I loathe the fact that scrollbars are now hidden. I'm constantly looking for it to either
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?
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?
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. :(
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.