Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

lewisjoe

From a person who started using computers from the early 2000s era:

THANK YOU!

None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era.

Take a simple list view of a typical Windows/Mac software?

1. Command clicking selected multiple objects

2. Shift clicking selected a range.

3. Right clicking brought up selection actions.

4. Double clicking opened an object.

This pattern was followed in almost list views and there was no re-learning and surprises.

Now can you say the same about the list views of modern web apps?

Can you apply the same list selection experience across Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud? Nope.

That's were we failed as an industry. We let a lot of designers run too wild with their ideas, to put it bluntly.

View on HN

The problem isn't really with designers per se (tho they played a role). The problem is with the web as an application delivery platform - it was never designed for this.

Windows, or MacOS, both have design guidelines that was produced, and they expected native apps to follow. Most native apps do (the few that doesn't have either good reason, or were unique enough that their customers don't care - think photoshop).

With the advent of the web, such a guideline for software no longer mattered, because the controls and UI elements are all custom - since html is not an application GUI library!

So every man and their dog has a different UX and UI interaction built for their own app, because the web encourages it. The designers are also at fault for not standardizing on a set of common UI widgets, but i cannot blame them as this isn't the easiest path.

> design guidelines that was produced, and they expected native apps to follow.

It almost sounds old-fashioned in 2023 to talk about usability, affordance, and user-experience.

Part of being a native application was/is for the application to look and behave like the rest of the user interface. Standards are important because learning how to use a tool is important. Users are important.

Software has become a way to make users miserable. Oh, and while confusing them, throw some advertising at them too. ^_^

And everything had a keybind so if you worked in software every day you could be as fast as cli nerds.

And not even be slowed down by animations.

I read "even" as "ever" - still made complete sense.

Animations may seem fine and fun the first time you encounter one, but when you think you'll have to suffer through it every time an action is taken, it becomes a whole different story.

Absolutely...closing a popup with 'esc'? Naah, wasn't requested so tha message stays up

Also:

CTRL+A selects all

CTRL+Shift+End selects all from where you are to the end

CTRL+Shift+Home selects all from where you are to the top

One of the (many) problems of web UIs is they often ignore the keyboard completely.

Or as is increasingly the case: they actively hijack what should be system-wide keybindings - making it even worse.

>CTRL+Shift+End selects all from where you are to the end

>CTRL+Shift+Home selects all from where you are to the top

Those two don't need CTRL, just so you know.

>One of the (many) problems of web UIs is they often ignore the keyboard completely.

They are also starting to ignore the mouse.

> Those two don't need CTRL, just so you know

Well, yes they do, only it's different with and without CTRL. For example in a text editor (or a normal webpage without any fancy JS):

- Shift+End goes to the end of the line

- CTRL+Shift+End goes to the end of the document

and the same is true for Home (substitute "end" with "beginning").

I have seen people, even "technical" people, select a text with the mouse from the middle of a large Word document to the end, because they didn't know this.

They also had to do it often (several times a day) and it had become a significant part of their workload...

Emacs would like to have a word.

Emacs is a text ecosystem. And it's trivial to add these shortcuts. Evil[0] basically rewires everything to be Vim.

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

It is a desktop application that doesn't adhere to the user experience guidelines of the OS it runs on. I'm an emacs user and fan.

I can’t help but feel that Agile is at least partly to blame for this. Things like you are describing usually don’t come under the “minimum viable product” purview and thus get pushed out indefinitely until the product is at the “very mature” stage. At that point there’s the risk that the product will be re-written and the cycle reset again.

Nah. If anything a lot of these trends are directly anti-agile, e.g. avoiding labels and using icons so that it's easier to translate your app, even though the icons take longer initially and you're never actually going to translate your app.

I’m not really arguing that. I’m saying there is a trade-off between having the common OS feature set described above (Ctrl/Cmd-select, etc) and implementing/iterating a web/mobile product quickly. Often standard UI paradigms are never implemented or implemented inconsistently. AWS, widely known for their Agile practices, might be the epitome of this with their web console. Sometimes I can sort columns by clicking on them, sometimes I can’t. Some products allow shift or control click and some do not. Etc etc. I can only assume the product teams are doing their best within their constraints but as an end user it’s a piece of suck.

The problem with the controls is mostly because they don't want to pay for Qt (multiplatform toolkit), so instead every company (badly) implements their own controls in HTML to save money. I suspect ultimately they waste much more money than they save.

Qt isn't even in the radar of most companies currently building multi-platform applications in HTML. And it won't be soon, for two main reasons: developers able to use it are expensive, and most Qt applications in the wild still have the "uncanny valley" look and feel about them on every OS but Linux.

Not to mention that with SaaS being more profitable than selling unlimited-use licenses, a lot of apps also have HTTP backends and webapp versions, which can share a lot of HTML/CSS/JS code with a browser-based desktop version. Think of Slack/Discord/VSCode/etc. Sure: Qt, Flutter, etc also have web versions, but they just don't look/feel as good in the browser as an HTML app normally can.

If you want a "Premium" native look and feel, people gotta go directly to the source: native APIs. Qt won't do it without a lot of work. Lots of companies have separate Android and iOS teams. Or they go directly to HTML when there's not enough cash (or even things like Flutter, which look ok in mobile). High-quality macOS apps, like those made by Panic, Rogue Amoeba, etc, use Cocoa directly.

Standardized controls and shortcuts unfortunately end up being collateral damage in all of this.

All this sounds great from the perspective of retail shrink wrap software. Today, the major use cases for Qt on the desktop are in-house corporate software. And, no one cares about "uncanny valley". Only HN and online nerds care about that stuff. Average, non-technical, corporate users care about functions, not form. Hell, they are happy with a VBA app! Also, lots of in-car and in-seat (aeroplane) entertainment systems are built in Qt.

    If you want a "Premium" native look and feel

Who is doing this in 2023? No one outside my examples above.

There's a reason in-house corporate software started becoming web based 15-or-so years ago: web is cheaper, easier to hire for, faster to develop and deploy, doesn't require installation or updates, easier to troubleshoot, doesn't need special pipes for communicating with the server (yeah I remember the days of DCOM, CORBA, WCF and other weird protocols instead of HTTP).

It is things like Qt that only HN and online nerds care about.

Don't get me wrong: I really like well made native apps and I think they're great. But Qt apps are almost never as great as software made with native toolkits directly.

No, long term, web apps are more expensive because the front end needs to be completely re-written ever few years. A desktop app written in Qt can be kept running for a decade with very little work. (This assumes no Qt library upgrades, which for in-house apps, are most unnecessary.)

The primary advantage of web apps is "zero install", which is a major point of friction at large corps.

“because the front end needs to be completely re-written ever few years”

Citation needed. I’m currently working in a jQuery+Coffeescript app that still works like a charm.

Like the sibling post says, Qt itself had breaking changes that HTML/JS/CSS didn’t.

> ...needs to be completely re-written ever few years.

No it doesn't, the HTML spec hasn't changed, whereas QT has. The issue is how the webapps were built in the first place. You don't need Nextjs and all it's friends to post a form to a backend once an hour but somehow that is becoming the standard approach...

> Who is doing this in 2023? No one outside my examples above.

For macOS check apps made by Apple (Logic, Final Cut), Panic, Rogue Amoeba, or apps like Pixelmator, Affinity, Pixelmator, TablePlus, Tower, Dash... there's more.

There's even open source ones like IINA providing a premium look+feel.

Qt has uncanney valley... do you think people using HTML care to make things look native then?

No. Why would they? The reason HTML apps don’t suffer from the uncanny valley problem is because they don’t try to look native at all, it's just something totally different.

When they suck it's not because it looks "almost but not quite there".

But there are exceptions: when Cordova/Ionic tries to imitate the look of iOS/Android's native controls. Then we have an uncanny valley problem.

> If you want a "Premium" native look and feel, people gotta go directly to the source: native APIs.

I've seen this regurgitated a hundred times, but I don't really know any more what that "native look and feel" is. On Windows, it might be the old Windows 95 controls, but those are quite limited. What system today is made of dropdowns, checkboxes and OK buttons?

Well, yeah. Windows is... special. Even Microsoft stopped using the normal controls. But the problem is that Qt looks like an uncanny valley version of those Windows 95-style apps.

But by Premium I'm talking more about macOS, iOS and Android.

For macOS check apps made by Apple, Panic, Rogue Amoeba, or apps like Pixelmator, Affinity, Pixelmator, TablePlus, FantastiCal, Tower, Dash. Or even "non flashy" apps like Pacifist.

Those all use Cocoa and have a bit more of a slick appearance, even though they're mostly using native controls, with very few special parts here and there.

According to Microsoft, native look and feel includes tiny tiny dialog boxes with even smaller panes inside that can't be resized, so yeah, not going to bother with that

> None of the current SaaS apps I use can come close to the experience of using softwares from that era.

I'm afraid you're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. In general software back then sucked hard. User experience did not existed at all. Developers bundled stuff around, and users were expected to learn how to use software. Books were sold to guide desperate users through simple user flows. Forms forms forms forms everywhere, and they all sucked, no exception. Forget about localization or internationalization. Forget about accessibility. Developers tweaked fonts to be smaller to shove more controls into the same screen real estate, and you either picked up a magnifying glass to read what they said or you just risked it and clicked on it anyway.

Software back then sucked, and sucked hard. Atrocities like Gimp were sold as usability champions. That's how bad things were.

Those four actions worked for me on the Google Drive web interface

Great! Now try it in any other list view in any other app.

Maybe the list of docs in https://docs.google.com?

On my phone so it's hard to check, but Gmail's ctrl and shift clicks work really well and is intuitive to me. I'm shocked they wouldn't use the same mechanics everywhere.

Best example: Gmail is one of the only webapps I'll ctrl click a few items at the top of the list, ctrl click a few in the middle, and then shift click to the bottom and it works exactly how I'd expect - everything stays selected and the shift+click selects from your previous click to the next item. I think it gets wonky if you change directions but I can't imagine how I'd expect ctrl+click item 1, 2, 9, 10, then shift click on 4 would work.

For myself, I'd expect the items between 4 and 10 to be added to the selection: everything but 3 would be selected.

Having just checked, this is indeed what the file explorer on my desktop does, and I'm pretty sure windows file explorer does the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com