Original small screen iPhone, where it's easier to reach the top than the bottom, and it's less likely to be an accidental touch.
But now it's cargo-culted everywhere.
With phones, it's always been easier to reach the bottom. This is why tab bars have always been at the bottom. This is why soft keyboards have always been at the bottom. This is why Apple moved Safari's controls to the bottom by default.
The idea back then was maybe to separate the confirm action from other actions located at the bottom bar.
Human Interface Guidelines changed a lot as Apple changed the iPhone form factor. But with a 3.5", most of the screen is "uniformly" reachable and the bottom is slight less reachable as you usually need to flex the thumb.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but it’s been over a year and I still don’t like how in accessible the top and bottom of the screen on my 13 mini are for one handed use. I swipe to text one handed, but pressing the numbers its emoji button requires serious contortion and dexterity. Maybe the fact that I tend to use my left hand (despite being a righty) contributes to this.
Anyone else agree?
If you use your phone one-handed often enough, iOS Reachability works pretty well: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph145eba8e9/io...
Do you hold your phone from the top, with the bottom ending unsupported and hanging out? And if so, why?
Obvious downsides: if you loosen your grip then the phone will fall to the ground; you can’t reach the on screen keyboard.
The _original_ iPhone is tiny by today's standards. It's 15% shorter than a current iPhone SE, with a relatively huge chin. At that point the top corner is where the thumb is when it's straight up.
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-SE-2022,...
Read the second section, labeled "Thumbs vs Touchscreens", which shows the sweet spot for accessing content via left or right thumb or both. The lower corner closest to the base of the thumb is hard to reach. Unless the user was using both thumbs, placing target UI in one of those corners would hurt one-handed users.
Also note which areas are labeled as HARD to reach for either/both thumbs - the location where GTK4 has placed the main buttons in the File Chooser dialog.
But I see that the other Unix machine most Gnome developers use is a Macbook, so they try to make things familiar, because they sort of like that UI. (Those who don't but still want a coherent desktop can pick KDE.)
Fortunately, I think more projects are abandoning GTK than onboarding it thanks to GTK's horrible documentation, instability, opinionatedness, and simply how much better Qt is to develop for[0], which I can only hope will gradually de-throne GNOME as "the default DE".
It still feels more polished and accessible overall than alternatives though, and so it will probably continue to be “the default DE” for the foreseeable future.
KDE has the most potential to replace it, but I think its configuration is still intimidating (to the point that you regularly see people ask which KDE distros have good defaults), as well as quirks you don’t see anywhere else, like turning file copy dialogs into notification toasts. It’s technically functional but comes off as weird.
The other GTK DEs (XFCE and Cinnamon) I think are in a better place in terms of their settings panes not being scary and generally feeling well designed, but lack resources.
That's a great thing that I'm surprised other DEs don't do. Works really well for file downloads too. It makes intuitive sense and the fact that finished state is retained in notification history is such a helpful thing that genuinely improves user experience for someone with such a poor working memory as mine that it's really weird to see someone calling it weird.
Why do you think it's not practical? That's what Plasma offers already and I'm using it often.
Even if for the sake of argument we accept that Gnome/GTK’s UI choices are poor, the consistency across applications elevates the overall experience.
If, for example, you disagree with the placement of buttons, you know that all the GTK buttons will have the button in the same place which greatly reduces cognitive load.
The same is, unfortunately, not true of other Linux UI kits.
This is vehemently untrue. You know that all GNOME applications will have the buttons in the same place (GNOME writes their own HID) but GTK doesn't have an HID. GTK is simply a GUI toolkit, I can put my topbar at the bottom of my window if I want. It's not 'correct' but I can still do it and ship my application.
GIMP still doesn't have stable release out with GTK3. Inkscape took a long time. I bet both will have great trouble in the future. It seems we're moving towards GTK apps being either core GNOME (maintained as paid work by Red Hat) or trivial little apps like on mobile (either simple to port or just short-lived). Everything else will slowly die out.
E.g. I did not write, but just looked through the hoops PyQt has to jump to interface with Qt nicely. Quite impressive.