), it makes sense, whereas she loses her way. Just to point out, a part of discoverability I guess is familiarity with the underlying principles the UI follows as well.
To add two more points to this. I think there's one thing platforms in general got very right: simple touch controls. My one year old is discovering that sliding fingers across a screen, touching and pinching (the three basics) does stuff. Hidden menus, press-and-hold, and so on is secondary. Second, icons are something which is wrong. You need to guess their initial meaning, and translate badly in conversations, like recently with my mom: "press the rectangle with four arrows pointing out of it" (fullscreen or whatever it was).
Windows 10 introduced the navigation bar, which is essentially a vertical version of the Windows Phone application bar, just using a "three lines" icon as the "show labels" button instead of an ellipsis. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls... The start menu and inbox mail app use this control, for example.
"Here's an image, guess what is supposed to happen when you click it, also i will give you no info on hover over -- you must push me and then try to guess what i did!" (btw if there's a bug or a configuration state in the app that you or i am unaware of -- you might've pushed me at the wrong time and i might've let you do that)
But if i really have to come up with something, I'd say green arrow pointing up. Meaning 'upload to your (own private) cloud'
The Apple II was the first computer that was widespread enough for people to have seen that had a floppy disk. It came out in 1977. Apple dropped the floppy disk in 1998 (21 years later), so it's been 22 years since it was standard in Macs.
Even allowing for some switching time, it has meant "save" for longer than it was a common physical object.
This is one reason why UI patents are not a good idea. When different platforms are forced to adopt differing UI patterns because they can't do what their competitors are doing, you get the current mess.
With examples given like curb cuts for wheelchairs helping everyone, and OXO brand kitchen utensils meant for impaired hands just being better for everyone.
Better is better.
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?
Thank you very much :)
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 would just sometimes be working and suddenly everything is gone and I had no idea why.
But I agree that it's a bad feature, and IMO it's a rare miss from the Windows UI team who if nothing else have developed excellent window management.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
- discover which registry key
- discover how to craft shit in a game
- to find where my Android setting is and what the searchterm/keyword for it is.
Without google/duckduckgo 80% of the options in my world would be undiscoverable or take waaaay too much time to figure out.
If you're refering to Minecraft, one of the reasons why Minecraft blew up that much was that it was around at the exact right time in history: when online gaming had become viable and let's-plays were just becoming a thing. Minecraft, as originally intended, is a communal experience where you learn from the friends you're playing with and from sources on the internet. If I had to describe Minecraft in one sentence, it would be "let me show you that cool thing I saw Pewdiepie do last week". The idea has become commonplace in video gaming at this point, but back then it was fairly new.
(That said, opaque game experiences have been successful before, like the original Legend of Zelda. I guess the schoolyard served a similar purpose back then.)
Shake the window again, and they will all come back.
It's akin to shaking my head before focusing on a specific task. I shake the task window and the other applications that I still want open but won't be using for a bit all hide away.
I don't think anybody needs that "quick" way to do that, and that nobody needs to change the icon sizes often. I have no idea if that misfeature could be blocked.
Anyhow, I just tried shaking a window from my work laptop and discovered that this behaviour activates on the second change of the direction in rapid succession.
While I was experimenting, I also discovered that shaking the window again restores the other windows so you don't have to restore them individually if/when this happens accidentally.
It’s insanity.
golem$ ed
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help
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quit
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exit
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bye
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hello?
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eat flaming death
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^C
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^C
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^D
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Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. [1]
Settings | Home Screen & Dock | Multitasking | Allow Multiple Apps
No idea if the same setting exists on iPhone or if it disabled split screen through.
The whole feature is so badly designed on iPad. I was forever detaching a Safari page and ending up with two Safari apps. So tapping the Safari icon wouldn't take me back, it only takes you to the detached page, and you think you have "lost" all the other pages. You need to close the detached page (none of that would be obvious to a novice). Also getting a page to detach into a popup by mistake, and then not being able to get rid of it (I still don't know the correct swiping motions!)
Somehow my 1 year old son can invoke it repeatably every time he gets his grubby little hands on my phone...
So if you accidentally hold the press for a fraction too long you block that number.
And then you wonder why your friend(s) don't love you anymore...
To unblock it, you have to go to the Contacts and dig through options there, the SMS app showed nothing of help. It wasn't obvious that you had it blocked!
Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it.
I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it.
Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:
1. They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.
2. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).
For the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things.
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Your point in general still stands, though. Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit.
I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time:
(I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)
As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0].
Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English.
--
[0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.
But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it.
But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.
One of the common responses I see when I complain about a bad UI is someone saying "no it's easy you just do ____". It's frustrating because that's not the point - the point is that I had to do research to find the answer!
There are cases, especially with specialized tools for complex tasks, where you are expected to spend time learning how to use the tool effectively. Photoshop is a great example. Vim is a great example. Figuring out stupid stuff like whether that grayish light blue vs dark gray fill on the checkbox means "enabled" or "disabled" is not an example.
Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button, and sometimes the second extra button selects the highlighted thing. Sometimes up and down arrows increase the selected thing (e.g. volume, brightness) and you need to press one of the extra buttons to stop doing it. Sometimes one of those extra buttons acts as a hotkey that will switch you to a completely different menu, so it will take five minutes to navigate back.
Then sometimes a confirmation windows opens, with two buttons "yes" and "no", one of them is pink and another is light blue, if you press any of the four arrows, the colors switch, and you are free to make your guess whether pressing the extra button will confirm the pink option, confirm the light blue option, take you to a completely different place, or turn off the menu.
Bonus points: turn the monitor to portrait mode and do it sideways.
That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.
Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.
Some VCR’s had a timed recording setting. More commonly, and you see this on cars before they got touchscreens, there were settings and options that you had to navigate to by hitting a specific sequence of buttons to get to the appropriate menu.
The core loop was generally fine. It was when you needed anything else that suddenly you needed the manual.
[1] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19830424&id=...
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The other hidden complexity was reception and tuning - so many people had problems getting the antenna pass-through working, and then getting the VCR picture to display on a TV channel (no switchable inputs in those days).
Warframe is the THE game I can think of doing this most. Even when I learned how it all worked, I needed a bunch of reference tables/posts so I could grind with maximal efficiency!
Nowadays, if a game has "crafting" I am 90% inclined to skip it.
It's a leftover from when iPhone screens where much smaller: https://postimg.cc/WFdqPwfd
Dear Google developers: if you decide to randomly delete a somewhat irrelevant word from a search query and you're left with "ten minute", it's far more likely that a person wants a ten minute timer than that they want to search your database of videos for ten minutes. Also, why do you search youtube instead of the web? Are you doing this specifically to irritate the hell out of me?
I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when
1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and
2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.
This has burned me more times than I’d like to admit. I have a macbook for work and activated iMessages for my personal account. One day I accidentally posted something in a chat room meant for someone I was chatting with in iMessages. It was kind of personal but thankfully vague enough that I could brush it off. I also was on some screensharing sessions when I switched to iMessages which briefly showed personal conversations. After a few times of that happening I disabled my iMessages account for on that machine and made it a personal rule to never mix business and personal activity on any company-issued device, which has served me well over the years.
Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.
So a ".../mail/u/0/" means the first Google account you're logged into, ".../mail/u/1/" means the second, etc. But if you did it in a different order on a different machine (or even browser), it'll redirect to a completely different one.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where it was decided that was a good idea.
If an application isn't either essential to me or incredibly obvious to use, I am unlikely to learn it's fancy new UI. Why bother?
This extends to APIs and DSLs too since there are often so short lived.
* It's the experienced users who were were less likely to recognize the "burger menu" or the three dots (does that have a catchy name) as something potentially useful. They didn't look like "real" controls. It was the less experienced users who just naturally tried clicking on anything near the top that looked interesting, or waving the cursor around looking for hovertext on active components.
* Confronted with a landing page that seems to have nothing more than some splashy graphics and a few words - notably no scrollbars - experienced users are likely to wonder if the page is broken for them (because that was a very common experience at the height of the browser wars and still persists). Less experienced users who grew up with smartphones are more likely to start swiping right away.
A user who was older but not experienced with computers would align more closely with the young 'uns on most of this. When everything's completely new you just start experimenting. It's when you think you know things work but they don't work that way any more that things start to get frustrating.
Hell yes. In most instances, I'm way beyond this point at only 30 years old. Come to think of it, it actually makes me wonder how I will feel about UIs at 50 or 60 years old.
I'm know my tech and I can't figure out how to reliably get Safari on IOS to display the bar at the bottom.
Makes me crazy
- swipe down from anywhere in the vague middle of the page?
- swipe down on the right hand edge where an "invisble until you need it" scrollbar might be lurking?
- swipe down at the "not quite the top/bottom edge of the screen" because you don't want the OS swipe, you want the app swipe.
Aarrrgh! I don't even have an iPhone and the options drive me crazy.
Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.
When the older folks in my life tell me exactly that I take their word for it. They usually they no issue being brutally honest about other aspects of life.
It all sucks. I'm convinced that devs are trying to frustrate me, and it's working.
Don't get me started on the icons-without-text design shit.
Side note, I've always suspected it's an issue of too many cooks in the kitchen. They spend tons on UX but end up with something barely usable.
WHAT?!
I use it all the time. I work off-shift so most of the messages I receive were sent quite a while ago, and pending when I wake up and grab my device. Knowing when they were sent is a very important bit of context.
It seems natural to spend a little time exploring the interface of an extremely complicated instrument that is an integral part of your daily life, reading Tips, etc. That also means if this device is not exactly that heavily used (say you have assistants for that), you are spared of wasting your cognition cycles on simply being aware about all the features it has in store.
FWIW search field in Apple’s own apps like Settings mentioned upthread is revealed to me every time I scroll from the bottom back up to the top of the list due to inertia, I don’t know if they changed it recently or not. (Other apps often make a mess of the same UI pattern. In WhatsApp it is much more difficult to discover, requiring to really pull down and wait to see Archived Chats, and meanwhile Search field is just there wasting screen space despite being used once every few months.)
That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about message timestamps in particular—I believe there are ways of showing them smartly if you haven’t used your phone for a while and missed a bunch of messages without overloading the UI for people like me who couldn’t really care less about that (RIP my IRL social life as of late). Perhaps Messages could use more attention from a good product designer.
On Chrome I could't get the button to appear so I can save the PDF on my drive. Completely frustrating.
Pull down for search is something that it maybe Apple is trying to cement (and only for mobile, I guess?), but hasn't crossed (and maybe won't) to Android devices. Apple is known for doing stuff like this and pushing changes, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. no floppy in laptops, no CD-ROM in laptops, no Mic jack, etc)
I type the konami code as soon as I discover a web app supports keyboard input. I have no problem pulling-to-reveal and shaking to undo. In fact, it makes me feel awesome to know all this little secrets and have people all like: Wait! how did you do that?
But when I design software I don't do it for people like me. I want my users to feel awesome and delighted without being UI spelunkers. Good design doesn't make you think.
It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.
But that's the point of this article. As a matter of empirical fact, they do. Visual appearance/attractiveness has dominated over usability since smart phones became our ordinary means of interaction.
(NB. artists never "churn out art for its own sake". They usually want to do something with that art. But to the extent that we allow usability to compete with visual appearance, it can be called "churning out art for its own sake".)
Or, your software is niche and its alternatives have such terrible UI that trying to do what the user expects is adding 3x clicks and actively hurting their productivity.
There can be legitimate cases for learning curve, especially if unlearning is involved. If so, the fact that your designer wants the user to learn is a very welcome position. If they make learning effortless and intuitive, you may end up with a solid piece of software.
This is something that we have lost completely with the web. Just having OK/Cancel buttons in the same place in the same order in evert dialog box was very important to developers at the time. Now it's all over the place
Learning something new requires more effort, because you have to unlearn other things. But it's not even clear what needs to be unlearned. So we founder.
Internally, we feel like we stopped learning. But I'm certain that if you were airdropped into a new domain, you'd be a voracious learner.
As @strogonoff pointed out elsewhere, there exist domains and niches where a complex and different UI is warranted. Scientific and creative software, for instance, falls into this category. Most software I use does not. I just want to change my account settings, or search for something without feeling lost. Personally, I'd like to see innovation in UX beyond hiding stuff, moving it around, or making it look a certain way. Whenever I see that some app I use has "revolutionized" their UI, the changes usually make me think of this:
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
That's a pretty good rant. Very Donald Norman. Know that I mostly hate rants about UI, ergonomics, design.
The follow up is pretty good too.
I've long had some notions about incorporating haptic and tactile stuff (I'm not saying "feedback") into the communication channels. Alas, I've never had the gumption to execute.
One very old notion was adding physical feedback into the mouse. A clicker/knocker, so the mouse would feel like it was passing over a bump. And one of those whirly things to make the mouse buzz.
Someone's actually done the physical part. But I don't think anyone has integrated it into the UI/UX.
Certainly nothing as sophisticated as Apple's trackpad.
Any way. Thanks for sharing.
Actually, it didn't work because I told him to Shift-Tab to go from the starting Tab to the ending Tab in one go, except he had an extra Tab on his computer (I think due to a graphics card) at the end. If I had told him to Tab 5 times instead, it would have worked.
A designer. Probably the same person who wanted to turn links from blue-and-underlined to same uniform gray with zero indication
I suspect I don't know some crucial (in Apple designers' mind) swipes on my iOS devices, because they're just hard to discover.
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 desktop computers at this point—including many old people!) and has built the OS around the idea that, just like on a touchscreen, scrolling is a gesture that you can attempt to apply anywhere, whether there's an affordance for it built into the app or not—i.e. that scrollability is a universal, system-level operation, not something up to the application. Every application in macOS/iOS is inherently built in terms of having some kind of "viewport" with a "document" loaded into it; and scrolling moves the "document" around within the "viewport." Even if that's a pointless thing to do, it still attempts to perform the operation.
(Though in terms of feedback, iOS has a more coherent responsivity to "attempted" scrolling than macOS does. You can "tug" at the top and bottom edges of the screen in pretty much any iOS app and get some extra out-of-document blank space, with a snapback when you let go. Whereas, in macOS apps, this only happens for "content" regions; whereas for "chrome" regions—e.g. the top-level icon listing in System Preferences—the region will only have snapback if the window is small enough for the region to be scrollable. If the window is large enough that everything is presented, your scroll gestures just go unacknowledged, as if the window wasn't a "document" in a "viewport" at all. Interestingly, you also can't resize such all-chrome windows; you only ever get a scrollbar on them if running on a computer with a too-low display resolution.)
What is missing, though, is a visual indication of whether scrolling will do anything, before you try it. Scrollbars used to help with this, yes. But the fix isn't simply reintroducing them. The world scrollbars were built for no longer exists: both web apps and modern native apps now do progressive loading/"infinite scroll", where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware of whether more content will be discovered when it tries to demand another chunk of data from its backend. Even when you force-enable the scrollbar, the size and relative position of the "scroll-thumb" now communicates no information about your "actual" scroll position in many apps.
As well, there are now real infinte-canvas apps (like Maps) where a scroll "position" wouldn't even be a coherent concept, because the document under the viewport is a self-connected torus. Universal gesture scrolling adapts well to this concept; scrollbars don't.
IMHO, I'd like to see a slight fade-to-black or 3D "bend away from camera" applied to the inner edges of the scrollable viewport, whenever the document in the viewport is not sitting flush with that edge of the viewport. This would provide a visual affordance of "scrollability" without providing any often-misleading information of relative scroll-position. Infinite-scroll documents would just always be "faded out" on all edges. Seems obvious?
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look?
Nah, it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. Stick a title/tab bar, tool bar, and maybe an always-on bookmarks bar on top of the window, and an always-on start menu at the bottom, and you'll find that the PDF only gets about 400px of viewport real-estate. And now you want the PDF's own controls to steal more of that? There's a reason that Chrome first made the status bar into an overlay, and then merged the title bar with the status bar — it's trying to reclaim vertical space for exactly these constrained scenarios.
Edit: Thinking further about this, the affordance for maps is a change in the cursor to a grabbing hand. You have to learn that, but there's a clear visual difference in the cursor to show that something differnt happens there.
What are some examples of the two approaches?
We had scrollbars on 640x480 both ways and liked it. Even SGIs with 1280x1024 monitors had scrollbars, and it wasn't a burden that some folks today seem to think it was.
Here's what Windows XP (not even really from the 640x480 era!) looks like on a modern display: https://ibb.co/W5mVgHT
You could fit a lot of Windows XP, and XP-era apps, on a 1366x768 display. You can't fit much of a modern OS+apps on one.
(That's honestly for the best; text and icons in modern OSes are both a lot more legible due to the increased fidelity and breathing room they have. But display resolutions have to keep up; and, at least for low-end PCs, they aren't.)
When done right, increasing screen density doesn't really affect available space, just makes everything sharper (unless you manually reconfigure it to get more space, like I do on my hidpi laptop).
UI elements are still far smaller than comparable ones in Windows 10 or macOS, when those are running at 1080p unscaled. On XP, IE and Explorer both manage to fit four toolbars (rather, a title bar + three toolbars) in 105px of vertical space. On my own macOS Catalina install, Chrome manages to fit only two toolbars in 86 device-independent pixels of vertical space.
Likewise, just consider the fact that people weren't generally looking at PDFs back in the XP era, but rather plaintext, which—as rendered on this image—was exactly 8px tall. A lot of 8px-tall text fits on a 1080p display, no matter how many toolbars you have; and a lot of 8px-tall text will even fit on a 640x480 display, if you make efficient use of the vertical space. But because PDFs use vector fonts, not bitmap fonts, they will look unreadably muddy if you attempt to scale one down such that the text only uses 8px of vertical height. You need more vertical space to look at PDFs.
So, in combination, when you throw a Windows 10, running Google Chrome, displaying a PDF, on a 768p display, it's just an ugly constrained problem.
Given that most scrollbars are vertical however, it isn't a big deal. I've gotten more vertical space from putting my taskbar on the left (when 16:9 became ubiquitous) than anything other change.
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.
IntelliJ IDEA also fell victim to this trend of abusing the title bar, but they are be reverting the change and providing a setting after listening to the inevitable criticism: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-219212
[1] http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convert-to-popup/i...
[3] https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars # chromium, firefox has another rule:
html {
scrollbar-width: none
}That's a really poor excuse. If that "awareness" is missing then the code is structured wrong, probably because somebody cargo-culted a design pattern without ever once thinking of the user.
1. there's a potentially-huge result set;
2. almost nobody ever wants to see the whole result set, but rather almost always just wants to see the first N chunks, and then drops off;
3. the results are sourced from a data lake, or from eventually-consistent geographic shards, or any other process where you need to actively gather results together with a map-reduce.
When these three factors apply, it becomes very expensive to know exactly how many results you will have, because that changes your partial streaming map-reduce workload into a complete map-reduce workload, over potentially billions of records, just to validate their inclusion and then count them.
Think "Twitter timeline." If every client displaying a Twitter timeline needed to know in advance how many tweets they could ever see, total, if they "scrolled all the way back" — then Twitter's servers would fall over from the load of calculating that number.
Another example is Google Search, which, while not "infinite scroll" on the client, is still a "map-reduced stream" on the backend. Google has put some extra effort into heuristic scheduling logic for its Search map-reduce: it grabs an initial 20-page-or-so chunk of the stream and caches it on a sticky-session node for you. This means that, if your search-result set is less than 20 pages, you get to know the actual result-set size. If it's more than 20 pages, though, Google Search reverts to exactly the same "you'll only know when you're at the end when you get there" semantics of SQL cursors. You see the first 20 pages, with a "next" arrow to go beyond them; and then it just starts counting up, and up, and up...
I'm glad I work in infra, not apps. Infra developers certainly make their own share of dumb decisions, but they're not that lazy and sloppy and user-blaming.
If you know you have one more result, that is necessarily because your data pipeline actually has that result available for it to count; i.e. the result record/tuple has been loaded into the database’s memory, and the database has determined that that record/tuple is valid and fresh. (And at that point, rather than counting, the DB may as well send you that record itself. Just counting it has already required almost all of the same work!)
Remember that MVCC exists. You can’t know how much of something you have as of a given instant without doing version deduplication/application of tombstone records. This is the reason that COUNT() in Postgres takes minutes/hours on large (>1bn records) partitioned tables: you have to actually visit records, to see whether they’re still part of the current MVCC transaction-version, and therefore whether they should be contributors to the current count.
That applies whether or not you’re “counting” or actually streaming results. Given the architecture of both traditional data-warehouses — and of the map-reduce systems like Hadoop that are used to do reporting on data-lake data — you can’t know whether anything that’s in the rest of the data set is going to actually exist when you get to it. Your data warehouse might have a 100GB heap of data in a table, but everything after the first 1GB of it is dead tuples, such that after you’ve streamed the first 1GB of results, the rest of the streaming consists of the data warehouse sitting there silently for a minute or two (as it checks the liveness of those tuples) before saying “okay, nothing more, we’re done.”
And because of this, it’s not about precision. You can’t even guess. You can’t know whether you have one more result, or a billion more. Until you actually check them.
Yes, OLAP systems are different. OLAP systems operate in terms of infrequent batch inserts, giving the system time to build indices, generate counts, etc. in-between, that will all stay valid up until the time of the next batch insert. An index is, in a sense, a pre-baked answer of the “set of live tuple-versions” that a data-warehouse is holding. Count the table? Just return the size of the index. If you’ve only ever built OLAP-oriented systems, maybe it feels like these are the “simple, obvious” solutions to this problem.
But none of the things we’re talking about — global-web search engines, social-network timelines, marketplace listings — are OLAP systems. They’re OLTP. They constantly get new results in, and people expect to be able to see freshly-inserted data in the results as soon as they insert it. Data comes in at too high a rate to generate “dataset snapshots” ala ElasticSearch. The pipeline has to deal with data as it comes, doing as little to it as possible so that it can ingest it all at the ridiculous rates required, by pushing all the work of validating tuple liveness/freshness off to query-time.
And given that, OLAP properties don’t attain in such systems. It’s basically the CAP theorem at work: Consistency (and cross-shard index-building) both require time for the system to investigate itself; and you can’t get Availability (and/or cross-shard freshness) unless you run the system too fast to allow for that time.
"Apps" to folks in storage (like myself), networking, OS, etc.
So users should purchase new equipment to suit designers? Or maybe - crazy idea, I know - designers should design for the equipment people actually have and not whine or look down their noses because not everyone makes designer salaries.
I'm not talking about shitty old laptops. I'm talking about shitty new laptops. There are laptops you can go into an electronics store and buy right now that have 1366x768 displays. And that's ridiculous.
Yes, these laptops are cheaper. But putting a 1080p panel in these laptops wouldn't be that much more expensive. Maybe an extra $0.50 on BOM, compared to the current design. Or, in fact, it might have exactly the same upstream cost. Why, then, use the shittier panel?
The 1366x768 display is purely there for market segmentation. It's an artificial constraint hardware makers impose on their low-spec devices, in order to make them unattractive to people with higher budgets.
A lot of these low-spec devices would be just fine for the small amounts of work many people have to do on computers, and so these people would buy them if they only needed "a little bit of" computer, even if they could afford something more expensive. (Just like you buy a $50 blender, not a $500 blender, if you're only making piña coladas.)
But the people who would consider these low-spec devices (despite having the budget for higher-spec devices as well), are pushed away from the low end, by these artificially-imposed pain points.
And that means that the people who do only have the budget for a low-spec laptop, are getting an artificially-imposed screwing, getting a shittier laptop than their money would buy them in an efficient market, purely because the supplier went to extra design effort to make their low-end products actively repel middle-end customers.
And taken in that lens, the fact that modern OSes don't work well on 1366x768 displays is actually kind of the point. It's not something the OS manufacturer can fix on their end. Because this would be a vicious cycle: if the OS began to work just fine on a 1366x768 display, then the laptop mfgrs would design their next series of low-end laptops to have even smaller displays, in order to re-introduce the market-segmenting "cramped feeling."
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 is off, long press is Siri.)
My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar at the top and realized it was probably a drag handle. Grabbed that and tried to flick it downwards. No luck, but it moved in a way that made it seem like dragging down more would do it, but nope of course that wasn't it either. How about a flick to the right? Nope. Dragging it to the right? Agh! It's trying to dock into split screen mode! I dragged it around some more hoping for different behavior before dropping it back into place and again trying a flick to the right using the handle at the top. And that FINALLY did it. Apparently I didn't put enough enthusiasm into the first flick I tried... What a pain in the ass.
I don't like how sensitive to speed some of the actions are. I have similar issues with bringing up the dock. I usually end up going to the home screen instead.
I keep meaning to look for a good iPad tutorial, to see how to do all this stuff.
(Admittedly, there were less features, then…)
You set the phone next to the terminal and the card comes up when radio contact is made.
I don't think there is way to make it discoverable without a big sign saying tap here ↓. Not from the phone anyway. Just something children will see and in the future never think twice about.
The fundamental difference with modern user interfaces is that you now have to tap, drag your finger across the screen in different directions, drag both fingers across the screen in different directions, pinch, unpinch, and whatever other gestures seem to be relevant to the situation. For good measure, try gestures that don't seem to be relevant either because the software may surprise you!
Now I know that a lot of these user interface decisions do offer value, but they are only valuable if you know that they exist.
I changed the setting to Mac OS always shows scroll bars, but I have no idea how someone thought hiding them was a good idea.
I notice that becomes something of a tic of iOS users, if you watch others, in that just about every new screen or panel there's often at least a squiggle of pushing the screen or panel around just to figure out the boundaries.
One of the things I thought was brilliant about early Windows 8-era "metro" design: it was the only era Windows briefly experimented with going scrollbar free (it went back to scrollbar "light" soon after) and when they did so they absolutely made sure that the application grids never lined up with viewport. If there was something to scroll, it would stick out a bit, always that little hint that there was something more further down or right.
It got some flak, especially from macOS design fans, for not being "clean enough", but you'd have apps with no visible scrollbar and you knew whether or not there was anything to scroll just looking at them. You didn't have to squiggle your finger around (or fiddle with the scroll wheel) to check.
It's to stop the offset shift. Pages with scrollbars and pages without have different document widths but the same viewport width.
When you click between the two, the page "shifts" half a scrollbar width if it's centered.
To fix this, Apple made the scrollbar an overlay. That stops the shifting. But then everything on any page with a scrollbar looks off-center.
To fix that, Apple made it disappear when it's not being used.
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?
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."
What's most telling is how even Apple often does an astonishingly bad job at it - it really sets the precedent regarding diminished importance.
As an exercise: Browse the App Store for a while and count the number of different ways it implements "go back one step".
I feel the same way about other "unspecified functionality" services, like fancy hotels with "personal butlers." What does the butler do? "Whatever you need" is not an answer. I don't have familiarity with butlers, I don't know what is and is not a reasonable request.
I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen.
It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see!
No negative feelings toward people who prefer them - it’s actually quite interesting to see the comments, I assumed everyone agreed they were better hidden until today! (Which, as a Mac user, is obviously part of the problem being expressed!)
Why should I try scrolling everywhere all the time instead of having the UI indicate to me that there is more content? Especially if it isn't clear by having a word or sentence cut of. Maybe the scroll area ends with a paragraph and it's not clear there is more. Why put aesthetics over usability?
Some other comments here claim iPhone users develop some kind of swipe tic where they instinctively try to scroll around on every screen that opens. Would be a pretty sad testimony to this UI concept.
There are subtler themes for scrollbars as well so that they don't have to stand out.
Because some things are scrollable and it’s usually fairly obvious if there’s going to be more content.
If it’s not clear to you, I totally get why you think that.
But I don’t suffer the same issue.
Why should I have to have scrolbars plastered all over the show to tell me that something is scrollable when I can check it myself in less than a second?
I understand why people disagree - why is it so hard for you to understand that I disagree?
Generally it feels like the pro scroll bar opinion is actually quite aggressive, needlessly so.
So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things.
I open a window, and decide I need to resize it.
There's no cursor change when you move the mouse over the edge, or the corner. It just doesn't let you resize the window. There's no three-lines things in the corner either, you just can't grab the corner to resize it.
I ended up having to google that you need to ALT+RMouse to do this.
I don't know why that would be the default. It seems crazy.
Don't blame Xfce for that but Ubuntu. For some reason they decided to make the resize area 1 pixel wide. It's specific to recent versions of Ubuntu. It worked fine on LTS 16 (or was it 14?) and on Debian.
Even you? Wow!
But srsly, that's not a snide comment but rather a hint that your personal sensibility may not reflect broad sensibilities. And of course, there may not even be a single broad sensibility -- look at the political parties in the US, both the major divisions and the subdivisions within each. Sometimes, the maker of something has to make a design choice consistent with their [market success proven] direction.
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed.
When I'm on my laptop, I do. Every inch of vertical space is precious. On my display monitor, not so much, but having the buttons reveal rather than permanent doesn't detract in the slightest.
- select non-maxmised open window
- keyboard shortcut Alt+Space. Then M. to move.
- use arrow keys to move windows offscreen, say to the right. Don't touch the mouse!
- Hit Enter key to confirm position.
From now on. Anything but "full maximise from the taskbar" makes the window "disappear" without a trace. "Restore" from the taskbar doesn't help.
And assuming you even know exactly happened, you still have to guess which direction they took the window and how far...
How is it there is no "Position Reset to 0,0" option?
- From the keyboard WIN+{Left|Right} resizes and pins the window to the side of the screen
- From the keyboard WIN+Up to maximize the window (or right click on the task bar and select maximize. Now, drag the title bar from the top and the window will unpin from the screen and move with the mouse
- Right click on the task bar and choose any of the windows arrangement options (Stack, tile, cascade)Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad.
Example: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ is horrible to use on anything that isn't a mobile device or a Mac.
It's so much easier on the fingers that I'm amazed I haven't been able to find it anywhere else.
Some mice (Microsoft ones IME) have horribly clunky middle-click, at least the Logitech mice I normally use are softer with less travel, which I prefer.
Not all apps seem to allow middle-click on Win10. I can't recall any that didn't on KDE though.
Apps and media can do whatever to the scrolling since it just an implementation detail to achieve some effect like slide transitions.
Documents shouldn’t touch it and leave it up to the client.
It's still janky (and buggy?) as hell on Chrome on Windows with a mouse with a scroll wheel.
I guess this is an example of being in my own bubble, but I can't stand touchpads. I've used the touchpad on MacBook, like, twice in 2 years.
It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wrong" with them is that _I_ can't figure out how to click things on the first (or 5th) try.
Apple’s touch pads (at least the recent ones) have none of these problems and are as smooth, responsive and reliable as good smartphones. They are actually useable as a main input device, not only in a pinch.
Remind yourself that it works exactly like the screen of an iPhone or iPad, that’s when it clicked for me.
I could probably get used to them if I had any reason to, but I have no idea where I would even put my laptop to use it comfortably with an external monitor. I like my mouse and I have no problems with it, so no sense in buying an external touchpad.
If I did a lot of work like scrubbing through audio/video or something that benefited from multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom, then maybe I'd consider it.
Like your comment's parent, I used the trackpad because I prefer doing everything from the keyboard and so prefer the trackpaid for things that require a mouse-like interface.
Just a tap, like on a phone, and I've clicked. I do keep the click sound on though, for feedback.
One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. When I play a first person game I always use my trusty old intellimouse. Otherwise, I use the trackpad unless I'm simultaneously using my mechanical keyboard, but if my keyboard had an attached trackpad I'd probably be using that. But mousing in general just isn't a very important to my workflows and trackpads work just as well as mice for nearly all tasks. Arguably they work better for some since you don't have to move your hand far from the laptop's keyboard to use the trackpad, while using a dedicated mouse means taking your hand completely off the keyboard.
I imagine that developers would prefer mice if people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably prefer mice, and I suspect people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably do prefer mice, the same way that I believe we prefer good keyboards and good monitors.
I still use a mouse for gaming, but I have to replace it every ~3 years because the buttons start to wear out. That has yet to happen to one of my Apple touchpads.
Neither can I, actually. I work with my MacBook plugged into a large monitor with an external keyboard and mouse 99% of the time, and just assumed everyone else did as well without really thinking about it.
Why would you expect that? What concrete advantage does a mouse have over a trackpad for gaming that doesn't translate to regular use?
Rarely you want to hold both mouse buttons or hold RMB while also move the cursor.
Source: I can play first person perspective games quite decently on my macbook using the trackpad, but holding the mouse buttons while aiming is the hardest.
Why would I subject myself to such misery? Playing games in train.
Better accuracy and muscle memory. Faster. It's not just for "gamers".
When I scroll down, I expect one thing to happen: content on the page moves from the bottom to the top, revealing previously un-seen content on the bottom. That's it. Please stop trying to make scrolling do something else!
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/PGdyt1c.jpg [2]: https://i.imgur.com/AXLi4Yu.jpg
Annoying. The only fix is to hover over the scroll bar itself (and I have macos -> system prefences -> general -> show scroll bars: always)
a) find out how big the page is b) scroll more precisely
I don't even understand why they would remove them? Who ever complained of a scroll bar?
IMO it's all part of this push to combine mobile and desktop UI. On mobile there is a legitimate case to be made for removing them because screen real estate is so precious. But desktop gets clobbered as an unwanted side effect.
Notably, when you connect a traditional mouse, the scroll bar automatically becomes thicker (easier to click) and always visible, as mice users do have a reason to click/drag the scroll bar. Seems like Apple had this in mind
I've seen so many web pages whose "fold line" just aligned so neatly with the end of my viewport that without the scrollbar being visible I would've just closed the page, being disappointed that it's just a meaningless hero page with no content.
Similarly, if stuff like selection boxes align just right, you simply can't see there are more options without a scrollbar. It just looks like you only have those options that are on the screen right now.
It's just plain bad UX coming from Apple.
To me, it looks more related to the recent fashion of "minimal" interfaces. Like material design and ultra-skinny fonts. Could also be related to the "infinite scroll" some sites have. A scroll bar doesn't make much sense for those.
That said, the issues outlined in this article are glaring, and I do notice them when I switch to PC/Linux and a mouse and back. It's definitely something easy to forget, though.
The UX is designed to make most of the obviousness fade away and make the process an extension of your natural movements. Kind of like how a good band can take cues from each other without explicitly speaking or reading off of a sheet during a performance. But that doesn't help people who aren't adept professionals, or people operating under completely different circumstances.
I was adding another experience to the pile.
I keep a touchpad on the left and a mouse on the right (had the extra hardware then got used to the config), plus the one on the laptop itself, and they're hidden with the "Auto" setting.
I have never seen that to be the case unless in an environment with very heavy constraints like embedded. If anything, a competent programmer 10-15 years in would skew towards more descriptive and clear variable naming as they've been burned in the past by having to maintain some of that "leet" code.
'Cute' code that leverages language features in creative and surprising ways, generally belongs on code golf competitions, not production systems. If your code is so 'clever' that only you can understand it, that means you're a bad programmer, not a good one. (That's not to say you should avoid making appropriate use of advanced language features for fear of ignorant readers, though. That's another matter.)
Ada was far ahead of the game here, explicitly prioritising readability over writeability, in its language design.
With all that said, an experienced programmer may feel less need to write comments, as their own familiarity with the problem-domain and with the language will be well developed.
What are you talking about? I've been programming a long time, and clean, readable code with clear, descriptive variable names gives me a stiffy. It suggests a more meticulous mind than mine wrote it.
You know who writes the worst Gordian-knot code? Engineers from other disciplines who learned programming as a means to do other engineering calculation. Smart guys, but it's a pain keeping track of what i1, i2, i3, and i4 mean, or their 1970s FORTRAN program flow.
Literally in this case :)
If those coders are like me their code becomes more verbose, less clever, more obvious, less dependent on the quirks of the programming language I use. The reason is that it's easier for me and the other developers in the team to read and understand what it does.
On my way to here I really hated many geeky clever and brilliant pieces of code I found in projects I inherited. They made me and my customers lose days at decoding all that brilliance.
I also see them frequently have a bug where they'll just keep cycling through the same first page-equivalent of results.
[1] If you click a result and then hit back, it usually just reloads the page and starts you from the beginning. I think the function of a back button changed at some point. It used to be that "back" was always instant and took you to the exact state of the page before you clicked a link. Now, there's a huge lag on all but the most minimal sites (like HN) and some reload of something gets triggered.
It almost seems like, beyond a very low threshold, UX gets worse as you throw more engineers at it.
Hey, it's better than clicking through the Medium digest and getting your 10th consecutive "you can use a switch statement instead of a bunch of if statements" article written by someone in week 2 of their bootcamp. :(
Hidden scrollbars recently caused me an extra day of work. I was documenting all options in hundreds of html select boxes (dropdowns) on a legacy product being rewritten.
Many of these dropdowns were vertically scrollable, but macOS using Chrome did not display a scrollbar. I had no idea they were scrollable and missed many options in my documenta3.
I could not look at the html for it as it was minimized and not easily searchable.
Give the Chrome dev tools a try. It "un-minifies" the html making it viewable and easily traversable.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/dom/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
In Chrome:
1) Right click on element you want to grab all of the contents of, and select Inspect Element. NOTE: If this element is the sort that isn't properly placed in the DOM and/or disappears when focus/mouse leaves, you can freeze the current DOM...but the right way to do that will depend on your context.
2) In Elements tab in Dev tools, the element should now be highlighted. You may need a parent or child element. But hopefully you can find it nearby and verify you have the right one with the Inspect tooling.
3) Right click on the element that has all your data in the DOM. Select Copy. Sometimes it will be enough to just Copy Element and paste it somewhere where you can start organizing the data. But for your task, it sounds like you might want to write a script for this so you can do it across multiple Elements. So, try Copy > Copy JS Path.
4) You now have access to the DOM element, even if it was created dynamically by JS and exists in the Shadow DOM. Try "paste" in the Console tab of Chrome DevTools.
5) The thing you grabbed might not be exactly the right one. Navigate down to the level you want to iterate across with the "children" attribute. Example:
const myStuff = document
.querySelector("#output > shadow-output")
.shadowRoot.querySelector("div > ul > li:nth-child(2)")
.children[0].children
console.table(myStuff, ["innerHTML"])
const stuffArr = [...myStuff]
const mappedStuff = stuffArr.map(x=> { /* transform each thing */ }
console.table(mappedStuff)
Just to extend a touch—I use CMD+Shift+C or CTRL+Shift+C countless times in a day while debugging, or sometimes for this very reason. The shortcut is the same across browsers—at least Chrome/Edge/FF/Safari.
Instead of right clicking, it'll give you a "target" for selecting an element and highlight it before clicking.
In the console the selected element will be immediately accessible by `$0`.
Eg,
$0.innerHTML;We need a new set of units that excludes document scrollbars. Or a constant like env(scrollbar-width) that represents the scrollbar width so that you can subtract it yourself, which would be useful in a few other places as well (instead I’ve done the likes of `var(--scrollbar-width, 20px)` and calculate and define --scrollbar-width on the root element in JavaScript).
That was fun to fix because I had to rebuild the entire header since a ton of other webflow-generated CSS depended on that thing being static.
The thing was: We catered for gamers which means Chrome or Firefox on Windows was the norm. We got a lot of bug reports like “hideous scrollbars in shop item description” or “hideous scrollbars in menu” where the devs were puzzled about the bug reports.
Yes your giga HD retina Mac displays these colours perfectly, I'm sure it looks great. On my screen however I can't read a damn thing.
How one can tell whether what you capture/develop is what you will see without testing it on a second monitor? What is the subject I must do research on to learn more about this?
I'm not just talking about color spaces, but also how these multiple software communicate image data in a lossless way, how window modes (fullscreen, borderless, windowed) affect these flows, where HDR stands in this.
As a general rule of thumb, if it has anything to do with colors and comes from either computer or photography people, there's a solid 99 % chance it's broken or doesn't even know what color is. If you want to know how it's done right, you gotta look at how the "moving photos" people do it.
(Note: "everything" for me means "everything that's not Apple", because I cba to care about those snowflakes)
[1] Yes, yes, OpenGL has sRGB types for framebuffers, which doesn't work on half the devices in the wild (on the other half it applies the sRGB gamma function to linear sRGB data) and isn't meaningful anyway, because we _don't_ want to use sRGB. DXGI only does Rec.709 and Rec.2020, no DCI P3, and it also treats everything that's not HDR as sRGB.
So basically, all I need is a software which can do post-capture tonemapping on captured pixels before streaming the frames.
System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars to Always.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys
Also watch out for people from marketing and the like who put pressure on the UX people to do that sort of thing. People who don't actually know how to make anything work, and don't have to actually use it to get work done, tend to be obsessed with how it looks.
A few casual users who don't actually need to get anything done will usually support this kind of time-wasting idiocy, and the offenders will point to their feedback for validation. Unfortunately people who write reviews are often in that category, since they rarely make practical use of what they're reviewing.
I think it's called using a scrollbar. :) That's typically how they work.
To spare readers the content marketing piece: tap and hold to grab it.
This "feature" has been available on every Windows, Linux and Android device I have ever used.
I'd take that one step farther - no matter what platform you code on, test your UX on all the others.
One of the best things I think I've done for quality purposes is require all developers, QA team members, and project managers have scrollbars turned on at all times. It's sent the number of sites with hidden overflow in production down to near-zero for us. Someone, somewhere down the line will end up seeing that your page is 300px wider than the viewport before it hits production. And because that usually indicates other problems (often related to accessibility), it usually has a domino effect of discovering other issues that need to be fixed.
It has definitely made a marked improvement to the quality of our work, and I recommend everyone require their teams using Macs to require scrollbars be set to "Always"
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 monoculture, for example, the spread of ultrathin fonts that look nice and crisp on retina macbook but result in very low contrast rendering on Windows).
US-based devs: outside of your country (that is, >95% of humanity), most people do not have a Mac, an iPhone, nor use MM/DD/YYYY dates and 12-hour clock.
Please show me a solved automated test for the issue in the post.
Even my craptastic company gives me a bunch of devices to test on. And I very deliberately specify very low-end versions of the machines so that I can test against worst-case-scenarios. It's a bonus that sub-optimal hardware is cheap as chips.
My favorite testing device is a $20 burner phone I picked up in the supermarket checkout aisle. If the web site works on that piece of poo, it'll work on anything.
Right now I'm waiting for UPS to deliver an old iPad from Alaska that the IT department bought for me off of fleaBay, just so that I can test on sub-optimal actual hardware.
Ths context is that testing is a solved problem. You are taking specific factual examples I wrote and attempting to debunk them with a general statement that is in agreement with what I wrote. Testing scrollbards can absolutely be tested inside a VM. Pretending that native hardware is needed to cover 99% of the use-cases for scrollbars is kind of silly.
> Even my craptastic company gives me a bunch of devices to test on. And I very deliberately specify very low-end versions of the machines so that I can test against worst-case-scenarios. It's a bonus that sub-optimal hardware is cheap as chips.
You've made my point. This is a solved problem.
The only problem that is solved is running multiple browsers in VMs in a cloud. Everything else is anyone's guess.
To come up with an automated test for the problem in the OP you have to be a) aware of the problem and b) have a way to test that scrollbars do/don't appear. Good luck with that.
That false hyperbole. Just because you do not know something, that doesn't mean that nobody else does.
> To come up with an automated test for the problem in the OP you have to be a) aware of the problem and b) have a way to test that scrollbars do/don't appear. Good luck with that.
No luck is needed, just tests. You may not realize, but test frameworks already exist for testing the screen for the presence of UI elements. That is how dialog boxes are clicked in tests. This is literally solved.
For the third time you've failed to show how to test for the problem described in OP. It tells me that you don't know
> test frameworks already exist for testing the screen for the presence of UI elements
Which ones test for the presence/absence of scrollbars?
I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use. I know the testers at our shop do it with an house built framework as well as with commercial ones. On our company's security team, various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools I mentioned, and she said it would take her a few minutes.
These are commodity tools. There is nothing special with any of them.
It would'be been so easy to just answer the question I asked. Instead, it's now a thread of non-answers and thinly veiled ad-hominem attacks.
The rest of your long answer is once again working hard on avoiding the answer.
> I find it hard to believe that you think there aren't any.
I didn't say there weren't any. I asked, "which ones let you test the problem in OP".
> I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use
Ah, my assumption that you don't know what you're talking about is proven correct.
> On our company's security team, various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium
Question: scrollbars.
"Answers": tools click on buttons, scripting security exploits, I don't know what libraries testers are using.
Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?
> and she said it would take her a few minutes.
Given your answers in this thread, I seriously doubt your ability to ask a proper question to "the people familiar with the tools". Especially given the fact that you don't know what libraries testers use and that you, apparently, don't do any testing yourself.
See, frontend testing is very far from being "a solved problem". Especially for quirks as described in OP. But you wouldn't know because you, well, don't know.
> These are commodity tools. There is nothing special with any of them.
Indeed they are. Indeed there is nothing special. And this still doesn't answer the question.
You used a lot of words to make it seem otherwise. As you yourself wrote, "Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?"
You din't, really. On the third attempt you said "I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use" and "various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools"
This shows that you started this entire argument with very bad faith. You berated me for not knowing something while you yourself:
- don't do frontend testing using frontend testing tools
- you don't know what tools your testers use
- you assume some capability of some tools only because "you talked to people familiar with them" which further shows that you yourself are not familiar with them.
On the other hand, unlike you, I know what I'm talking about. Granted, I haven't used these tools extensively, but I did use them, and I'm well aware of their limitations.
All you have is, well, empty words.
> You din't, really. On the third attempt you said "I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use" and "various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools"
Because I see this sort of test being done almost daily... I work in security and not specifically in testing. I mentioned what frameworks are used in a security context. You are beating a dead horse, focusing on what doesn't matter. I suggest you get off hacker news, go educate yourself, and stop pontificating.
When I said that I "just asked" I meant that I just now asked, not that just asking was all I have ever done. You're being foolish, projecting in every comment that you know more than everyone else.
PS. Please quote properly. I wrote that the security team uses selenium and appium not whatever it is that you are pretending I wrote.
Good luck with your holier than though attitude, and god help your security.
I did not need to ask other people how to solve a problem. That is a silly interpretation of what I wrote. You are willfully pretending ignorance of how to read and have a conversation.
Pontificate: "express one's opinions in a way considered annoyingly pompous and dogmatic." Yes, you really do need to stop pontificating.
I hope you find happiness.
Testing platforms like SauceLabs, Browserstack etc run on real hardware, even for mobile.
Testing with your own devices is of course better, but a lot more work. Which one you choose doesn't really matter, the point is just that you don't _need_ to have all those resources to do basic compatibility testing, so no excuses.
You can keep using all the words and comments that you want, but the simple truth is that this is a solved problem, I gave you two solutions, and yet you keep using ad hominem attacks.
As you yourself wrote, "Ignorance is bliss". Those are your words, not mine.
I think you mean outside of the Bay Area. For PCs/Desktop Apple has like 12% market share in the US. 7% globally.
I once had a discussion with a coworker at a major company known for its app, where I was complaining about an Android bug and he genuinely asked "does anybody even use Android?" And I responded, "only the majority of users in every country around the world including the US. It's even 50/50 on our app!" Afterward, I found the internal numbers for employee use of the app was 96/4 in favor of iOS, and this included employees outside of tech and outside the US!
He, like so many others, was totally oblivious living in the Bay Area tech bubble.
Make stupid design choices, win less customers.
You’re completely right that this doesn’t hold true for other countries, and that ignoring Android is not the play, though.
other aspects include to assume everyone have free wifi everywhere or unlimited latest-G data on their phone, last model Macs and phones, disposable income for 57 $9.99 monthly subscriptions, and live on food delivery.
Soon to include: everyone have a room fully set up for VR, with the latest headset du jour.
I use Windows as my daily driver OS now for both native/web/mobile/devops work and I expect to see more and more developers making that same switch in the coming years.
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.
zsh has replaced bash as the default shell, btw.
Also, Mac is a certified UNIX environment, it is native.
Well if peripherals vendor and "common communication/presentation software" didn't test on Linux, whose drawback is it now? That being said, I have used the following without any trouble on Linux: Slack, Discord, Teamviewer, Zoom, BBB and BlueJeans. Vendors don't put enough investment into testing for Linux due to comparatively low usage numbers - but that doesn't mean that it is a "drawback" of the OS.
As for hardware, as Vinnl explains above the way to go is buy certified hardware. Ubuntu and Red Hat folks certify a bunch of Dell and Lenovo laptops to work with Linux. I use Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13 and I don't need to do ANY extra setup. Things just work (TM) - including my Sennheiser and Jabra headphones.
The same is true for Zoom: things like accelerated video streaming are universally supported on laptop GPUs, but software support is spotty for some apps/OSes. Things like screen sharing are 100% software-side.
While I'd love to use a Linux workstation (and often do), it's simply not there yet in those areas. That has nothing to do with "high-end hardware" and everything to do with less robust software support than many alternatives--including MacOS.
I guess you could make the case that because MacOS has to support fewer kinds of hardware, they can spend more time on making software support robust, but I'm neither convinced of that argument nor convinced that's what you meant by your post.
Likewise, if you use an underpowered laptop, or one for which Ubuntu doesn't have proper drivers, you're going to have a hard time using Zoom.
I'm not saying that you'll never have issues (which I'm sure holds for MacOS as well), or even that you might not have slightly more issues than on MacOS (see your last paragraph), but things are definitely not as bad as comments online would have you believe, because many of those can be ascribed to issues like I mentioned above.
As a linux user, I'd like to say that I've seen that happen just as often with OSX users on my team. I think that's just Zoom's shitty app. But I do agree about peripheral hardware issues plaguing Linux. Bluetooth headphones are still such a hassle on Ubuntu 20.04.
This goes especially for audio.
I’m going to guess that Apple peripherals + Apple OS on Apple hardware is actually hassle-free but then what’s the point of a standard.
Anyone who has used any Linux knows HiDPI or mixed DPI monitors are a massive issue on Linux. Even when you get your xrandr configured perfectly fine, disconnecting is a hassle. And that's completely ignoring apps, QT, GTK, etc all handle DPI differently. So you need a different config with DPI setting on each.
One of the best I've used is PopOS with the HiDPI daemon enabled. But even that has issues.
Even Windows can't deal properly with having a 4k laptop screen and a 2k monitor attached. Have to deal with weird text scaling issues and other weird scaling issues.
But MacOS can and does it beautifully.
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 miss being able to drag a file into a Open File dialog so much) that I still greatly prefer using macOS.
Windows has some niceties to try and make the transition better - The Windows Terminal app is pheonomial, and Powershell tries to map rm to whatever the Powershell command is - rm -rf doesnt work as expected though. I honestly don't find myself using WSL all that much - I only use it when I can't figure out how to make ping go forever in Powershell.
I still miss macOS, so much, because
- Mac Software I was accustomed to using (and it was lot) is no longer available to me (don't discount this problem when suggesting switching)
- I had to customize Windows 10 a lot, (many hours of work) to emulate native features of macOS I personally can't live without (including remapping keys, which turns out not to be trivial on Windows)
- I miss the general UI polish of macOS. Windows is...ugly in a lot of places.
- I miss Finder, and I've tried so many file explorer alternatives and nothing comes close
- Windows 10 can't seem to ever remember my screen layout for my applications. I had to resort to an application to do this for me. Drives me nuts
- macOS has way better HiDPI support (I have 3 4K monitors)
It ain't trivial, is what I'm saying.
Don't get me started on Linux, I loved Pop OS conceptually, but the support for basic things, like natural scrolling, was completely lacking, and I had to resort to all kinds of hacks to get a desktop semi functional. Not to mention, a lot of Linux 'add on' packages are abandonware and would break constantly when updating to new versions, and for basic things, like dealing with scroll direction, I had to edit files in a terminal, which I just found annoying. It just wasn't a polished out of the box experience. Don't get me started with it not recognizing adapters properly and issues with GPUs. macOS is alot of things, but they take 'just works' more seriously than any other operating system I've ever used.
Honestly, I find it incredibly odd that companies that have more manpower than Apple (you'd be shocked how little manpower they devote to some things) can't manage to pull off the polish of macOS UI
Why do you miss Finder? Search feature? Preview.app? Opposite to you, I never like it.
As for software, I miss Finder because I felt the interface was intuitive and I really liked the features Finder like tags, smart folders, and the way you could custom it with extensions and settings. I like the built in software, like Preview in particular.
I have yet to have anyone show me an OS that comes close to matching macOS out of the box. Even conceding customizations, they're just so lacking in comparison, to someone who 'clicked' with macOS.
Granted, not everyone likes macOS, and thats fine, but to come at it from a place that its so easy to migrate to another platform, ignores so many things about macOS that make it great to a macOS user.
My job requires Windows 10, thats how I ended up on the platform. I learned to get around and replicate as much of the features as I could, but so many are just fundamentally missing and even if I wanted to pay for the functionality (and for so much of it I would), the software doesn't even exist.
A good set of examples is here
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-w...
Now that macOS is every bit as complicated as windows, it’s often Microsoft’s OS that can’t do something. WSL helps some of that, but there are usability shortcuts that Windows doesn’t have. Windows is also insultingly condescending with its verbiage (“Getting Windows Ready” or “Working on Updates”). Maybe aiming low in their explanations is their one-button-mouse moment.
I don’t think the users were ever all tech-illiterate on either platform. Only perceptions have changed.
The world does have a variety of options, so users need to live with the fact that they're going to have to discover things, and designers are going to have to live with the hassle of designing for users with a variety of experiences. That makes the best possible UX worse than it would otherwise be. It's a necessary evil, but it's not surprising that a lot of developers try to wish it away, especially when they can get away with that, at least initially.
Most users use Chrome on desktop and mobile.
Anecdotally, most engineers I know use Chrome on a MacBook. The only people I know who use Safari are my parents.
This is an unsubstantiated claim, why bring up and bundle the entire United States to support your claim? I was with you until this.
[1] https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/34950/which-large...
Took me a week or so to get used to Mac. I can't care less about what OS I'm using, they all excel and suck in different ways.
Up until Android and iOS mostly phones and tablets, we had a monoculture Intel and Windows. Windows is still almost 90% of actual laptop/desktop users. [1]
I am an ex-Mac developer. I do not have a modern Mac, I do not have an iPhone, and I set the date/time format to pretty much whatever I want on Linux, Windows, and 15 year old Mac OS X. And, I just have to deal with broken date/time interfaces on the web. For far too long, I would go along with the Intel / Windows developer monoculture of "good enough" software, and comments like Mac? Linux? What's that?
[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
I don't even live in US. But this culture certainly exists here too.
Recently, we were doing a bug safari for a new product feature that was about to launch. I noticed that an element had a scrollbar when it shouldn't, and filed a bug. One of the developers picked it up, and first said "not a bug. I don't see it on my computer." I showed him the bug on my machine, and he looked at it for a few minutes before saying "I don't know how to fix it." I pointed out that the overflow-x was set to "scroll" in the CSS for that component, and he could just set it to "auto" to fix the behavior (since the scrollbar should never show up in normal usage of that feature). It turns out that he didn't even know "auto" existed.
On NTFS you can hide an arbitrarily large file in the "Alternate datastream" of any file. Explorer doesn't show you alternate datastreams and certainly doesn't show you they are possible.
You can use VLC to play a bluray from what appears to be a 1kb text file in Explorer.
If you have that on a USB stick, the properties of the USB stick will reflect the capacity loss of the bluray image. But Explorer won't show you why or which file has it...
https://blog.foldersecurityviewer.com/ntfs-alternate-data-st...
- Discoverability: You don't even know if a container is scrollable at all until you try.
- Orientation: You don't know where you are in a document until you scroll to make the bar appear, and then you have to notice it before it disappears
- Usability: It's much harder to target the scroll thumb to drag it. To find it you need to again scroll first, then notice it, then target it with the mouse, all under time pressure before it disappears.
If you're on MacOS, do yourself (and your users) a favor and set them to always show.
That's not enhanced at all, it's horrible, and scrollbars should be more contrastful and bigger again
The actual useful UI left is “does this thing scroll”, “where on the page am I”, and “the grab and flick” gesture on touch to scroll faster.
In hindsight I think the mistake was having scrollbars be part of the document flow instead of hovering invisibly over the content until they’re needed.
I'm talking about desktop computers here by the way, althrough grabbing a scrollbar and going to wherever I want at any speed would be awesome on a phone too.
I mean such programs as Konsole, Firefox, and others, in Linux desktop. Scrollbars got thinner and with super low contrast there too
I don't mind having to move my mouse to the scrollbar and drag it to scroll documents or webpages (when I can't use the keyboard for that already).
This was fine until a few years ago when scrollbars starting to hide or become super thin. I should not have to concentrate to be able to target scrollbars with my cursor.
If you're working on UX/UI design, please remember that not everyone has or uses a scrollwheel on their mice.
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.
I don't think hiding scrollbars can really be termed an enhancement; 'mistake' at best or 'user-hostile behavior' at worst seem more appropriate.
The original Macintosh GUI succeeded so well because it made it so easy to see what was possible. It laid an awful lot of stuff out right there on the screen in front of the user, and what was hidden was easy to get at. They spent a ton of time testing an improving usability. Modern macOS, OTOH, just doesn't feel right anymore; I suspect it is designed to look good, not to be usable.
More recently, a few weeks ago we had a bug in our app that was caused by an India time zone. Our company is fully U.S.-based so nobody noticed. Since then I've kept my computer in the India time zone so that time zone issues are readily apparent. I've already caught another one since then.
There's a more general principle here of "user empathy": configuring your environment so that you're in the same boat as your users.
I think there are two parts to the problem: ① a popular developer platform using overlay scrollbars; and ② the fact that `overflow: scroll` sounds like what people want, when it’s actually not (as you say, they wanted `overflow: auto`). If I could rewrite the history of just this one property, I’d rename `scroll` to `always-show-scrollbar` or `show-scrollbar-even-if-insufficient-content-to-scroll` or similar. Or maybe split `overflow` in two and use `scrollbar-show: always;`.
Hmm. I wonder if we could convince browser makers to kill off `overflow: scroll`, making it equivalent to `overflow: auto` due to rampant abuse (there’s precedent for this sort of thing), and replace it with a new, more clearly-named property `scrollbar-show: always`. (And `scrollbar-{x,y,inline,block}-show` to go with it.) Maybe `always` wouldn’t be quite the right keyword, given that it wouldn’t be affecting the behaviour of platforms with overlay scrollbars. But this actually sounds both reasonable and feasible to me, given that `overflow: scroll` is subject to rampant abuse due to misunderstanding and was basically only a tiny quality of life thing for certain corner cases in layouts anyway.
It was much more rigorous than other design content I watch (e.g. skillshare, youtube), which are usually based on how something looks (emotion) and not the actual efficiency or usefulness of the design.
In the industry we really should distinguish between UI Architects and Aesthetic Designers.
I have on idea what school of thought has brought forth the no-UI UI but I absolutely think they are idiots.
Makes me wonder if I'm missing the point of the fairly simple post?
<body style="overflow: scroll;">
<div style="overflow: scroll;">
<div style="overflow: scroll;">
<div style="overflow: scroll;">When I first saw it the first thing I did was to find a way to get rid of it. In Windows it's: Settings > Ease of Access > "Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows" > Off
This just reminds me of how lovely it would be to have complete interoperability between every browser, every OS, mobile or desktop... And how unlikely it is to happen in the near future.
They're undoing much of what Ive did to MacOS, it's time to include making scroll bars as big and useful as they used to be!
I felt absolutely ridiculous and ashamed after that. So, I make a point of designing all my software with visible scroll bars and other visible features that a user could reasonably expect to find without having to hunt or guess.
Sure, it doesn't look as "pretty" but it's so much more useable.
I misunderstood the intent and I thought that they were just replacing the scrollbar to style it, which as a side effect broke the behavior with a mouse in Windows/Linux, but it took me long to understand that it was because Mac OS removed them by default and it was not just designers being obsessed about styling the scrollbars...
That stuck with me for a long time, and I remembered it when MacOS and iOS first began departing from that philosophy with their modern looks. I would say Jony Ive contributed a lot to this transition from user-friendliness to design-led, form-over-function.
The fact that I can only toggle it at an OS level is pretty bad. I love the invisible scroll bars and I would prefer to have them in all apps I use myself, but I do respect the platforms and users who have visible ones, but I shouldn’t have to choose between my own user experience and testing for their user experience
In the Gmail Admin interface for users, the scrollbar vanishes unless I have my browser nearly maximized. Do the designers live in a world where their browser is always nearly full screen?
You'd think huge companies would notice and care about these things.
I remember on IRIX they were so bold, a real tool to be used. Same on Windows up to and including Windows 7. Now it's like you have a 2 pixel wide invisible border, hard to click, which may be the shadow of the window, or at the edge in the window; it's hard, specially when working over VNC. Nothing is gained by freeing up those 10 horizontal and vertical pixels.
I think this is a lost cause. A lot of macOS people are "zealots" and they feel that anyone who uses anything else is simply "wrong." I've long dealt with designers like this and realized I can't win.
It would be a lot nicer if, while typing a command, a list of options came up, along with a short explanation and example, and by clicking the option the full documentation for it would come up.
But that cannot happpen, console apps have no connection to a UI.
The amount of hidden-ness/clevery fuckery in OSX is maddening. I would implore every one to complain to Apple to fix their broken OS.
The web is fine, the garbage developers are putting out is because of the broken dumpster fire of OSX.
You'll notice that Apple loves to champion usability (HIG etc) ... except when it flies in the face of their minimalist aesthetic.
Solution: web developers should change how they do CSS to accommodate Apple.
Grab your ptichfors brothers and sisters, we have another heretic to burn at the stake!
I really like the hidden scrollbars that Apple settled on. They are easy to identify by hovering the cursor over scroll-able content and they just act as an overlay over the content. In windows, the content is actually shifted the width of the scrollbar which is terrible for UI consistency in some cases. There is the problem that hidden scrollbars remove the "discovery" aspect of traditional scrollbars, but I find this to be a very minor loss in practice. I don't miss having a sliver of a scrollbar for large content blocks.
I ultimately just settled on styling scrollbars in CSS, making them a bit slimmer and forcing that behavior on the Mac for consistency. Scrollbars look nice, match my UI look and feel, minimally shift content and look consistent across all platforms.
I threw away all of the custom JS approaches that try to mimic Apple's solution because none were perfect and, in every case, introduced new problems that disqualified them entirely.
Agreed.
> Alternatively, you can set the scrollbars to be visible at all times by setting System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars to Always.
Disagree. Now you're using a different UI layout than the vast majority of your users!
After all, the initial sentence also didn't imply checking _only_ some other platform.
Stop complaining about discoverability, everyone that knows how to browse the web knows how to scroll. It's like worrying whether the user will know how to use a mouse when you're designing a web page. Scrolling is not something like shortcuts or tabs - you need it to move around, which means you get to know it as soon as you start your computer and after the first knowing phase it's visual clutter.
Also, I would like to ask whether users will usually even want to click on the scrollbar to move around. Unless the small number of cases where the page is long and you want to move around quickly (and if you have ever been in that case, you know that even there using the scrollbar is pretty useless because it's too sensitive - you are usually less precise when you use a scrollbar, not more), there's virtually no reason to click it. Computer screen estate is precious because not everyone is using a 27-inch display (13-inch display here), so that's a pretty big reason to hide the scrollbar.
MacOS default UX w/ the hidden scrollbar represents a tiny portion of any consumer-facing web product's user base.
So what is the value of a development team, not experiencing the same UX as the vast majority of their users?