The worst are the apps that will constantly bother you with an in-app popup to enable notifications, e.g. Goat. They make it come up randomly so you'll accidentally click on it.
Or apps that you pay for (Spotify Premium, Tidal) that will constantly bombard you with marketing in-app popups at random times. So instead of listening and enjoying my music, I can accidentally click on one of these landmines and get redirected to something I do not want.
I cancelled Spotify because of this. Will also cancel Tidal after my trial because they just copying the same ugly tactics as Spotify.
Already had my fill of Pixel 7 Pro problems. The screen failed to register any touches on it, twice. Once within warranty, once outside it. Best I could do is file a claim with my credit card company for a measly $300.
For a $1200 phone.
Had a bizarrely similar experience with the Pixel Watch.
The screen just failed to respond to touch. Wasted an hour figuring out how to get into fast boot mode. After a factory reset, it started working, but it doesn't get much more than 12-16 hours of battery time before needing a charge.
After losing a lot of money, time, and patience, I'm done with Google anything. Their hardware is garbage and they seem to have failed to address these issues with newer Pixel releases. Not sure what the point is of having 7 years of updates when the phone's hardware will barely last one of those years. And good luck with support.
Switched to a Samsung A54, and although it is slower and laggier in some aspects, the hardware is solid and I've been impressed at how clean OneUI is.
Tip: When your Pixel screen fails to respond to touch, you can at least plug in a USB mouse and recover what you can before tossing it into the dead gadget drawer.
On my iPhone 13 Pro, calendar notifications will fail, and the alarm clock will fail to ring. No idea why. I need to reboot my iPhone once a week to fix this issue, and it's been this way since I bought this phone a few years ago. No iOS updates has ever fixed this.
I also have issues with the sluggish interface. Some of my third-party email apps takes several seconds to just load the list of messages. They take milliseconds to load on a Pixel.
My lock screen can sometimes take a bit more than a second to unlock.
The browser dropdown will occasionally load the wrong page when I touch the URL.
The keyboard is more wrong than right, most of the time. Out of all the bugs and problems that make the iPhone almost unusable, it would be the terrible, auto-incorrect keyboard.
The analogy that comes to mind is when the auto industry consolidated to just three large players. Quality was never great to begin with, but it steeply declined after that. It took foreign companies to add real competition to the market.
Apple has been in decline for years now, especially since their only other competitors are Samsung and Google.
Sometimes I wonder if their mindset is, "Hey, even if only .05% engage w/ the marketing email, that's still > 0%!".
Maybe their mindset should really be, "Hey, we're annoying 99.95% of our users who did not consent to these emails, and > 50% will be turned off to our product and will associate our brand to that of a needy, attention-grabbing parasite".
If I wanted these emails, I would have opted in.
Instead, not only do they automatically opt you in, but they'll re-opt you in after you've unsubscribed. I've had it happen a year or two later; suddenly, I'm back on their spam list.
It's become so bad now that I can't even let a shopping cart sit anymore without getting a nagmail saying "HEY YOU NEED TO FINISH CHECKING OUT NOW1!!!".
That email is the reminder to empty my cart and never do business with them again.
Seriously, STFU and leave me alone. If your sales and marketing team insist on these tactics, you need to fire them and hire people who get it.
> If your sales and marketing team insist on these tactics, you need to fire them and hire people who get it.
So, full disclosure, in addition to being kind of an anti-spam zealot, my day job is running marketing operations at a big-ish software company. So I get the fun job of telling everyone from the junior intern to the senior VP that no, my team is not going to send that email for you. That no, in fact, I don't care what the old person in my job let you do, or what you did at your old company, or how many levels above me you are in the org chart. We're only going to email people what they asked for, at the frequency they asked for it, on the topics they asked to hear about. These new Gmail/Yahoo rules have helped immensely in making the case to our CMO to have my back.
Sounds like you get it. It's unfortunate more people don't follow this mentality.
And there's no incentive to stop this. When email inboxes turn into marketing dumpsters, it just drives users to WhatsApp/Discord/FB Messenger/Slack/etc. for communication, which is good for those affiliated companies, but is bad for open platforms.
It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.
It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the window.
It's the way that tabbing between text boxes either doesn't behave the way you'd expect, or doesn't work at all.
It's all the tooltips that interrupt and litter the interface and, at times, block out things that you are looking at. And 95% of the time, the information provided in these tooltips are redundant or useless.
It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people.
Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets.
The biggest sin is that this would be a non-issue if these things were configurable at the windowing system level and could not be overriden by app developers. But the trend has gone in the opposite direction; instead of providing more configurability, Windows and Gnome/GTK are actually taking away options that have existed before.
“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without losing your place in the file system. And on top of that, everything is grindingly slow.
A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad.
That title bar thing, good god damn. I have to concentrate my vision on the title bar to place my fucking cursor between non-outlined active sections just to grab that motherfucker and shove it over. It is entirely a user experience regression. There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar. Easily moving a window by dragging the title bar was something that "just worked" for at least two decades if not three.
Maybe two-odd decades is about the time it takes for enough people to have forgotten the reasons and decide to just remove Chesterton's Fence[0] because, despite the fact that screen area is at an all time high, we still need to squeeze more shit in around the edges.
I've already whinged about both scroll bars[1].
I'll also whinge about "dead space" rarity on UIs like DevOps and Jira. "No, i want out of all contexts! Did I accidentally switch that slider by clicking like 10cm to the right of it?" (actual example from within DevOps right now).
> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar
The one benefit I can see is to gain some extra vertical space on the skinny 16:9 screens, especially now that the task bar in windows 11 got thicker and can no longer be moved to a side. They, of course, still haven't gotten around to fixing the auto-hide behavior, so that's still not an option.
The rare times I have to use windows, I use edge and I quite like the vertical tabs. This allows for a usable title bar, too.
You can't actually use reason to understand modern UX/UI designers choices. I've just got Windows 11 at work. They've increased the blank space between all the items in the file exporer quite significantly. They clearly don't care about vertical space because I know have to scroll first in places I could click first before.
Feel free to enlighten all of us, instead of using ad hominem on this particular comment. I, a lowly uninformed user, would love to know what UX/UI is versus what it pretends to be, so that I might understand the decisions being made in Windows 11.
Alt-Space, 'M' is your friendly keyboard method to move a window around.
After pressing those three keys, use the cursor keys to move the window around as you desire, and press the Enter key when you're happy with the window's new location or press the Esc key to cancel the move op.
Works really well when the window's title bar has been moved offscreen for some reason.
Once you've moved the window with the arrow keys you can also use the mouse to move the window. The problem with this is that it's _slow_, and it doesn't actually work on some software. Some non-native window frameworks like to disable (or don't implement) all hotkeys by default, including f10, Alt+space and sometimes even the tab key. IMO the only reason for a program to disable the standard windowing mechanics is because it's intended to be used as an overlay (programs like launchy or slickrun).
You wanna freak out anyone under the age of about 45-50, use the [Ctrl]-[Ins] / [Shift]-[Ins] / [Shift]-[Del] shortcuts while they're watching your keyboard. Everyone nowadays only knows those Apple-copied [Ctrl]-[C]/[V]/[X] ones, and thinks they're the God-given Standard.
FWIW, and I know it's not as good as patching the root cause, on Windows environment I have found relief in using AltDrag (and/or its fork AltSnap [1]). You can grab and move a window by pressing Alt and then clicking wherever you want on the window. There are also a few other tricks regarding window maximizing/resizing etc.
[1] https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
Ironic, to some degree. I agree with the overall sentiment,but:
> There's no benefit gained, whatsoever, from moving content to the title bar.
But also:
> Chesterton's Fence
>>The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'
There are always pros and cons to every design decision. As technology develops, we create new tools to interact with an ever-expanding content base. By moving things to the title bar, you gain back some real estate that you can dedicate to this ever expanding set of other tools and content.
There are other design paradigms that can be used for this, but it's a fairly simple (and naive) implementation / solution to this problem to move some of the stuff to the title bar which (visually) appears to be wasted space. But visual space != interactive space, so
> By moving things to the title bar, you gain back some real estate that you can dedicate to this ever expanding set of other tools and content.
But the loss of the title bar causes actual pain and interferes with practical use. It's hard to imagine any tools/content that would be worth that loss.
The only programs I have that are putting things in the titlebar are putting tabs there, and those programs do not cause me notable problems. For me the positives are much stronger than the negatives.
Visual Studio actually puts the menubar in the titlebar; I never have any place to click left unless the window is maximized (or, at least, full width).
I'm ok with adding more functions to the titlebar, it's something I experimented with myself for a desktop app some 15 years ago. I found there was a heck of a lot of special behaviours tied to the titlebar and that overriding them meant a lot of work to fix edge cases like - being able to move windows. So I never followed through with it.
Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?
That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.
If you need to use the move button, the move button needs to stay on screen. I may be the only one, but I regularly position windows partially off screen when I only need one side of the window and I don't have enough desktop space for the whole thing.
Oh yeah, that's a little bit annoying. It looks like I can drag on the second toolbar on the very left but it would be much better to force some dragging space both left and right on the title bar. Otherwise I think menus there is okay, I don't need the entire title bar as a dragging area.
Browser tabs I actually find OK, I didn't even really consider them as "using" title bar space, since each tab is a title bar and contains no "active" areas that prevent the simple 'click and drag' action.
This does become more problematic when there are so many tabs they become tiny and the whole title bar of the browser is taken up by tabs so that there's no dead-space to drag the entire browser window to another screen. I try to keep minimal contexts (due to personal brain capacity issues), so I don't run up against this very often - I manage links that I want to keep and go back to using other means, or if I forget them then they weren't very important in the first place.
That's actually a case against modern overfilled title bars.
"Real" title bars can be removed if not needed (e.g. by switching to another windowing manager like dwm on Linux with X11; not sure how it's done in Wayland or in Windows but there must be a way).
"Crowded" title-bar from Gnome can't be easily removed, because they are not managed by the window manager.
> But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.
They're mandatory because they're the way to move the window with your mouse. So fucking them up with a bunch of stuff that hinders that is just as bad as not having them in the first place.
Congratulations, you've circumvented the mandatory requirement!
Which is just as bad as disregarding it in the first place.
That's a screenshot across the entire width (of the top) of my monitor, as you can see from NP++ being maximised behind MS Word. Pretty darn busy, isn't it?
Sure, I can clean it up quite a bit, I can find out how to customise that. But naive users? They'll probably freak out. (And, TBF, I just noticed you can grab on to at least some of those busy-looking fields and drag it. But I only noticed that just now, while futzing around to screenshot it. And again, would my Mom? Or yours?) No, on the whole: What large software providers do to the Windows ittle bar nowadays is shit. The larger, the shittier. So of course Microsoft itself is worst of them all.
> But title bars are mandatory, so that's why not.
What does that even mean? That's the whole point of the discussion - standard UI elements have been bastardized so much, might as well just keep the trend going.
> But to ask "why even have it" is to fall into a discussion more about backwards compatibility than design.
No, it is a question about design. Window environments like Windows 11, macOS, Gnome or lots of other Linux window managers are designed for desktop PCs, not tablets. I would include Laptops under desktop PCs for this discussion, since most people -- that are working the whole day on their laptop -- add one or more screens to it. And on those large modern displays, it is more effective than ever to use overlapping non-fullscreened windows. Then it is absolutely necessary to have good standardized UI components to manage those windows. But those customized title bars break that standardization and customization. On modern Gnome I often have to search for the window that is in focus. It used to be clearly visible with a significant color difference in the titlebar. Today, there is slight difference in gray shading. That is ridiculous. And half of modern programs redefine the colors of their title bars, so you have to know for earch application which shade of gray stands for focus and which stands for not in focus. This is fucking stupid.
Just use a tiling window manager. In mine you move windows around by holding middle mouse button anywhere on the window, or left button with some key combo.
Oh wow I thought the New Teams menu was an internal dog food thing for Microsoft employees. I’m so sorry, it’s absolutely maddening. Nobody likes Teams at Microsoft either, and many hours a week are wasted complaining about it.
I used to use Teams, and it had this feature where if you clicked on the app icon (macOs) enough times a debug menu appeared. It was clearly aimed for internal testing. But there was no timer attached to it, so if, over the course of your day, you clicked on it in the dock, eventually the menu appeared. It seemed pretty half baked to have a debug menu available to your users in the wild.
So what do employees say about it? How could it be fixed? And since you're not in that dept I'll ask something else too, why are Microsoft employees not using MS made tech? Like it seems almost nobody is using WinUI3, or MAUI internally but it's all React and Electron?
> A lot of people working at Microsoft/Apple/Google are bad their jobs and should feel bad
That's the thing, I don't think they feel bad at all. Their UX departments exist solely to justify their own existence and are increasingly distant from the opinions and issues facing actual users using their products. They're still well paid, so they have no reason to feel bad.
I agree. The distro I am using lets me move windows by holding down Meta/Super key and left mouse button - anywhere in the window. Firefox is an example of how terrible it can get, see this screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zs2wekv.png. To move this window I can either click to the left of the Firefox icon (to the left in image) or between the arrow down and minimize to the right.
Yes? We managed on 1024x768 screens and all that “wasted” real estate. Meanwhile I have two 2880x2560 monitors hanging off my dock and UX designers are tripping over themselves to hide more shit in the overflow menu to save me 5 pixels of vertical space.
Going back a long way, this is what always bothered me about UI efforts in the Linux world like the Enlightenment window manager. It seemed like the very definition of “nice house, nobody home.”
The problem boils down to allowing aesthetics to dominate over functionality - form supersedes function. There are plenty of people happy to inflict that on others. I sometimes wonder what they use themselves.
> I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button.
I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.
It is a must have to know because there is inevitably moments where you have a window showing at the wrong place. I remember back in the days I was using windows sometimes when switching from multiple screens to single screen a window would start/appear out of the frame so you'd have to move it using one of those shortcuts.
I would be surprised Microsoft and Apple have removed these. Someone to confirm?
> I don't know about MacOS and Windows nowadays but most linux/BSD window managers + Haiku allows one to move or resize a window using a keyboard shortcut so that you can do it regardless of where you put the cursor.
Except this is an X11 feature, and they're all frantically switching to Wayland... Which probably doesn't have that feature, right?
>Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams
Are you sure you’re not accidentally opening the old Teams application? When you update to new Teams it leaves the old version in place so you have both, and if you open Teams with the new shortcut/application you won’t get prompted to switch back.
I think this was a bug that lasted a couple weeks or so because I had the same exact issue: Open New Teams, get prompted to switch back each time, including the first run (!?)
I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn.
[0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable (until roughly SP2 came out, which basically was an entirely new OS released as a service pack).
Windows 7, which was Vista's equivalent to SP2 also has some fans. Heck, I'd even personally argue that Windows ME has some niceties not seen in subsequent releases, particularly when combined with Active Desktop (which I'm pretty sure did not survive the transition to XP).
I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen. To that end, I don't actually mind how iPad does its window layout, I just wish iPad had all the features and openness of macOS to install your own drivers, background apps and virtual devices/mixing. A simpler UI can actually be a good thing, but you shouldn't lose functionality when making things simpler. A simpler UI doesn't necessarily mean less complex operating system...
> For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.
That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:
- RC was alpha quality.
- Releases were betas.
and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product.
NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.
This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.
The only thing I remember is that I would never install SP2 because of EULA. I don't remember the specifics though. Around that time I started mostly using Linux anyway.
> Everything old is new again? I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable
That’s more of a truth universally acknowledged. XP was goofy then, it’s goofy now, and it was goofy at every instant between.
Yes but in hindsight endearingly so. And the UX itself was still really good. The start menu in particular was an actual improvement over the old one, as were the clickable login screen icons.
I wouldn't say orthogonal. Making something inviting, approachable and feel like a safe place to experiment/explore for a novice is a critical and overlooked part of usability. The childlike choices of "bright primary colours" and "no sharp edges" is one way to attempt that.
It's what the general public needs that us nerds can least relate to.
It might have been good for brand-new users and children, but not all computer users are like that. It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.
> It might have been good for brand-new users and children, but not all computer users are like that.
Well, are you sure which of those groups you belong to? At least as far as Windows is concerned? Because:
> It would have been much better if they had had selectable themes.
It did. One click in the right place in the Control Panel and it looked like W95/NT4/W2K. (So did Windows 7, and therefore I must assume Vista, too. [Skipped that one myself.])
But, hey, brand-new users and children couldn't be expected to find that, right?
>I wonder if/when some subset of users will prefer a more controlled window layout engine, one which always opens windows into their own "space" on the screen.
Ya know one of the first things I do on an XP install is to go in and disable as much of UI faffing about as I can. It takes a couple of clicks, but once you disable themes in XP you get something that looks quite a lot like Windows 2000.
No offense, but I cannot possibly trust your judgement when you use a DE that, by default, is the classic example of no window borders for the mouse to grab onto.
I do not remember how I have configured it, perhaps the window border width is determined by the window theme (I use Chicago95), but I have also been using XFCE for many years and I have decent-sized window borders on my 4k monitors and my mouse theme (Hackneyed 48x48) has extremely obvious mouse cursor shape changes whenever you touch the window borders, so they are easy to grab.
The default theme that XFCE ships with has a 1px grabbing area set. So it's not that the cursor doesn't change, it's just you have to be very precise.
There are "fixes" where people hack the theme to increase the size of some transparent images to force a larger grabble area or telling people that they are holding it wrong.
> A good interface would allow enough configuration that we both could have what we want.
Like Windows, from at least 3.1 (ca 1987?) to at least mid-life of Windows 7 (ca 2012-14?). The item under discussion, window border width, used to be settable from 0 up to... Pretty much all of your screen. (But from some update somewhere halfway through W7, it defaulted to at least one pixel however hard you tried to set it to zero.)
I don't "agree to disagree", they offer a function that's unusable.
It would be the equivalent of MacOS breaking the ability to double click on an app.
But it's okay because you could use Spotlight.
That's great and all, but if everything else allows double clicking and MacOS allowed double clicking but only on the absolute centre pixel, we would all consider it broken.
Yep I got into the habit of doing that because I run XP in a virtual machine for legacy junk. I actually had opportunity to run classic MacOS recently and realize that I largely prefer the 10.x UI especially once they started toning down the decorations. Classic MacOS got a lot of things right that are missing in current operating systems, but man is it ugly.
> I remember when people were deriding Windows XP for being "Fisher-Price" in appearance and preferring to run Windows 2000 because it was more stable
Yeah, most people apparently never noticed the Control Panel setting in XP where you could with one click activate the W95/NT4/W2K interface in stead of the "Fisher-Price" one. Worked in Vista and Windows 7 too, but there they started to remove ever more of the detailed UI customisation settings from the Control Panel. (For a while, you could change them by editing the Registry, but towards the end of W7's lifetime, at least some of those didn't take effect any more.)
Windows 2000 was the last truly great Windows for me. It was the last Windows version that had a working "Find in File Contents" feature without having to install grepwin.
This is something that's always puzzled me - why is searching in Windows always so gosh darn slow? You'd think with an entire background service dedicated to file indexing, I'd be able to quickly find files in a directory tree with the word "foo" in their file name or contents, but even with a modern SSD it still takes at least a minute on any remotely populated directory.
File search in graphical Linux is terrible as well.
Just the other day i was trying to do sone simple file search in Mint and oh god the GUI search function is completely useless. I had to jump around installing 3 "file search" programs, none of them really worked and at the end I settled with some console bash magic. ... its 2023 people.
Microsoft should just buy Everything off Voidtools because they have perfected Windows search and it boggles my mind that Microsoft can't recreate that.
I was a fan of Google Desktop Search - that was actually able to find relevant content in my files, and it was fast. But Google killed it as soon as they decided to drive everyone into the cloud. Supposedly all major OSes have such an (indexed) search functionality integrated nowadays, but for some reason it doesn't really work, and I'm never motivated enough to find out how to fix it...
May be they are so busy figuring out how to upload our data to their servers and sneak in clauses in their terms and conditions to cover it ... that they forgot to build the actual functionality of showing search results to user.
Same with Google Talk (as in, was good, then killed by Google). This is their text chat and voice chat app before crapware like Hangouts. Not tried Duo or Meet.
Recursive agree to all the above, purely in terms of UI/UX.
Firefox currently has about 20x20 pixels next to the tabs to grab and move the window, and "always show scrollbars" is off by default. This would be reasonable on a phone, but not on any kind of machine with a mouse.
Can you not right click and enable menu bar to get the traditional menu (plus a title bar of sorts) back for this?
I'm not really defending firefox UI to strongly here, I use it every day as my browser of choice and I find the defaults wonky but at least customizable.
> Can you not right click and enable menu bar to get the traditional menu
FF has a great compromise setting, keeps the menu bar hidden by default but it appears when you press (the CUA standard keys) [Alt] or [F10]. (At least on Windows, that is.)
Especially with the Dashboard shell [1]. Was very convenient: compact, always at your fingertips, with extended virtual desktop, fully configurable and stable: you lay out things some way, they stay this way.
It is interesting that modern UIs keep removing agency from the user. There is very little space in the system that feels mine because I am the sole owner of it. On Windows 3.1 I managed everything in the program groups. It was not too convenient (compared to that Dashboard shell or Mac), but still, if the system added a group now and then, I could always take it apart and rearrange to my liking.
Now the Start menu is completely taken over. The ability to manually arrange things in a folder is taken away. The folders that should be rightfully mine (such as Documents) are constantly invaded by every program that feels entitled to put things there. As a result “we do not go there anymore.” The only places that are left for me to manage are: the area to the right of the start menu and the desktop. But I do not like the start menu and do not like cluttering the desktop, so the only place I still govern is a tiny custom toolbar I added to the taskbar.
The Windows 10 Start Menu scrollbar is unclickably skinny.
It is supposed to expand when you stop your workflow to undertake the Hover-Your-Pointer-Tip-Over-The-Miniscule-Scrollbar Ordeal. If you win, the scrollbar will typically expand to something less difficult. But expansion doesn't happen so reliably that it has your full trust.
> Fair, but after win3.1 there wasn't a menu up in that corner anymore.
WTF are you on about?!? There still is!
Source: Just clicked on the top-left icons on a few programs in Windows 10. Not guideline-defying shit like Microsoft Office / Outlook / Edge / Teams, of course, but programs that follow the Windows developer guidelines display the standard menu just like they've always done: Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close (usually also displaying the shortcut key, [Alt-F4]). Notepad++ does, WinSCP does, 7-Zip does, PuTTY does, SAS client software does, Teradata client software does... Seems most built-in Windows utilities do, too: File Explorer does, Task Manager does, Command Prompt does, Notepad does, Paint does, Snipping Tool does...
[Edit:] And even in Word / Excel / Edge / Outlook / Teams, at least that menu appears up in the top-left corner when you press the age-old shortcut [Alt]-[Space], even though there is no icon for it. (That was what the W3.x icon was supposed to depict, BTW: The space bar, not a hyphen or minus sign.) [/Edit]
Seems you have to go out of your way to build a Windows app that doesn't have a system menu up in the top-left corner. (Start building a Windows application in most IDEs I've used, and unless you change the default settings it sure gets one automatically.) So why do you spout such drivel, when you obviously have no idea what you're talking about?
Still quite a bit of time between "after win3.1" and "over 5 years". Like, almost thirty years now where that exact icon has, OK, "been absent" -- but replaced with other icons in the exact same spot. Did you never, even by mistake, click on one of those in all those over twenty years? Wow, you must be a lot better than I at mouse control. And / or a lot less curious.
I won't argue against Windows 2000's usability. But I will say that to me, as someone who first started using computers in the XP era, any Windows earlier than Windows 7 looks so god damn ugly to me, and Windows 2000 even more so than XP.
Interestingly though, I don't have the same impression when looking at the old Apple OSes. To me, Mac OS 9 looks old, but not ugly.
To me, XP and Vista looked like a terrible attempt at replicating Mac OS X when that all wow'ed us - it's hard to imagine these days just how big of a deal the iMac and later on OS X were in terms of moving away from grey boxes everywhere (though sometimes too far, since Windows 7 really toned down and refined XP/Vista's UI).
For me, I grew up on Amiga Workbench 2.0 and MS-DOS, so Windows NT/2000 felt like a good evolution from it's User Interface. Very functional, for sure.
100% agree on Classic MacOS. As outdated as the tech was, it was beautiful because it was elegant without being distracting.
To the contrary, XP and Vista' soft, round buttons and edges always made me think of a Douglas-Adamsian dystopia. Win2000 was bare bones, square and functional.
I swear they actually are actively trying to make the "Control Panel" / system settings experience worse with each iteration for sure. 90% of 10 and 11's system settings feel like they just took the original Control Panel screen and hid it, exposed 2-3 of the least valuable options, and displayed them in a weird solid-colored screen. To me the only way to adjust most windows settings is to find the "Advanced settings" link in the solid-colored window that will bring up the original control panels.
I absolutely agree. For at least 10 years now, my dream has been to essentially recreate the Windows 2000/XP UX as a Linux desktop environment.
That said, doing so would basically require creating everything from the ground up, because merely theming some existing toolkit and window manager to look like XP is not at all the point. And frankly, there HAVE been SOME useful UI/UX improvements in the past couple decades, like, FTA, minimaps. But can you imagine a much more conservative desktop, with highly integrated apps, based on the "good old days" of desktop design with just a touch of modern elements when they improve on things?
... Truth told, the closest thing in existence is probably SerenityOS... but it really would be more practical if there was a Linux desktop for this. Every so often I fantasize about how I might start such a project. It's been like that forever now.
I believe the biggest obstacle is dealing with different toolkits, since gtk3 and later are constantly breaking theme compatibility with new versions, and nobody have the time to maintain good alternative themes in these conditions.
XFCE with Chicago95 already exists (and so does Q4OS with XPQ4) as proof of concept that the window manager and toolbar side can be replicated.
The problem is that important pieces of software are not relying on any toolkit directly, but implementing their own version, so even if you support qt, gtk2 and gtk3+ applications with 3 different themes, there will be software running under electron or implementing their own client side decorations and breaking all the rules.
I think the easiest way to start would be to simply collect and maintain existing themes with a unified look and make a distro based on Ubuntu LTS or even RHEL to avoid breaking changes at maximum. This distro would have pre-selected software that behaves well with the selected themes, and need to have at absolute minimum a working browser with extensions following that theme.
If implementing from the bottom up, then something similar to helloSystem could also be a way, but I do not see it working in practice due to the time it would take.
You can find well maintained applications for almost everything in either qt or gtk3. So you can select one toolkit to support. KDE might even accept your theme if you did enough work on it to make it work - and this is something that is feasible for one person. The hard part is those few exceptions, if you need one GTK3 app because KDE doesn't have a good alternative (or one qt app because GTK3 doesn't) then you have twice as much work and it is probably beyond what one person can do. Making that missing app for qt/gtk3 probably needs a large team and a few years and so is beyond you (unless you are rich and can afford to hire someone to fulfill your vision) - and there are many missing applications, not to mention existing ones which are just barely acceptable
It's does not seem well known but it looks and works very closely to old Windows.
I have a side project plan to take this, combine it with a decent laptop, pre install libreoffice and a browser and sell it as "Stable OS" with a long term "no-change" policy to anyone who just needs a basic computer where not everything changes at the whim of someone looking for a item on their resume.
I did like XFCE at one point, but it never really did quite nail the UX for me. A lot of the problem is more on GTK+2 than it was anything else. (Obligatory mention of no thumbnails in file dialog; I used to patch GTK by hand for this!) Now with newer versions of GTK, this problem has unfortunately gotten worse for me, and I don't really prefer XFCE very much. Worseyet, I've gotten used to wlroots giving me good support for things that never really worked well in X11, and XFCE's plan regarding X11 and Wayland going into the future is still somewhat unclear.
I also tried LXDE and LXQt as well. I actually thought LXQt might be the one for me, but it was a bit buggy and lacked a lot of much-needed maintenance.
Also, although I'm glad Linux developers don't always make a habit of just simply throwing out ideas and code that works fine, it does bother me how antiquated some things have gotten. DBus is the best desktop IPC option on Linux, and that's not really a great thing in my opinion. Likewise, it sucks that most file archivers still work by popening some command and parsing its output, occasionally breaking on edge cases, usually having limited support for the kinds of advanced functionality you'd get in Windows archive tools. I do understand that making actually-good applications takes time, but over the course of the past couple decades it doesn't feel like much progress has been made here. I mean hell, speaking of archive tools... FreeBSD has been working on libarchive for ages and it'll likely be integrated with fucking Windows before it's integrated with common Linux desktops, which will probably mostly farm out to CLI tools like unar and zip directly. This is the same approach, with the same exact problems, that I remember being used as far back as when I started using Linux, in programs like Xfe.
Of all the versions of the Windows UI, Win 7 was -- for me -- the best by far. Nothing else even comes close, and everything from Win 8 on has been substantially worse.
I stopped using windows after Using Win10 for a short time, but ClassicShell was always maintained and worked flawlessly... oh, dev stopped in 2017. oh well.
Win95 default was peak Windows UI for me. It had proper shading so you can see the window edges. Min/max/close buttons were high contrast and easy to see, and were big enough to easily click. Window titles were high contrast and clear. The UI was light and snappy unlike XP’s.
Nothing. Those are just touch ups of the Win95 UI. Smoother color gradients from using more colors and smoother animation.
XP was the next big change. Never liked it. Felt like I was dragging around bitmaps. It’s “heavily” for no reason - no usability improvement nor does it even look that good.
Edit: Oh right I forgot about Active Desktop and MS’s attempt to turn Windows Explorer into Internet Explorer. Not a fan of it but at least it didn’t impair usability that much. Visually it still use the same “language”.
Active Desktop and IE Windows Explorer, for one thing.
But also, generally, the difference is that Windows 95 still feels like a "workstation" computer, designed for maximum readability and clarity, while staying in the background and not drawing any attention to itself.
With Windows 98, the OS begins trying to look pretty, which means having more elements and style choices which take attention away from the work.
If I remember correctly turning off active desktop on 98 was almost a requirement if you wanted a ... I was going to say stable system but lets be real this was 98 the best you could hope for was a sort of stable system.
It can be turned off, but it can't be turned off. It's still there, lurking just around the corner, and still showing up in some dialogs.
And I think this is exactly what many people's complaints are in this thread: an interface that is faulty out of the box that needs to be "tuned" in order to change it from an entertainer back into a workstation.
I haven't played with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 in a while, but I remember all sorts of "improvements" over Windows 95, such as sliding menus, "shiny" icons that draw attention to themselves, "shiny" gradient title bars, and so on.
The article complained about things which were not configurable or not easily configurable. So did many comments.
Judicious animation has well studied benefits. I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
I do not use Windows 98 as my daily driver, and I can't give you precise examples.
But I know that many areas of the OS, such as parts of the Control Panel, like the Display control panel require, load into memory, and include IE modules.
> I do not see how Windows 98's icons were more attention grabbing. Gradient title bars help locate the buttons in my experience.
All this crap to the left in Explorer windows that takes up space for no good reason. Active Desktop. Uglier icons that are inconsistent with the many older Win 95-style icons that remain everywhere in the OS. It's not that bad on the whole, and you can reverse most of it, but it's a bloating and bastardization of the (unironically) finely honed aesthetic of Win95.
The left area was used for information like file size, disk usage, and image preview. There have been better implementations. But Windows 98 could suit either preference.
Windows 98's icons look very similar to Windows 95's. Windows 2000's look better and more consistent to me.
I might be getting old, too. (Born 1987.) I have also come to regard Windows XP as the pinnacle of personal computing UI. Almost everything that followed, regardless of vendor, feels like a step in the wrong direction.
Same, and same. It was pretty optimal too, where i remember getting the number of BG tasks down to 15 and I knew what each every one did. I haven't been able to make that claim for an OS for many many years now.
From Windows 95 to Windows 7, the UI fundamentally stayed the same, with a few details here and there, including, scroll bars, window title bars and borders.
Essentially, what changed is just cosmetic and mostly as a result of better hardware. Earlier versions of Windows were designed for 256 color displays, Windows XP fully embraced 24-bit color, and Windows 7 was designed with GPUs in mind. That's how we got from pixel art to shading to semi-transparency.
And I must admit I liked Windows 7 because it was both functional and pretty. A nice, modern for the time skin on top of tried and tested UI core concepts.
Windows 8 broke everything as an attempt to unify the desktop and mobile experience, and we haven't recovered since then. In fact, I think mobile killed desktop usability. We are in a conundrum that we didn't find a way to resolve: desktop and mobile are fundamentally different platforms, so they would need different UI paradigms, but there is an overlap functionality as many apps are present on both platforms, so it would be nice to provide the same experience on both.
To that, add the fact that the web is often third or a fourth option (mobile and desktop web), and the ability to use native controls in web browsers is rather poor, so people make their own, but then, you want the website to look like the desktop app. Same kind of problem.
I'd love the windows 2000 style classic theme with the overall customizability improvements in XP with the UI feature sets of newer versions.
E.g. booting up 2000 by itself it absolutely sucks. I mean, it looks great... but you can't tile windows, you can't resize the command prompt dynamically, you don't have DPI support, a lot of the little victories like pinning and grouping aren't there, the way it draws often causes ghost trails, virtual desktops aren't a thing, a surprising number of things were modal when they didn't need to be. It has great parts but the problem isn't newer versions threw them all away with no improvement it's that not every change was an improvement.
Same time frame: GNUStep/Windowmaker on the Linux side of things, also something of a high water mark. It's really weird to me how much interfaces have degraded in the past two decades.
Mac is all secret handshakes, nothing discoverable, terrible af keyboard-primary work. Windows was very good at letting you stay on the keyboard.
In the spirit of scroll bar discussion, the standard of Ctrl-Home, Crtl-End, Shift-Ctrl-Home and Shift-Ctrl-End are so good. No such "begin of doc" and "end of doc" on a Mac except if an app wills it.
> It's amazing how much damage these cargo-cult UI/UX morons have done in the past ten years. They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts for something that looks pretty but doesn't fucking work for a lot of people.
No need to throw insults. I love HN because it's one of the few places where civil debate trumps the hateful tone of all other platforms.
I fundamentally agree with usability being more important than aesthetics. But I don't know what you mean by UX/UI cargo-cult morons.
I'm a UX/UI leader with 20+ years of experience. To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame).
Yes, there are designers who think form is more important than function and push for small scrollbars. However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs.
I wish the same was true for C-level leaders, marketing leaders and managers. In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated. A dangerous combination. Their demands are typically "I like the scrollbar of this website", " the design doesn't look modern" and similar. The amount of fighting that takes to push for usability and accessibility is excruciating.
We need some roles and ranks to act more professionally, and trust the experts. And yes, we also need some designers to think usability first.
> In UI terms they're both ignorant and opinionated.
These are the UX/UI cargo-cult morons you're looking for.
It seems in the software world we've yet to establish our own version of industrial design[1] so "regular" designers gets used. And leaders who decide aren't technical so they don't get usability.
I think the lack of competition also make the terrible designs seem successful.
I'm not using Teams because it looks great. I'm using it because my org uses it for chat and meetings. It's not like they let people try a few different looks for Teams and then see which people like the most.
> To me, the main culprits of crimes against usability are business leaders and marketers, not designers (although these do bear some of the blame). [...] However, when you explain the issues they often back down and create usable designs.
Honestly, my experience is the opposite. It is almost always designers who push for what they consider aesthetically pleasing with very little regard to usability.
Yes, when you push back a lot, you sometimes win. But it takes too much fighting, you need to be at powerful position to have the chance to win and they simply do not seem to care about usability.
It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore.
All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random layout for it's menu-ing, often with links to external sites, for what could be set locally.
It is geniunely confusing to try and understand the designers intent. I can never tell if I missed a setting, or if it was never meant to exist in this menu at all.
The amount of times I've had to Google how to change basic settings is way too high, even for Games where the experience is half the ticket value.
CS2 has a settings menu with text buttons at the top (like a tab) that drag you down to an arbitrary point in a long list of settings. There is no tabs, it's impossible to mentally separate what the text button represents mentally, from every other option, because they all point to the same page anyway. Why bother with the buttons?
The semantic meaning of concepts don't relate to each other and are not structured accordingly. It is waaay too unnecessarily difficult to navigate around computing.
I miss Macromedia Flash's UI. I didn't use the program much, but it was so simple and easy to use.
One my biggest drives for privacy and self made solutions, is to get away from the experience and knowledge pollution we've been seeing lately.
This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big.
Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t.
At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it from Unity.
>your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t.
Anybody else remember the UI from the Photoshop plugins from Kai[0]? You clicked the plugin, and then you were looking at some alien organic texture full screen with a few adjustment sliders. That was someone that said, "I see your UI suggestions, but I have other ideas"
This is the most intensely 90s software aesthetic I have ever seen.
Edit: Holy shit, Bryce! I think I had that on my family PC. We were really into Myst and Riven at the time and I guess someone thought it would be fun to try to make our own 3D worlds. It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills and I don't think I ever created anything with it.
>It turns out that making digital art actually requires art skills
it used to. now, you're only skills in art need to be to properly describe the scene and let some generative model do the work for you. i hope we continue to have distinctions made from digital art created by a generative model and not actually give the artist title to the people driving the prompts. to me, that's no different than me telling Bob Ross that I want a painting with a happy little bush in the left corner, a waterfall in the right, with a nice cabin in the woods in between them and then saying I was the artist because I was able to describe the scene.
Alas, Mac is one of the biggest offenders of crappy design and anti-usability.
When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline?
Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all).
And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.
Their 'magic' mouse was a magic louse, that didn't work very well, ate batteries like they thought they were in a hotdog eating contest, and just randomly did stuff you didn't want based on where your finger happened to touch them.
I hope someday they hire a designer that has used a computer before and can upgrade their UI/UX standards to at least the Windows 95 level.
Old MacOS was good, until they started gradually making it phonelike. The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines¹ was solid work. (The big flaw, as usual, forced on the professionals from above: the form-over-function one-button mouse, requiring the undiscoverable double-click — it's almost forgotten now, but originally people had to be trained to double click ‘correctly’.)
> Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default
They are if you use the touchpad, and appear whenever you scroll. The logic is that as you are scrolling with the touchpad, you will not click on the scrollbar, so in that case it is a useless appendage.
> Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all)
I am not sure what you mean by “editing keys”, but Apple takes painstaking effort to make sure most shortcuts are global, and in text entry fields, Emacs shortcuts always work.
> And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.
Sorry but this is just a laughable complaint. Apple’s touchpad and accompanying gestures are considered best-in-class and have been so for more than a decade. Microsoft and various Linux distributions have tried to catch up during that decade+ and still aren’t close.
There are many things one can complain about with macOS ever since Lion started the iOS-ification, and I’d be right with you, but saying the old Mac OS X UI was lower standards than Windows 95 (and I assume XP) is a supremely contrarian statement that few people of that era would have made.
> Mac apps that are unapologetically _Mac_ apps. They’re platform-specific and they’re not trying to wow us with all their custom not-Mac-like UI (which often isn’t very accessible).
I wonder if there's a directory of such applications somewhere, actually.
Seriously. When I think of my daily tools I’m not sure I have even one application with a standard UI. Not one. JetBrains IDEs may be the closest, but I’ve already seen their UI reboot coming (soon mandatory I assume) and it’s disgusting.
> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.
This is what the resize box is/was for. (It's actually draggable edges with no "meat" to them, which introduce the conflict by overloading an element, which is also just a pixel wide.)
*) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows. Mind how this is in the direct vicinity of any scroll buttons which may be used to see more than what is exposed by the initial view. It's the quasi "natural" origin and anchor of any basic interactions with the viewport. (Somewhat ironically, while the resize box has mostly vanished from application UIs, it is still rendered by web browsers in certain circumstances. E.g., with textarea elements with scrollbars and resize enabled. With most UIs, there will be no related scroll buttons anymore, though.)
IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize, Close, and maybe one or two others. If you chose Move or Resize, the mouse would change cursors and just moving the mouse would change the window, then you'd click to get out of it.
I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it?
You'd click the application icon in the title bar, then in WinXP you could reach it by right-clicking anywhere in the title bar.
And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu, and the down arrow on the right was minimize): https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm
In modern Windows 10, you still get that in well-designed applications. In poorly-designed applications (hate to throw shade at Firefox, but it is one), you may be able to still get that menu by hitting ALT+SPACE. It just pops out of nowhere because there's nowhere to click to get to it.
ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.
> ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.
Happens quite often with dialog boxes that pop up to inform you of some error. Particulalrly if you're working on multiple screens and have moved the application off your main one. (Which is what at least I tend to do when working on a laptop attached to one or more external screen/s.)
You brought back a muscle memory I forgot I had: ALT+Space would activate the Control Menu [1] and then pressed down twice and enter to resize the window using the keyboard arrow keys.
> IIRC in that era, the leftmost part of the title bar could be clicked to get a menu of options that contained Minimize, Maximize, Move, Resize ... I'm pretty sure this had a button there in like Windows 3.11 or 98, that I think was later hidden so you'd just click the title bar to get it?
Still there, even in Windows10. (And AFAICR even W11; only used that a couple months last year.) It's called the System Menu, IIRC. If you see nothing to click, try pressing [Alt]-[Space] -- even MS Office apps, which have gotten rid of the icon, still pop up the menu.
> And in the Windows 3 era, it was an actual button (IIRC the minus on the left wasn't minimize, it was this menu,
I also called it "the big fat hyphen" when I first started using Windows 3, but AIUI now, that was actually supposed to be a picture of the space bar. As in, you know, [Alt]-[Space].
> I also called it "the big fat hyphen" when I first started using Windows 3, but AIUI now, that was actually supposed to be a picture of the space bar. As in, you know, [Alt]-[Space].
A pic of the old Windows 3.x Program Manager with its Program Groups within the Multiple Document Interface, linked somewhere in this thread, reminded me: Sub-windows within an MDI had a shorter bar for an icon, and IIRC you got the system menu (document menu?) for the focused one by pressing [Alt]-[hyphen] (or [Alt]-[minus]).
I have that quite often as I RDP in from various desktop sizes. You can bring up the Move command with Alt+SPACE then "M" and then use cur cursor keys to move the whole pane. That allows you to bring one of the corners into view so you can then drag it.
That does make it easier to resize a window from the bottom left corner, which is indeed where you want to resize the window from in the majority of cases.
However, if you want to resize the window from the top or from the left, that does not help you much.
While this is true, it also turns a task that takes only one action (resize the window up or to the left from an edge or corner) into one that requires three or four (move window, resize window from bottom right corner, readjust window position).
I guess, it's a question of perspective. For me, maybe due to habit, these are two distinct actions: moving the origin and resizing the viewport. And I'm actually not comfortable with having to combine them in a single interaction. More often, I do not want to combine both, especially on a larger screen. Moving the viewport or its origin is a matter of the desktop metaphor, as well as altering stacking in the Z-order. Resizing it is on an entirely different level and relates to another kind of mental model or mapping, relating to aspect ratio and field of view, which, if changed, requires a remapping of the situational awareness regarding everything that makes the desktop metaphor. (BTW, I also hate snapping windows.)
Personally, I think, it's this kind of constant overloading, which makes modern interfaces harder to use, or at least, causing them to put more strain on the user. (I guess, as interaction is becoming more and more the message and thus the media, like in constantly pulling the content area for more to load or swiping one thing away to see another thing, this is probably just as it ought to be. But this is essentially slot machine territory and not a working environment.)
Possible meant: "Window's resize widget is outside the viewport, so have to first move the window by dragging the titlebar until the resize widget is accessible, then resize, then drag the titlebar again to approximately restore the window position".
Still, this seems to be more logical to me than moving the window borders, since moving something in a suitable place first, in order to maybe manipulate it there, is much more like we would proceed with real-life objects.
(However, the window being rendered for an initial view in a way where not all the crucial controls are accessible is the real problem and arguable shouldn't happen at all. At this point, every action to fix this will probably be flawed. E.g., if we resize the window by dragging any of its visible borders, any action and/or cancel buttons will be still tied to the bottom part of the window, which is still off-screen, meaning, we're still stuck. On the other hand, dragging the window by its title bar, while maybe a more promising approach, may be impossible, as there is probably not sufficient screen estate left for this, to begin with.)
> That does make it easier to resize a window from the bottom left corner, which is indeed where you want to resize the window from in the majority of cases.
> *) The resize box used to sit below the very bottom of the vertical scrollbar, just below the down arrow button, as a distinct and dedicated handle for resizing windows.
At the intersection between the vertical and the horizontal scrollbar, if both were present. Or below them both, at the right end of the status bar, if the app has one (which many did, back in the day). Still there in f'rinstance Notepad++ 8.5.4, from June this year.
You have to scroll faster than the combination of bandwidth size and JS computation. Turn it into a game: visit the site progressively working backwards through your old phones until you can 'win'.
Then see if you've got time to take a screenshot.
If you actually need to click a link in the footer the only way to win is not to play.
Even better: automatic infinite scrolling. Wanna click on something in the footer, where useful contact details can typically be found? Ooops too late, it's gone!
Glad to see Postman mentioned. It has probably the most counterintuitive UI I've ever used. Sometimes I procrastinate by counting how many hamburger menus I can see simultaneously in Postman.
For years I thought it was odd that GitHub didn't let you do basic tasks in their mobile site. You couldn't browse releases. You couldn't look at the files in a PR. Then one day I accidentally hit my thumb over the middle of the screen and it scrolled. I had no idea all this info was there but required horizontal scrolling because there was no scrollbar. Moreover, the tabs all perfectly fit on the screen so there was no indication that anything existed beyond them.
It's still somewhat of a problem, but now I see GitHub doesn't perfectly align its tabs. It's obvious that some text is cut off and you need to scroll to read it all. Other UI elements are now placed behind a menu button and that's nice, too. But, it's amazing just how poor the mobile UX is everywhere overall.
This is common on sites like YouTube as well. Try to scroll through your front page without your mouse accidentally hitting random videos and causing them to auto play. It drives me insane. The best spot for the mouse that I've found is a small maybe 20px area between the menu bar and the leftmost video. Other than that, you're autoplaying something.
I agree with everything you said as well. Huge complaints from me over time. What if a Chrome window has fallen to the background behind another window and I want to grab it? Oops switched tabs because I can't get my mouse to stop in that little 10px area up top. Oof.
Oh, it can be, but it loves to just turn itself on. And I doubt anyone in charge of allocating FTE-time at YouTube gives a crap, because autoplay drives "engagement" and "views". Just actively user-hostile and safe to assume purposeful. My subscriptions don't randomly disappear, so why does this setting on my account?
The "autoplay on hover" thing can also be turned off, but get this, it's seemingly stored client-side so you have to turn it off on every computer you use, and if you reset your browser or clear the cache, it turns itself back on. I'm sure YT couldn't find the space to store a boolean.
It's a basic evolutionary principle. When there's no selective pressure, species breed for superficial beauty at the expense of other traits. So to get rid of that problem, we need to allow users to apply selective pressure. But the question is how. Individually our voices are lost, and when you need to log into app X to use the service within, you get no choice of app Y with a different UI.
Discord’s interface is extremely busy but if you ever used IRC I think it’s fairly intuitive. It’s a much more complicated app than Telegram with a lot more functionality.
As a long-time IRC user who never had problems with various IRC clients, I find Discord's interface quite counter-intuitive.
First example that comes to my head: I click on a channel that I haven't visited for some time, the view focuses on old messages (from the last time I visited it) rather than on the newest ones (which is typically what I want). And going to the newest ones isn't even trivial, I don't know a way other than scrolling down all the way, which may be quite annoying if the channel is very active and there is a lot of material to scroll past.
Unfortunately Telegram is getting more and more useless gimmick anti-features. It was better 3-5 years ago, when it didn't have so much useless junk. Still the most streamlined experience.
While voice and video calls, screen sharing is nice, they are not very polished, good quality, and UI is overloaded, but the last useful feature additions.
(useless junk: animated stickers, custom wallpapers, emoji responses (though I use them), premium emojis, collectible usernames, (i get that it needs money to run infra), channels and social-media-platform related stuff (i guess those are revenue drivers and signup-funnels as well)
Discord has one killer UX feature: voice chatrooms. It is great for gaming, and great for remote work too for small flat-hierarchy companies. (no setting up of a meeting, just dropping in to a "meeting room". I have worked on a product with similarly streamlined ad-hoc remote meeting user experience, but it is defunct now unfortunately.)
Funny that I would find the other basic comms channels integrated a good thing, if they would be properly polished, and the stuff you like is what I find junk.
I'm always baffled when people say this. I understood Discord immediately and fail to understand why people are so confused by it.
You have a list of servers you're in on the far left, you click one, and you get a list of channels. Click the channel, and if it's a voice channel, you can now talk. If it's a text channel, it shows the channel and you can chat. Voice channels have a speaker icon that make it obvious it's a voice channel.
Some servers will initially hide all the channels except one where you need to click a reaction on some bot's message to acknowledge their rules.
The only thing that Discord screws up on, IMO, is the configuration of notifications. You've got your account-wide notifications, server notifications, channel notifications, and the handling of @everyone and @here. Getting the exact behavior you want is tricky sometimes.
I don't know if I think it has more shady stuff than whatsapp or other mainstream platforms (so sad we have to write this as there is no open federated standard *in widespread use* as with email), which are backed by megacorps famous for spying on users and selling it to whoever, and being digital goons of governments when it comes to privacy and freedom of speech. All are the same from my perspective, with UX being a main differentiator.
man every time I want to respond to a message in telegram I end up in the forward mode, it's so intuitive in whatsapp but so backwards in telegram. Likewise when trying to react to a message with any emote other than the one set by default. And then I couldn't even find the setting to change the default emote reaction. So I guess I disagree with that assessment. I do agree about discord tho.
I blame designers/devs cargo-culting on fancy new stuff (webdevs on new css features, 2000s custom bitmapped UIs), and especially widescreen monitors on desktop, and pushing too much complexity to too small screen real estate on mobile as drivers of these processes.
Actually I found Windows Phone Metro UI as very well designed and clean UX for the small/touch-only screens, always showing a single view, but they backed out of that and made the current monstrous hybrids, with some worst of both words. (I was never really fond of the skeuomorph stuff on computers, and mobile UIs with lots of hidden interactions.)
I responded to something UI-related recently and closed with "if the cloud made shoes there'd be different ones for grass and concrete, but they'd all be the same size so you'd have to stuff them with prosthetics if your feet were too small or cut off toes if they were to large" and some kind stranger gifted me with a word:
seems like what all these issues have in common is when apps just go "fuck your configs, we want our app to look like/do this instead"
that last paragraph would really solve things, but also not being able to have that level of control does sorta suck for when you might really need it (and not just want to piss of the user lol)
I'm sure it's negligible these days, but there's also the concern of an increased graphics load since you'll have to do an extra pass for the transparency. But I don't want to dive too far into the mindset of "everything must be optimized to the max".
Computers are very fast. GPUs are way faster than you think. Of course, it doesn't feel like that way since all the abstractions and layers kill performance by a thousand cuts.
Remember, "Aero" was a thing almost 20 years ago and that was a graphically intensive window renderer at that time. Nowadays we could have 50x better effects without a problem but UI designers are not willing to.
Oh for sure, I'm with you. Old graphics work has this mindset of avoiding transparency passes stuck in my head. Certainly a small part of the bigger problem.
My 0.3GHz iMac in 1996 could draw and resize window drop shadows at 60fps while simultaneously encoding an MP3 without a hitch. It’s seriously inexpensive computationally.
Sorry, it was 1998. I’m pretty sure Mac OS 8 had drop shadows but even if it didn’t, I took that machine all the way to 10.4 and every version of OS X had drop shadows.
Classic Mac OS drop shadows were opaque, hence a lot cheaper.
I don't think OS X is a good example of your point because resizing windows was incredibly sluggish for a long time. I always figured it was somehow due to the combination of live resizing plus ubiquitous compositing, but I never understood why it was so slow.
Resizing is slow because it is a back-and-force between the compositor (insanely fast, no bottleneck here) and a given user application, which receives a resize event multiple times a second, has to relayout its UI (CPU-bound - OS X might have had a phase when it had to run a constraint solver), and then rerender every widget in the new size. Shadows don’t matter here at all.
There were live resizing hacks on classic MacOS that often worked pretty well, depending on the app. So it seemed pretty shocking to me how huge the regression was in the early days of OS X.
I don’t think the graphics hardware was always “insanely fast” back in those days, but even so, there must have been some terrible bottlenecks in the software.
As a user there was no way around it, and if I recall right, even as a developer it was hard to get decent resizing performance out of the system widgets.
One of the very few times I can recall where Apple has shipped something with such poor performance. Maybe most people didn’t notice or didn’t care because they just don’t resize windows very often?
I used to have that problem when using xterm: white text on black background.
I worked around it by writing a script that gave each new xterm instance a different dark background colour. Each window by its own felt like it was still black but when you put two next to each other you'd notice the difference in hue.
Then I switched to mate-terminal which put a nice big scrollbar in the right-side border of each window, so I didn't need that script any more.
I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)
Things being "a waste of screen real estate" was a bigger issue when we only had 1024x768.
Now we have extremely high resolution monitors, and we use that to get really smooth angled lines and anti-aliasing, scaling up the visuals and decreasing the logical DPI, but the lack of a hard edge to grab doesn't get wider when the visuals are scaled up: it's still a single pixel wide.
The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.
We still need the same "real" size of items in the real world. And there is a trend to occupy the space with useless staff: ribbon, big G logo, status messages not about what you do but about bugs and internal program stucture.
> The 4x3 aspect monitors were bigger. The 16x9 added only horizontal space.
Unless you had a large monitor back then and a small monitor now, this is incredibly incorrect.
Back in the 1024x768 days, most people probably had a 15" monitor. You might have had 17" if you were lucky. Even at 17", that monitor is only 13.6 x 10.2"
Now, People on a 16:9 are likely running a minimum 22". At 16:9, that's 19.2 x 10.8".
...shit you might be right. But really only if you had a large 4:3 monitor and now have a small 16:9 monitor. 4:3 15" is 12 x 9", and 16:9 24" is 20.9 x 11.8. 27" is 23.5 x 13.2.
Laptop screens are of course a different beast. Still though, with resolutions being higher, certainly they could have used a pixel or two to create an actual window edge.
It's pretty much as big an issue now, because my field of view has not gotten any bigger.
And I think you missed the essential part of my comment: The reason it's a waste of screen real estate for me is that there is no need for any edge to grab when I can grab the window anywhere by combining with a keypress.
I have more real estate to "grab" than you can ever get with borders that way, without dedicating any space to it at all.
Modern design looooves wasting screen real estate on white space. Partially to look "clean" and partially as a result of avoiding any hint of skeuomorphism. Have to separate different UI elements somehow.
Trying to claw some of it back from window borders seems like it's attacking the wrong problem.
I hardly have any UI elements to begin with, it's almost all text. But that's also largely besides the point, which was more that window borders only matters beyond visual separation in the first place because of a UI paradigm that wants you to hunt for a specific place on the edge of the window in order to move or resize it, but it doesn't need to be like that at all.
The point is not to deny your preferences, but rather that they shouldn't be forced upon everyone else, especially when they break decades of proven usability design and practice.
My point is that the "proven" usability design and practice isn't all that proven.
There is a whole lot of unexplored or underexplored design space, and when people are complaining about having space to grab a window border away from them due to a tension between competing needs it's worth considering that there are alternatives where that tension just goes away:
You only need wider window borders because you've already decided that you need to grab the border, rather than decided you just want an efficient way of moving or resizing the window. Maybe that genuinely is the only option that works for you, but most people haven't tried alternatives.
I'll note that lots of user interfaces has this kind of modal mechanism to indicate which class of action you want to take on an object so you don't need to target some tiny visual area, which is always going to be too small for some people nearly no matter how big you make it. We're used to doing that. Most people just don't do it with windows.
Even if we were going to dumb computers down to that level - and really there are tons of things in any modern UI that is entirely undiscoverable - that is something trivially solvable by popping up a tooltip explaining the options the first few times a user grabs the border.
No, based on their keybindings it sounds like they use dwm, a window manager which you have to compile yourself, configure yourself in a .c source file, and comes without window decorations by default, I believe. It's neat but made for 0.1% of computer users at most.
Although I want to add the "Windows Key + Left/Right Mouse Button" bindings are incredibly convenient and should be supported by every OS by default imho. The area you have to hit with the mouse cursor to resize a window turns from "a few pixels in the window corner" to "the entire damn window no matter if there's a button or not".
I use bspwm, which is still not easy for beginners though not as extreme as dwm, but it's also kinda besides the point which is that a lot of the complaints about borders really are complaints about the difficulty of moving and resizing windows or otherwise manipulating rhem, and once you look at it from that point of view there are alternative solutions, one of which is this one.
Pretty sure you can configure any WM to use those key combinations. I used them in i3 and currently use them in bspwm. Not sure why you jumped to dwm immediately.
I'm sure you can also use them in a fully fledged DE, and someone mentioned using alt + click on windows to drag.
> Applications like Postman, Teams (and pretty much all of MSFT's applications these days), Chrome, and Insomnia should be case studies on how to not design user interfaces. They are about as bad as desktop software gets.
Sadly Tunderbird devs drank their coolaid, as evident in the latest release.
The border between UI churn and “I am old and dislike any changes” is very blurry. I have only tried it for a short time and I think they did a good job.
The same for Jetbrains’ new UI. If you put every UI change in the same bucket, how can the situation improve?
The UI is not terrible, but it feels very unpolished. The font line spacing seems off and too narrow, the toolbar and other UI components drift and shift when you switch tabs, the main window menu is in the wrong location, etc.
Edit: Somehow this URL leads to some spot on the Web page of the URL but does not always lead to the actual post. To find the post on that Web page, the post starts with
You have to open their disquss profile, ctrl+f search for "to me, a" then click on the "7 comments" part of "Discussion on Littlefield Advisors 7 comments" then ctrl+f search for "to me, a" again and there you click on the ".. days ago" link under the username.
Now everyone can bookmark it, or print it and glue it to the wall.
edit:
You should really be using firefox, click "view" > "page style" > "no style" to read that page. The anchor doesn't work anymore if you disable the style. They could have just <a name="comment-6294665157"></a> ?
The only solution I've found for addressing this in any meaningful way is AltSnap[0], which lets me avoid needing to find window borders for any resizing or moving operations.
I don’t understand why a power user wouldn’t use a tool like this. IIRC I used AutoHotKey for this when I was on windows. Most Linux window managers have this built-in.
I mostly stopped grabbing window borders and title bars about 15 years ago.
On Linux (e.g. KDE), you can simply Ctrl + mouse drag the window, and then click anywhere you want. This makes it even much simpler than the need of clicking on the border, even with larger borders. You actually don't need any window border at all then, or it can be full of other utilities.
There is also some software for Windows to do the same.
> You actually don't need any window border at all then
Even if that was a great solution for everybody, you still need a window border. Or at least I do. I need that visual separation from all of the other windows on my desktop, and I need it to be thicker than one or two damned pixels.
"Pretty" is subjective. I think a lot of it just looks like an experiment in minimalism, by people who forgot that there are colors besides jewel tones.
It almost seems like the people who make this stuff don't actually care about usability. They probably have top notch motor skills and can click tiny stuff instantly, or they're not actually using the GUI much, they do everything in CLI and have no idea what a GUI is even for.
We need better input tools to deal with this. AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse, combined with algorithms that can cancel out stiction-related jumps. Maybe even eye tracking that knows what you want to click and pulls the mouse towards it. A zoomed view for when you're trying to highlight some text that auto pops up on click and drag.
> AI smart mouse assist that makes the stuff you want "grab" the mouse
I recommend trying out an iPad with a mouse — there the cursor sort of locks into the closest clickable element, and has to have a sort of “escape velocity” before it will leave the given button, only living as a free-form cursor in-between.
Apple has here a unique way ahead - due to those UIs being designed for touch-first, they have surplus information compared to desktop-only software (e.g. certain apps understand touchpad gestures as well, simply from the appropriate swipe gesture on mobile).
Some of those things you mention are configurable at the windowing system level depending on your system. Using SwayWM with xdg-desktop-portal gives control of some of the things you mention, and with keystrokes and tiling so that there is never a need to grab windows by the edge, or almost ever use the mouse for that matter.
> it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window.
That might be the proper nudge to get rid of yet another old&persistent UI mistake - why do you need to hunt for a tiny border when you could, e.g., have some tap/hold key(combo) and have the resize border become as wide as ~1/3 of the window width?
(same thing with the title bar, a wide and tall box in the center should be more than enough)
> They threw out several decades of usability pioneered by real HID experts
Yeah, no, those experts were just as smart as the current "UI/UX morons", with tiny borders and tiny buttons highlighted in the post being the testament of their expertise
that really bugs me any time i have to use a Windows computer. on linux (on pop os or zorin os at least) you just hold down the super/windows key and then left click and drag anywhere on the window to move it.
pop os also puts a thick border around that active window which makes it much easier to see where you are
There is a Powertoy to introduce this behaviour in MS Windows, I think it is Fancy Zones. OTOH, there is always Open Source Software to the rescue, in this case AltDrag and/or AltSnap.
Not that you're wrong, but IMO the moving and resizing complaints are resolved by the Ubuntu behavior of (IIRC) alt-leftclick-drag and alt-middleclick-drag. It completely eliminates the need to find any special target within the window: just click anywhere inside it.
That's just the top of another iceberg: features are increasingly harder to discover.
I use i3wm, which is a tiling WM. There's no window borders, so this resizing feature (W-leftclick and W-rightclick) has been there for many years, alongside a keyboard-only way to move or resize. That's hard to find unless you read the documentation, but that's alright, because the target user is supposed to be a power user.
But how are casual users of Windows or Gnome supposed to resize a no-tile window? Or to find a feature with no visual clue? I've had this problem myself on web sites where I can't guess where the links/buttons are, or with phone apps where I have to try several gestures until one of them does what I wanted.
This X11 (probably also in Wayland) feature Meta+mousebutton for resize, move, etc. has been there for the last 30 years or something. Yet it is not widely known, so let's be honest, it IS hard to discover. It can't be a justificiation for destroying the UI, esp. window borders.
Contrary opinion apparently, but I almost NEVER nned to resize windows OR use the title bar. I'm glad I have the extra real estate to do things that I do most frequently.
If I need to switch window, I am on a mac so I can easily just use the content of the window to choose my program. Much faster than reading for me.
The problem is also waste of real estate, empty space for aestetics. Reading a conversation in teams etc. is outright painful. My suspicion is that it's some company internal engagement metric gambling ala every click on the scrollbar is a "use", much "use",less time spend in other apps equals promotion.
I don't know what windows has, but in gnome, you can grab anything in the title bar to drag the windrow. You don't have to search for some empty pixel there. The edges of the window also easily work for resizing as well
I honestly don’t relate to anything you say. It’s like for every UI evolution you find everything that could theoretically go wrong, and say that it’s definitely a problem.
Like:
> Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window
What? When has that ever happened to anyone?
I use Postman and Chrome daily and I have no idea what you think is so unusable about them?
Ok, but how is that an actual problem? You can use visual context to differentiate both windows, you’re not a visual AI. Also when does that happen that you have 2 terminals that overlap? I’d rather have my UIs be optimized for the 99% of usage, I don’t care if they lack affordances for cases that never happen in practice
Resizable windows are an outdated concept, full-screen applications with tiling capability (think emacs) are much better. Add multiple workspaces just as they are today and it is perfect.
Unfortunately Windows and MacOS don't really support this kind of environment very well. Sure you can tile windows, but they are still windows. When you open an application it is not immediately tiled or opened in another workspace etc.
Everybody says "floating windows are dead", but I fail to get sold on the tiling concept. For people working on 3 windows, that may be acceptable, but if one's juggling 10 windows on a couple of desktops, things get hairy fast.
Window resizing also helps a lot of things in terminal. Sometimes programs write log lines so long, I have to resize the terminal wider than the screen itself to make sure that every log is written in single line to be able debug things with some efficiency.
Also, not everyone uses GNOME. KDE has very nice features for floating windows like "dim inactive" which makes working with many windows a breeze, while effectively cutting eye strain, because your average screen brightness is lower, without turning down your lighting. Also, enabling window shadowing convincingly raises active windows over others, so brain's depth perception can isolate said window pretty easily.
Both ways (floating and tiling) have advantages over each other in some use cases. I use an hybrid approach (manual tiling of floating windows with snapping), but the scenarios I prefer tiling is really rare, I may say.
I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing
I myself mostly use MacOS without tilling, I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces. I prefer to have a single big (32'' at the moment) monitor and just switch workspaces instead
But if MacOS had better tilling support I would probably use it more.
> I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen with tiling been an advanced user kind of thing.
If using a 13" MacBook, yes. If using a 16" MacBook, maybe, but if using a 27" Linux desktop, the answer is definitely no for me, unless I'm running a multi-pane IDE or other specialist software.
MacOS is very optimized for that kind of workflow (I'm writing this comment on a 13" MacBook), but as the screen goes larger, the wasted space becomes too much. I even sometimes divide a workspace to two applications on this machine, to see more on a single screen.
For manual tiling, I sometimes enable Magnet and snap windows to corners, esp. if I'm away from my Linux desktop and need to do some system administration across a couple of machines.
> I am thinking that most of the time you want your applications full screen
I have a large screen. It's very rare that I want any application to be full screen. I want to use some of that screen to see other things at the same time.
> I just keep all my applications full screen and use multiple workspaces
I also like this setup, but do you have a workaround for the godawful animation that MacOS uses when switching apps? I can disable the panning effect, but not the fading one.
wait how do you disable the panning effect? I hate that. I just want the workspace to switch I don't need the stupid visuals that just slow everything down.
I was a total convert to the Pixel 7 Pro until two weeks ago (check my comment history). Now my phone goes black when the slightest amount of pressure is applied to the center of the screen. Spent over an hour in support hell (and 6-8 hours of backups/migrating to a spare phone/etc) to be told to go to an Asurion center to get my phone fixed.
Had a lot of hope and goodwill lost on this phone. I feel like I paid a premium price (over $1100) only to get shoddy service and a shoddy product that will fail just outside the warranty period. As much as I dislike the iPhone, at least I can walk into an Apple store and get support right away, and not the Google runaround.
I've had part of the touchscreen die on my Pixel 3a. A 1cm wide, vertical strip down the phone just wasn't recognizing any touches anymore. I contacted support, showed them the problem, and they had me reset and send it in. Got a replacement phone without a problem.
Maybe EU support / warranty is better than in the US?
> at least I can walk into an Apple store and get support right away
I understand the value of being able to speak to someone but Apple support has again and again shown that they overcharge, tell customers x needs to be changed when it doesn't have to etc.
Sure, you maybe can get help but the help will charge you close to a new device while they do everything in their power to reduce your ability to turn the device in to a third party repair shop.
The obvious choice here is to give third party repair shops more power so everyone, everywhere, can get help getting their phones/devices fixed no matter what brand it is.
