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laurent92

Windows classical UX was awesome:

- 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.

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Remember selecting more than one of something, and then being able to drag-and-drop it somewhere, or right click it and perform actions on the whole list?

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....

Menus are so. fucking. awesome.

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!

You're damn right.

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.

FYI you can see your likes by going to your own twitter page and changing to the likes tab. No different from viewing other peoples likes.

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