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Comment by neurostimulant | Hacker News Reader

Rounded corners seems like a feature that has unexpectedly high performance penalty but the ui designers refused to let it go.

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It's not like crazy out of control avant garde different thinking UI designers haven't and totally ruined the user interface of a simple video player ever before!

Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999):

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

And then you have smplayer (Multiplatform) and mpc-hc as a good balance between usability and features.

I might write some UI for mplayer/mpv on Motif some day, is not rocket science, you basically talk to both with sockets and sending commands. Kinda like mpc/mpd.

It's something I as a user would also refuse to let go, given that the performance penalty is reasonably small (I think it is).

I think the point is that it's not - rather than just copying a rectangular area to the screen, you have to go through the intermediate step of rendering everything to a temporary buffer, and compositing the results via a shader.

But… the example given shows that they place the video frame behind the window an make the front window transparent except for the round play button. This apparently offloads the frame… so why not just do the same for rounded corners?

What am I missing?

The selfie example has an explanation under it. Summary: because the video subsurface is square and needs to be clipped to produce rounded corners. Otherwise you would have corners of the video surface protruding from under the corners.

Professional designers mostly cut their teeth on physical objects and physical objects almost never have sharp corners.

This then got driven into the ground with the "Fisher-Price GUI" that is the norm on mobile because you can't do anything with precision since you don't have a mouse.

I would actually really like to see a UI with just rectangles. Really. It's okay, designers. Take a deep breath and say: "GUIs aren't bound by the physical". BeOS and MacOS used to be very rectangular. Give us a nice nostaligia wave of fad design with rectangles, please.

Animations and drop shadows are another thing I'd like to see disappear.

Rounded corners for windows have been in the Macintosh operating system since the beginning.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

Yes, but often not in the interaction areas: http://toastytech.com/guis/macos1.html

Or, take a look at the interaction mechanisms and palettes in MacPaint: https://www.punchkick.com/blog/2015/08/07/how-apple-has-shap...

Even in the 1990s, it was a lot of squareness.

And, as I point out, physical objects have rounded corners for a reason. Computers GUIs do not share that reason.

Rounded corners are a design choice. A different design choice can be made.

One other thing that people forget is that rounded things generally suck for packing.

> And, as I point out, physical objects have rounded corners for a reason. Computers GUIs do not share that reason.

I knew a guy who poked his eye out on a Windows 3.1 window corner. Super brutal, was running on only 16-colors too. It was the upper left corner, so there wasn't even a drop shadow to help.

My main setup it's cwm+uxterm+tmux+sacc+mpv/mocp/mupdf... and such.

But, from time to time, I sometimes use emwm with xfile and a bunch of light Motif apps with some Solaris9-themed GTK2/3 ones when there's no Motif alternative. Usable, with contrast and every menu it's sticky, so good enough for a netbook.

Is it possible that they are just the well know representative example? I vaguely suspect they that is the case, but I can’t think of the broader class they are an example of, haha.

The play button they show seems to be a good one, though. It is really nice to have it overlaid on the video.

Fortunately the Play button disappears when the video starts playing, so it has no effect on the frame rate!

Or instead of a triangular Play button, you could draw a big funny nose in some position and orientation, and the game would be to pause the video on a frame with somebody's face in it, with the nose in just the right spot.

I don't know why the vlc project is ignoring my prs.

If you're writing a video player or a game or something else that wants direct scan-out, then you can disable the round corners in your CSS.

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