As it is now, and forever will be, I think the balance between usability and ease of development will be those 20% of effort to make your app palatable to 80% of the users (barring some exceptions by people with underdeveloped moneymaking sense whose self-description might involve the word "artisanal".)
- Menus
- Easy keyboard shortcuts with underlined keys in menus (Alt-F Alt-O!), and reconfigurable in general,
- F1 Help working everywhere,
- Unified keyboard shortcuts: F2 to rename, F5 to refresh (except in Lotus which closes entirely),
- Reconfigurable an draggable toolbars!
- Icons (those don’t exist in the web)
And so on. Treeviews! Lists with sortable and reorderable headers! They were awesome. It was the ultimate UI. Then they flattened everything and, worse than everything, came the time where treeviews disappeared and were replaced with infinite list sorted by “last document opened” like in Google Drive... That is what I regret most: Old documents being buried behind an infinite scroll, you can never be sure that you see and sort everything.
Remember tables with sortable column headers, in every app?
Oh man. The web sucks so hard, and the kids working on it now are so used to it they don't even know how hard they've been fucked over. To think that in 2021 people still have to think about how to wire up a data table to some backend, thousands of people writing their own version of that every year....
Imagine. The computer giving you a list of the actions you can do, written in a language you already understand, organized hierarchically by the kind of thing you are operating on. And as a bonus, most of them have keyboard shortcuts that are/were immediately spelled out directly on the menu!
The other day, I was using the Twitter web interface, and I realised I'd accidentally clicked the "Like" button on a tweet as I was going back to the previous page. Oh no, I haven't liked a bad tweet, have I? Of course, I go forward, and the page has completely changed, showing me a bunch of stuff that wasn't there the last time I saw it. Great, now I need to navigate the UI. I scan the interface for some sort of "likes list". It's not in the sidebar. It's not in the "more" in the sidebar. It's not even in "lists".
So I open Tweetbot, search the menu bar for "like", find it in "Tabs → Likes", and perform the action I want in seconds. Web applications can never compare.
No it does NOT. It's beautify because it's simple, yet consistent and clear.
Today's "standard"? That's the ugly one.
Win 10 brought their current start menu.
These days, dark mode on a black desktop background means you can't find where a window's surface ends.
Windows 10 UX is under the control of the guy who came with the Flat UI and they don't care about annoyances such as this. They are very dogmatic, and no matter how many people complain they aren't going to give up any of their Flat UI principles.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/tech/windows-10-redesign-...
I began using altmove after discovering xfce's alt <mousebutton> functionality. I think I had to remap the move or the resize, one of the two, in altmove to get it to behave properly.
I guess this would be awkward if you've never used it, but I can't imagine it being confusing more than once or twice unless you never look at the screen while opening folders.
You had to hover the mouse to know that it was clickable.
I agree with the rest but not this. You no longer need visible scrollbars now that you do 99% of your scrolling with the wheel or the trackpad or sometimes the keyboard. You did need visible and prominent scrollbars back when mice lacked wheels so you actually clicked and dragged them.
To me, all three ways to scroll (scrollwheel, auto-scroll, dragging scroll bar manually) have their uses.