Hacker News Reader

Comment by AshamedCaptain | Hacker News Reader

> I miss the days were UIs were /crafted/ not just decided for you bad a bad 'layouting' engine with huge rectangular flat buttons and no sense whatsoever of 'design' or usability.

I couldn't disagree more regarding 'layouting' engines. I absolutely detest pixel-perfect English-only UIs that basically look like a mess the moment anything (including font DPI) changes. You CANNOT imagine how much pain the work of the translator is and it just doesn't matter because it will look horrible anyway, specially the more "smarts" the original English form designer applied.

I want to enlarge the fonts, reduce the size of the useless icons, and set black backgrounds, and no amount of "creativity" from the original designer is going to convince me to lose that flexibility. I'll also translate to my native tongue thank you very much.

Flat buttons and no usability testing is another story, of course.

View on HN

It is not terribly difficult to make 'crafted' UI localizable, there are a few rules to follow that's all. I worked for apple back in the day and shipped software translated in countless languages, and the same 'crafted' UI worked pretty well in all cases. Of course there are always exceptions, and 'modern' HiDPI present issues if all you do is use hard coded pixels as a unit, but it is still manageable.

Would it work if the other language increased the text length twofold? How about right-to-left languages? What if the language is sensitive to numbers and putting a numeric textbox in the middle of a sentence would require the sentence to change phrasing significantly depending on the value?

Here’s a screenshot of the Windows Vista start menu in English: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...

As you can see, it’s a nicely crafted layout, with the power buttons at the bottom taking up all the available space, and the thin separator lines below "E-mail", below "Games", and above "All Programs" are taking up the entire widths of the boxes they’re in (minus reasonable margins).

Here’s the Polish version: https://ia902303.us.archive.org/24/items/WinVistaSP2AIOPLMay...

The awful translation made both columns of the menu much wider, making the separators look too short, and adding blank space next to the power buttons.

> The awful translation made both columns of the menu much wider, making the separators look too short, and adding blank space next to the power buttons.

They aren't much wider.

The one English one is a 1373px wide screen shot. The Polish one is 800px wide.

Even if both menus were in exactly the same language, the second one would look wider anyway.

The start menu width does not change with the screen width, here’s a smaller screenshot of Vista in English: https://betawiki.net/images/3/35/WindowsVista-6.0.6002.18005...

> The start menu width does not change with the screen width,

With respect, you're missing the point - the start menu width does not change with screen width, so on a smaller screen the start menu takes up more space.

You're comparing a ~800px-wide screen with a ~1400px wide screen - obviously the narrower screen is going to lose more to the start menu than the wider screen, even when the menu itself is exactly the same pixel size in both screens.

> here’s a smaller screenshot of Vista in English: https://betawiki.net/images/3/35/WindowsVista-6.0.6002.18005...

That's still much, much larger than the polish version you supplied. Why not show images of the polish version and the english version with the same resolution?

TBH, I get very skeptical when doctored evidence is produced in support of an argument. Your argument might have been better received had you produced no evidence at all rather than misleading evidence.

How is this doctored? It’s hard to find screenshots at an exact size. But if you really can’t see the difference, here are screenshots from clean installs in both languages at two resolutions:

https://i.ibb.co/CByXH82/Vista-Start800.png

https://i.ibb.co/CWLvgn5/Vista-Start1024.png

I see what you mean with your original post - I have to sadly admit that I read your post wrong (you weren't unclear, I was just not reading properly).

In my initial reading, I looked at the images and assumed you were talking about the reduced real-estate in the rest of the screen due to the expanded menu. Reading more carefully, you were talking about the extra added space on the right margins.

Now that I see what you are talking about, I admit, yes, there is significant extra space on the right margin, but I disagree that it deserves the description of "awful". It's not ideal, but it's not really awful either - readable, understandable and easy on the eyes.

Bad localisation is possible even going from English (US) to English (UK).

I remember a mac magazine from my youth complaining that Apple was wasting unnecessary space by localising the deleted items folder as "Wastebasket" when the Americans had "Trash" and in both countries "Bin" would be valid and even more compact.

(It is now called "Bin" on my machine, I don't think I even noticed the change — we're no longer stuck with 640x480 displays where every letter counts so the change didn't matter when it happened).

Yep, the designer taking into account the strengths and limitations of the UI toolkit being used and remembering to design for more than just the happy path (e.g. accounting for long strings and variable fonts) will get you 90% of the way. UIs localizing badly in my experience is often caused by rigid designs that make loads of assumptions and were only ever concerned with looking good in a mockup.

Decades of fixing dialog templates in resource files disagree with any definition of the word "manageable".

Just for comparison, nowadays a shitton of desktop software doesn't look all too bad with just changing a gettext()-style list of strings, and not even touching the dialog definitions. You may argue that this is because the dialogs nowadays just look equally bad in all languages, but I'd disagree and anyway it definitely is an order of magnitude in "manageability".

This is why we can't have nice things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com