Comment by li2uR3ce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by li2uR3ce | Hacker News Reader

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Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now?

I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious before the onslaught of hidden scrollbars. The trouble is that having my pointer over the navigation pane--practically a guaranteed position--causes the scrollbar on the other pane to be hidden. Without the visual cue of a scrollbar there was no reason to move my pointer over to the other pane to discover there's more. Hell you might not even know it's a separate pane now that we've gotten rid of every defining border. I shared a screenshot with the developer, assured them that I was using the current version, only to have him say "scroll down." No doubt, I'm the fucking idiot (/s).

Just like on mobile, you're supposed randomly interact with every UI element in hopes of discovering how it works only to have that learned skill be unique to one fucking app. Tap it, slow tap it, slow tap it for a different amount of time, tap it faster, spam it... "google it"... oh, this time you're supposed to drag it to something that doesn't even look like a UI element. Stupid grandpas!

"Is the checkbox checked?" was never as ambiguous as "is the slider switch on?" Also, the checkbox uses less screen space! I'd argue that they optimized for neither screen space or user friendliness. It's optimized for a look and you can even make it worse by making it flatter. Go ahead make it look like two squares! Is the darker area the switch part? Who cares! It looks so clean and distraction free! I was so distracted by knowing what state the switch was in.

Sorry, time for my meds. I usually make it half way through the day.

I feel you. There is nothing today quite like _Inside Macintosh Volume I_ laying out out in drawings and prose (!) what the elements of a UI are, what they do, and how they work... almost like people had never seen a UI before. People must have had to think about it, they wrote a book for F sake. /s

They devote ink and paper to declaring that modes are to be avoided, and why. The do's and don'ts of UI on page 70 are worth repeating:

Do:

* Let the user have as much control as possible over the appearance of objects.

* Use verbs for menu commands that perform actions.

* Make alerts self explanatory.

* Use controls and other graphics instead of just menu commands.

Don't:

* Overuse modes (again!).

* Require keyboard / mouse when the operation would be easier with the other.

* Change the way the screen looks unexpectedly, especially scrolling.

* Redraw objects unnecessarily.

* Make up your own menus and give them the same name as standard ones (they define the standard ones in this book, you know: About, File, Edit as well as what goes in them. yes, yes, this is where it all started).

We've meandered into a bullshit local minimum where there is the One True UI and it's different for every app, but the same for every user. Meanwhile in industrial control where a $50,000 piece of equipment has its own app, used by maybe one person or three if it's operated 24 hours a day, the responsive mobile interface is as easy to lay out as slides in a slide deck and takes about as long to do. Hell, a customizable dashboard is a widget.

If the cloud made shoes there would be different shoes for grass and concrete, but they'd all be the same size and you'd have to cut off toes if your feet were too big or stuff them with prostheses if they were too small.

Today is your lucky day. Have a new word; Procrustean.

"forcing strict conformity through disregard of individual differences or special circumstances"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procrustean

"In Greek mythology, Procrustes ... was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked [read: killed] people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed."

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes"

Eh, Apple's ideas are not to be taken as gospel. This is the company that fielded UI that's as bad (or worse) than everything we're complaining about here, decades earlier.

For example: secret alternate menus. You can actually press modifier keys on the Mac while a menu's open and sometimes you get totally different menus. These are not indicated anywhere. So theoretically every menu on a Mac may have... let me do the math here... eight sets of contents using Control, Option, Shift and all combos of those. So according to Apple, you should open every menu and mash every combo of modifier key to see what's in each... and memorize them.

Another Apple menu defect is to start every entry with the same word:

VIEW

Show meters

Show clips

Show this

Hide that

Hide the sense

Show WTF the point is

This makes the first word of every entry nearly useless, and massively degrades the usability of the View menu. You have to sit there and parse the first part of every line, which only has two options... both of which are four characters, BTW, and thus visually the same size.

You don't do this; you use CHECKMARKS, which we learned decades ago. Some Mac apps do this, but many Apple ones still have this asinine convention of "show" and "hide" repeated over and over.

VIEW

• Meters

• Clips

  This

• That

• The sense

  WTF the point is

But that brings us to another classic Mac menu defect: The misuse of the Window menu. This menu is supposed to show names of open windows in an MDI-type situation. But Mac apps often bury View options in the Window menu, apparently expecting the user to guess that whatever they're looking for has been implemented as a window. Why would I go into the Window menu to activate audio meters, for example?

And most of the time, whatever the option is has NOT been implemented as a window.

I'm a UI/UX layperson by any measure, but as an avid vim user, I actually wish modes were everywhere and I could use every app with the keyboard alone

The way Microsoft office handles this is pretty wonderful. Alt reveals the keyboard shortcuts and they work in a very intuitive way. All pretty discoverable once you learn the one "alt" key trick.

(Side note, for mouse-work, They're now starting to f** with their ribbon a bit and the hidden/simplified version is just terrible, but they haven't forced that upon us yet.)

To handle the lack of vim modes in other apps, I just use a keyboard with my own custom QMK firmware that makes my keyboard have modes. That works well enough for 90% of what I'd be doing in VIM.

Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose.

On your scrolling complaint — well, there's this desktop-specific thing that OP doesn't mention but that becomes very apparent once you start looking for it in old-school desktop UIs. Controls never, ever scroll. Only content does. If controls don't fit into a window, you don't make it scrollable — you split it into tabs or you put the extra controls into a separate window that opens via a button. This appears to be universal at least for Windows and macOS.

I've had touchscreen laptops for about 7years now. The only time that the touchscreen gets used is when somebody is showing me something, doesn't realize it's a touchscreen, and accidentally borks whatever we were looking at.

It's strange - I love to optimize my flow, but I just haven't yet hit a situation where my hands leaving keyboard and touching the screen is faster. (I'm a die-hard and proficient track point user,and my hands never leave keyboard, so maybe I'm a special weird case?)

Reaching for the screen all the time also sounds like a shoulder RSI just waiting to happen.

> is when somebody is showing me something, doesn't realize it's a touchscreen, and accidentally borks whatever we were looking at.

It's funny -- I've been using my work laptop for over a year and only yesterday discovered that it has a touch screen by doing exactly this.

I haven't bothered to figure out how to disable the touchscreen yet, but it's on my todo list.

> Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose.

When I was doing a lot Android development, it was nice to be able to test touch without loading on a phone. It was equally nice to be able to markup screenshots with the pan. I switched to Linux from Windows a couple years ago and the new laptop doesn't have touch (it does have a giant 17" panel and all day battery), so I keep a tablet that has a stylus in the bag for doing UI markup and bug reports. I may switch to the 16" Gram because it does have touch and stylus... and I won't have to carry the tablet.

I have to admit that using a touchscreen laptop with a decent pen has made my university life a breeze. Ability to whip out a laptop and have all the notes, from all the years, searchable, with drawings just as good as when they were drawn and even better, because I can fix them and annotate them anytime... makes me feel like a terminator machine.

And it is the main reason I am stuck with Windows, despite also enjoying the 'normal' pc experience on linux much more than Windows bloat.

I have a touchscreen laptop for work and the only real use I've found is testing the behavior of touch-only HMIs.

But then you need fixed window sizes, which is pretty damn annoying as well.

That same Microsoft solved that nicely in win32 by using "DLUs", or "dialog units", for layouts. These scale with the font.

DLUs solve the wrong problem.

You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

> You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

What kind of extra work DO they need? I can only think of RTL layouts but I don't remember whether win32 "dialogs" loaded from resources automatically mirror the layout for RTL languages.

> Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

Desktop Linux is an unfixable dumpster fire UX-wise. Don't even get me started.

A serious problem with many open-source GUIs, but especially those on Linux, is that they're built backwards: you first write the code, then build the UI. Your UI ends up being shaped by the underlying implementation of the thing it controls. When in reality you want to do it the other way around: you'd formulate user requirements ("they need to be able to do X and Y"), you'd think through all possible scenarios that the UI must accommodate, you'd make a rough outline of what a UI satisfying all these requirements would look like, and only THEN would you start actually writing any code.

> Desktop Linux is an unfixable dumpster fire UX-wise.

This is exactly how I feel about Windows. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Slide switches are just awful. A skeuomorphism that doesn't work. Checkboxes are far better, assuming there aren't double negatives in the label text (e.g. a check means something is disabled.... the developers who do this should be shot at dawn).

I was with you, until you got to the slider switch part. Now I'm with you AND my blood is boiling. Nice to know it's not just me though - I find the ambiguous slider switches in way too many apps now!

And what the fuck is with the wording on check boxes these days?

On top of not even knowing if the sliding circle is actually on or off, half the time I cannot figure out which of on or off I actually want. Double negatives all over the place. Weird wording. No indication of actual impact.

It’s all crazy.

> I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to.

I've done that, man. Quite embarrassing.

Embarrassing for the app/os designers.

I try to write mine, to avoid that kind of thing. It often involves a lot of arguing with the graphic designer.

We've got some innovation from having everyone invent their own user interfaces for every app, but it's been a very high cost to pay vs standard OS GUIs.

This feels like a modern rewrite of "Falling Down" :)

* That's not a criticism. I agree with your take on it.

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