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Comment by ValentineC | Hacker News Reader

I downloaded that on my spare Android phone (I'm primarily an iOS 17 user), but never ended up using it because it just wasn't aesthetically pleasant. I also don't really take photos using my Android phone, I guess.

Randomly, I wish more UI/UX designers contribute to open source.

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I wish developers put in the faintest amount of thought into UX instead of just throwing together the first thing they came up with.

Like, literally just add a photo of the app to your landing page. It's not rocket science.

> Like, literally just add a photo of the app to your landing page. It's not rocket science.

Heh, I still remember a time in the internet where apps had a dedicated "screenshots" page.

That was presumably a best practice when people were still on 56kbps dialup, and downloading images was expensive.

Many telcos in the world don't even support 3G anymore.

You're wishing for a very double-edged sword. UI designers do as much harm as good. Disappearing scroll bars, rounded window corners for square content, hiding primary functionality inside a hamburger menu when there's plenty of room for labeled buttons, removing maximize/minimize buttons in favor of non-discoverable keyboard shortcuts.. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots, and that's just on GNOME.

As a rule, if you, a non-UI designer, are bothered by it, then it doesn't take a UI designer to fix it.

More than anything, I wish UI designers would work really hard on V1.0 and then leave it alone. There is nothing worse than having things move around on stuff you have been using for years, especially if you use it professionally. Add the new options at the end of the ribbon MS. While you are at it, don't make the menu items suddenly bigger so they look good on my big monitor, but then hide some of them when I use my laptop (that they fitted ok on last week). Don't move the account menu from the top to the bottom Reddit. I think that is one reason I keep coming back to hn. The UI has been the same the whole time I have been here

I wonder if we can get some UX folks to volunteer a day to review and write up improvement suggestions for various popular open source projects. I personally know bad UX when I see it, but I'm no expert on making good UX ;-)

There are some initiatives for designers to contribute to OSS, like this one: https://opensourcedesign.net

Dunno how popular/successful/active it is, tho.

This. I've had so many projects where I wish someone who really cared about UX could just tell me "this sucks, if you want I can help"

Many programmers think they can cheat their way into designing a good UI, they just think it's just enough for you to learn and use a GUI framework, and place the widgets in a "good enough" way.

Just look at the monstruosity that is the GUI version of wget, it's the epitome of programmers with no UX background trying to make a GUI application.

there’s a gui for wget??

Handbrake ;)

wget is a download CLI tool. Handbrake is a video transcoder. I feel like I'm missing something, or just missed the joke lol.

I Googled screenshots of "wget gui" and "handbrake software", both are GUI programs with a whole lot of dropdowns, checkboxes, etc.

Maybe that's the meaning of the parent comment?

Handbrake is aesthetically better, if slightly less powerful compared to MeGUI, but MeGUI is usable if one doesn't mind reading through some video encoding guides.

Whatever came before MeGUI was likely much worse.

Yep, web browsers.

yes https://www.jensroesner.com/wgetgui/wgetgui.png

that is horrifying.

I suppose if someone thought this, they would not have dared saying it?

Many do make horrible UI, but would react poorly to criticism, hard to know before ..

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