UI Bites
-
@boomzilla
I thought we where all just you
-
-
But weirdly when I bring that up to other people, they either say they didn't notice, or it doesn't bother them. Even with people who can out- me on French grammar (which says a lot!). So I guess I'm weird in this way also...
No, I noticed that trend as well, and I find it annoyingly patronizing.
-
@Zerosquare It only proves you're weird like me. Which, given that we're both here, doesn't really say much.
-
@remi Ils sont fous ces
RomainsFrançais
-
-
-
@TimeBandit said in UI Bites:
@ixvedeusi said in UI Bites:
It's not your fucking account
I really want a fucking account
I am in the creation of a new account.
I fucked it up and want to try again.
-
-
@error The person who decided our salary statement file names should be
Apr-2023.pdf.
-
@Zerosquare said in UI Bites:
But weirdly when I bring that up to other people, they either say they didn't notice, or it doesn't bother them. Even with people who can out- me on French grammar (which says a lot!). So I guess I'm weird in this way also...
No, I noticed that trend as well, and I find it annoyingly patronizing.
You're too grown-up and well-spoken to be patronized.
-
-
Wouldn't work with kids these days, they would never think to tap-hold the image and then read the caption text for it on their mobiles...
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Wouldn't work with kids these days, they would never think to tap-hold the image and then read the caption text for it on their mobiles...
TIL, that's how you do it... (the only browsing I do on the phone is when I'm searching for something)
edit: The reason I never would have thought of that is because tap-hold is a right-click on a touch laptop.
-
When your left hand doesn't know what your right hand is doing:
Yes, language "checker," you are right, the punctuation is wrong. If this was a sentence, not, say, a reference field.
ETA: also, why does it complain about the lack of space in
2.bbut not the lack of space inVI.2?
-
why does it complain about the lack of space in 2.b but not the lack of space in VI.2?
Because it only complain when the dot is right after a number
-
@TimeBandit because, of course, of the well-known typography rule that says that punctuations are not followed by a space when the last character of the sentence is not a digit.
I think.Probably1? Maybe not.I don't care anyway3!It1' s Friday evening after all.
-
@remi
\.[A-Za-z]
-
@remi Well, most realistically, it probably doesn't complain when the dot is followed by a digit, because that is probably a decimal number—and omitting a leading zero, like ‘.2’, is common enough that they check just followed by a digit and not in between digits.
-
I really hate interfaces that appear to be unresponsive when, for instance, they ask you a question and then you click OK. At least acknowledge that the click happened so I don't keep clicking.
Major offenders are the Win11 smartcard PIN dialog. Or clicking on the "Quit" from right clicking on Teams from the task bar. Or, I have an upload function on our report server to replace a source file. Click OK, and it just sits there until it gets around to a successful upload, and then it wakes up to let you know that it worked (or didn't...whatever).
At least show a spinner you assholes.
-
@boomzilla you mean like the Windows 10 start menu?
How can they fuck up this badly?
-
@topspin It is still a plain old event loop, and it isn't JavaScript, so they can put a blocking operation in it. So, easily.
… of course while in JavaScript you can't block the event loop, but you can still postpone the UI update and that way make even more mess as the further clicks will also be processed.
-
while in JavaScript you can't block the event loop
Is it in a different thread then? Normally, when there's an event loop you can block it by doing active computation in the same thread.
-
@dkf You can still block it with an active computation. I just didn't think about that, because this kind of UI tends not to do computations.
-
@dkf You can still block it with an active computation. I just didn't think about that, because this kind of UI tends not to do computations.
If you're stupid, you can absolutely block the main thread by doing things like having blocking synchronous network calls. How do I know? There's one particular site that likes to crash the mobile browser because the bunches of ad banners run as blocking scripts. And they've implemented scrolling in a properly
sort of way (you can often scroll fast enough that the page turns white even when fully loaded until it catches up), so if you try to scroll before all the banners are loaded (which can take several seconds on a gigabit connection), it ANR's the browser. Enough so that even if you try to navigate away, the scripts are still running and things go <sproing>.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in UI Bites:
@dkf You can still block it with an active computation. I just didn't think about that, because this kind of UI tends not to do computations.
If you're stupid, you can absolutely block the main thread by doing things like having blocking synchronous network calls. How do I know? There's one particular site that likes to crash the mobile browser because the bunches of ad banners run as blocking scripts. And they've implemented scrolling in a properly
sort of way (you can often scroll fast enough that the page turns white even when fully loaded until it catches up), so if you try to scroll before all the banners are loaded (which can take several seconds on a gigabit connection), it ANR's the browser. Enough so that even if you try to navigate away, the scripts are still running and things go <sproing>.You can name them. coughESPN.comcough
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in UI Bites:
@dkf You can still block it with an active computation. I just didn't think about that, because this kind of UI tends not to do computations.
If you're stupid, you can absolutely block the main thread by doing things like having blocking synchronous network calls. How do I know? There's one particular site that likes to crash the mobile browser because the bunches of ad banners run as blocking scripts. And they've implemented scrolling in a properly
sort of way (you can often scroll fast enough that the page turns white even when fully loaded until it catches up), so if you try to scroll before all the banners are loaded (which can take several seconds on a gigabit connection), it ANR's the browser. Enough so that even if you try to navigate away, the scripts are still running and things go <sproing>.You can name them. coughESPN.comcough
That makes two sites then. I was thinking of reason.com's comments. Which are a cluster of
-shows for a whole lot of orthogonal reasons. Not just technical but content.
-
@boomzilla you mean like the Windows 10 start menu?
How can they fuck up this badly?Yo if the Start Button animated when clicking it until the menu appeared I would laugh so hard....
-
@boomzilla said in UI Bites:
I really hate interfaces that appear to be unresponsive when, for instance, they ask you a question and then you click OK. At least acknowledge that the click happened so I don't keep clicking.
I know one that’s just a little bit worse than that: my mobile banking app. When it starts, it asks for a five-digit PIN. Enter five digits and the keyboard fades out while it does a little animation of the dots that fill up for each digit you pressed. Then the animated dots stop moving and the keyboard comes back. A second or so later, it takes you to the actual banking screen (assuming you entered the correct code, of course).
This only started after an update a few months ago, and caught me out a few times at first because the dots no longer moving and the keyboard coming back, give the impression you didn’t enter your PIN correctly.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in UI Bites:
If you're stupid, you can absolutely block the main thread by doing things like having blocking synchronous network calls.
How do you make a synchronous network call in an environment that does not provide such option‽
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in UI Bites:
If you're stupid, you can absolutely block the main thread by doing things like having blocking synchronous network calls.
How do you make a synchronous network call in an environment that does not provide such option‽I don't know. But they manage it. Probably with scripts that busy-loop until they get the thing back.
-
@Bulb You do the network call, then loop while checking the value of a global variable that is set to true when the network call is handled
-
@TimeBandit you semi-joke but if you're doing curl_multi_exec that's basically how it works to even do that.
For some value of basically, anyway.
And of course, curl calls in PHP operate generally this way for convenience.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in UI Bites:
If you're stupid, you can absolutely block the main thread by doing things like having blocking synchronous network calls.
How do you make a synchronous network call in an environment that does not provide such option‽
XMLHttpRequest: open() method - Web APIs | MDN
The XMLHttpRequest method open() initializes a newly-created request, or re-initializes an existing one.
async(Optional)An optional Boolean parameter, defaulting to
true, indicating whether or not to perform the operation asynchronously. If this value isfalse, thesend()method does not return until the response is received. Iftrue, notification of a completed transaction is provided using event listeners. This must be true if themultipartattribute istrue, or an exception will be thrown.It also notes “many browsers” have deprecated synchronous XHR support on the main thread, but no indication of what those browsers are or whether deprecated implies it should be expected to not work.
edit: derp, it is in the compatibility table, but you have to clicky on the thingy:
The Firefox for android entry has a similar note. So “some” apparently means Firefox and, surprisingly, not Chrome leading the charge on deprecating Bad behaviour.
As for deprecated vs broken, Firefox gives a warning in the console, but still lets it go through:
“foo?” definitely took a second or two to appear.
-
Status: When your POS angular SPA decides to clear the entire page contents because it made a POST and got back and HTML (200) document that reads:
Filed under: I hate ServiceHow
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Filed under: I hate ServiceHow
You should receive your
club membership card in a few days.
-
@Zerosquare said in UI Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Filed under: I hate ServiceHow
You should receive your
club membership card in a few days.
-
-
Submitting for some reimbursement from my Health Savings Account. They have a table of claims I can pick. Most of them have $0.00 left on them, so I'm trying to sort the table. I click on the Date column and what do you know? It sorts the US formatted, mm/dd/yyyy date lexicographically.
-
@boomzilla said in UI Bites:
Submitting for some reimbursement from my Health Savings Account. They have a table of claims I can pick. Most of them have $0.00 left on them, so I'm trying to sort the table. I click on the Date column and what do you know? It sorts the US formatted, mm/dd/yyyy date lexicographically.
That's actually a good business decision. Designed to make you give up trying to cut into their profits with your frivolous "claims" but with perfectly plausible deniability.
-
@boomzilla said in UI Bites:
I really hate interfaces that appear to be unresponsive when, for instance, they ask you a question and then you click OK. At least acknowledge that the click happened so I don't keep clicking.
I know one that’s just a little bit worse than that: my mobile banking app. When it starts, it asks for a five-digit PIN. Enter five digits and the keyboard fades out while it does a little animation of the dots that fill up for each digit you pressed. Then the animated dots stop moving and the keyboard comes back. A second or so later, it takes you to the actual banking screen (assuming you entered the correct code, of course).
This only started after an update a few months ago, and caught me out a few times at first because the dots no longer moving and the keyboard coming back, give the impression you didn’t enter your PIN correctly.
ENOREPROand I'm on snailnet roaming. Must be two Dutch banks with that interface.
-
@boomzilla said in UI Bites:
It sorts the US formatted, mm/dd/yyyy date lexicographically.
But I guess still starting with "01/01/2000", not with "April/01/2000".
-
ENOREPROand I'm on snailnet roaming. Must be two Dutch banks with that interface.ING, in my case. It happens every time I want to log in.
-
ENOREPROand I'm on snailnet roaming. Must be two Dutch banks with that interface.ING, in my case. It happens every time I want to log in.
ABN. So two banks.
-
I was happy to see my son's school use something other than the previous one's "ManageBac" app for school communication because ManageBac is the worst-rated app on the Play Store I've ever seen, and for good reasons. On "Seqta" you can actually find how to do such esoteric tasks like contacting a teacher or looking up you kids' timetable, which is a science unto itself on ManageBac.
The warts only manifest themselves later, like when your kid receives a grade and their UI is simultaneously optimized for minimum readability and maximum demotivation:
-
@LaoC No Teacher Left Behind!
-
I have a problem with a transaction I made on my bank account so I logged in and wanted to send them a message. It's a bit complicated so it took me maybe 5-10 min to write the message.
Of course my session expired at some point in the middle of that.
Despite me still being active on the site, since I was typing text in the form. 
But the kicker is that it waited until I finished typing the message and clicked "send" to tell me! Well, not so much "tell me" as "unceremoniously drop me back at the login page with not so much as a tiny error message or popup."
So I logged back in, and of course there is no draft message kept, despite the bank insisting on having some sort of full-blown mail application to communicate with them (rather than using, say, regular emails) and auto-saving draft being the expected behaviour nowadays. They do have my email, they use it to send me an email every time there is a new message in my mailbox. That is, they send me an email telling me I've got an email.
Second try then. This time I'm aware of their games, so I want to save a draft of my message every now and then. Nope. Their mail app doesn't support that apparently. That is, despite having a "draft" folder.
Thankfully at least I can select + copy the text, which came handy as the session timed out again as I sent the message a second time.
This time I was ready as I had copied the text and could paste it in a second. Well, I still had to manually fill in the half dozen of fields about the transaction I was talking about, which of course means typing a lot of digits (what are the chances I made a typo in at least one of them?).
Oh, and a last one to cap it all: you know this wonderful and totally broken mail app? Well, I was on a tablet (this may be different on a computer) and the text field for the message can't be resized, nor can it even be... scrolled! So I couldn't proof-read my message. Well, I could since I had it in the clipboard and could paste it elsewhere, but still.
-
@remi When it comes to sending messages via such (cr)apps, I virtually always type them in Word or Notepad before, then paste them, and violà,
stupid bank / administration / whatever. And better yet: I still have a copy of what I've sent them.
-
Searching for job opportunities, I found a company which is incredibly interesting:
the 0 - ZERO COMPANY:
0 countries in which company is represented
0 employees
0% growth rate
0% R&D
0 Patents
0 Innovations.
I am ready to apply. But my salary requirement will likely not fit their motto: it is different from 0.
Normally, my salary requirement has 4 zeros, but when I add a little, I could ask for 5 zeros, too.
-
@BernieTheBernie said in UI Bites:
@remi When it comes to sending messages via such (cr)apps, I virtually always type them in Word or Notepad before, then paste them, and violà,
stupid bank / administration / whatever. And better yet: I still have a copy of what I've sent them.In retrospect I should have done that. But being on a tablet makes it less usual to open another app to do something (it feels more natural to open e.g. a notepad on a computer than it does to switch to a notepad app on a tablet) so I didn't think of that.
The only nice thing about this mail app is that it does have a "sent" folder that contains a copy of my message, so at least I can see what I sent.
I can also see that their wonderful mailer stripped all additional whitespaces so it made one huge block of text from what I tried to make into 2-3 more readable paragraphs.
:zwj: 
