Mozilla have lost their mind - Part 2
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Yes, like I said it's not perfect. Still better than GTK, though. You can force it to use native widgets, but for complex apps that's a perfomance bottle neck.
IE and managed apps don't use native widgets either afaik, but still look correct.
That's not the same as actively fucking with the window manager to draw stupid shit like the "Firefox button" up there.
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@topspin said:
IE and managed apps don't use native widgets either afaik, but still look correct.
Managed apps don't look correct - there's something off with them, and when you use a custom theme (like I do), they have very visible borders around buttons.
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@blakeyrat said:
That is interesting. You should put that in their bug tracker. Then you can watch it be utterly ignored for months on end.
heh,,, looks like somebody else noticed as well:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=5cec24251ce3d200&hl=en
@blakeyrat said:
I don't know what that is. Where did you choose "use system default?" In Chrome or Windows somewhere? What is "emerald?" (It's not one of the colors Windows 7 Aero ships with.) When you say "a Windows 7 glass theme" do you mean Aero? Or some other theme actually named "glass"? (If so, it's not on my Windows 7 Ultimate install-- but I seem to recall Vista had a "glass".)
@BC_ Programmer said:
on my Linux Mint 10 install...
That was regarding having Chrome running on Linux; the second image is from Linux. (Emerald is a theme manager, Windows 7 theme was what I had enabled. (it breaks with a lot of them, though, not just that one).
@blakeyrat said:
I think you got your description reversed. The application on the bottom has caption buttons, but also isn't Chrome (since the spacing between the caption buttons and the edge of the window is correct.) I wager you're trying to demonstrate that under a specific theme, the caption buttons disappear from Chrome? But I'm really confused as shit right now. (I've also never heard those called "caption buttons" before, but Google seems to back you up on that.)
Well I was describing their position in the image, not their zorder or back-front arrangement... sorry about that. in that manner it would be gedit that is behind the chrome window.
@blakeyrat said:
Well, anyway. If you want a browser that doesn't draw its own widgets, you can use Firefo-- oh wait. Ok, you can use Safar-- goddamned. How about Opera... them too? Shit. Guess it's IE or bust.
It's really only apps that mess around with what I feel should be parts that should be consistent with other applications. Firefox (from what I can tell, I might have changed some options to be fair) seems to allow the window manager to manage the drawing for stuff like the caption buttons and all that.
I'm not saying that they should all use the same look for toolbars and stuff; (although I guess that wouldn't hurt, it would make things awful bland)., I guess what is most important is just plain old consistency, I mean firefox, and many other applications draw their own toolbars manually (and really- that's no surprise, the built in common control for toolbars blows) but they generally act the same as each other- drop down buttons, icons, fairly similar sizes, etc.across applications, and even operating systems, Menu's almost always act the same, etc. It's those "errant" behaviours I find annoying,like ignoring themes and user preferences, and not looking like an application that is designed for that OS (in the case of everything but Vista really, (since it always uses that vista-ey style)
@blakeyrat said:
Oh, and BTW: nitpicky is good when it comes to UIs. Hell, I didn't notice that caption button thing in Chrome, which makes me upset and ashamed now, especially since they've pushed it so far right it actually changes the shape of the window itself.
I'm surprised you didn't notice it as well, form what I've read you have an eye for that type of thing. I don't mean that in a bad way, of course.
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@nexekho said:
Yeah, that's exactly it, thanks. Not sure how you grabbed a screenshot of it because I can't.
VS2010 has a crappy custom-drawn UI. The problems with refreshing are VS's, not Windows'.
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@topspin said:
Yes, like I said it's not perfect. Still better than GTK, though.
That's about the lowest bar you can hurdle and still consider a "bar".
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@BC_Programmer said:
That was regarding having Chrome running on Linux; the second image is from Linux. (Emerald is a theme manager, Windows 7 theme was what I had enabled. (it breaks with a lot of them, though, not just that one).
I know nothing about Linux GUIs, except every time I've tried one it's a flickery, inconsistent, buggy mess of crap.
If you can get Chrome to fail to draw window widgets on Windows, I'd be impressed.
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If any program should be written properly, it is Windows Explorer.
Now remember, nVidia seem to be covering this up in their screenshot function to ensure everything looks pristene. I don't have any video capture software to pick this up, so here's a very, very high speed photo of a moving screen border even with no other programs running. Please note that although there is the ghost of a previous frame, the window border has been redrawn with the client area lagging a full frame or two behind. I apologise for the darkness, I have brightness boosted it but my camera is fairly low end. Test system is an Athlon II X4 840 @3.2gHz + 2x2Gb DDR3 + nVidia 450GTS 1024Mb. It's more obvious on my less powerful laptop but the screen on that thing is so terrible it's lost in about 4-5 frames of blur.
[url]http://i53.tinypic.com/2nq5gfl.jpg[/url]
I think it's interesting that the top bar is pretty badly implemented, what with it often mismatching state with the rest (I've seen one be active and the other not) and it's also lagging behind the rest of the frame.
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The image viewer under 7 does this pretty strongly too. Another weird thing you can try at home (or work :p) is that if you grab the right border and scrub from halfway up the window off the bottom 2-3 times your mouse will revert to the standard pointer even though you're still moving the window border.
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@blakeyrat said:
I know nothing about Linux GUIs, except every time I've tried one it's a flickery, inconsistent, buggy mess of crap.
It has a lot of problems with all three of those issues. I have been impressed with how little of all three Emerald has shown. I'd blame Emerald myself but Chrome is the only application with that mysterious invisible caption button issue.
If you can get Chrome to fail to draw window widgets on Windows, I'd be impressed.
I'm sure there is a way... but it probably needs windowblinds or something. one of those silly skinning applications.
Also I have no idea what everybody else is on about regarding issues on windows with repainting. Sounds like shitty drivers or something to me.
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Well, it happens on a reasonably powerful machine with a nVidia 450GTS, a less powerful machine with an ATi Mobility Radeon 4200HD and an abysmally underpowered machine with an Intel graphics system (not sure what, doesn't really matter they're just so... BAD) but if your screen is a bit pants and has a long update time you probably won't notice it. It's the graphics card updating the frame faster than the program can redraw its client area and upload it. Something that would be caught on MS's end, not the driver's. It's not a driver or graphics card issue.
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@BC_Programmer said:
@blakeyrat said:
I know nothing about Linux GUIs, except every time I've tried one it's a flickery, inconsistent, buggy mess of crap.
It has a lot of problems with all three of those issues. I have been impressed with how little of all three Emerald has shown. I'd blame Emerald myself but Chrome is the only application with that mysterious invisible caption button issue.
What the heck are you guys running? I haven't had these sort of issues in years, except for the Intel SNAFU a year or two ago (which really just made things slow for me, not really flickery, inconsistent or buggy). I've mostly used Debian / Kubuntu / Ubuntu / RHEL, locally, under vmware and remotely (using NX Machine). I'm sure there's hardware out there that fails to function acceptably, but these days that seems like more of a quality control issue than a general lack of drivers or support.
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Want a list?
On the ATi laptop:
Changing screen resolution requires a logout and login.
Multimonitoring causes a misaligned primary monitor with four rows of noise.
No desktop VSYNC (only in render windows) without installing a VERY specific version.
Segfault in the OpenGL subsystem when retrieving extensions unless I punch some very cryptic stuff into the Terminal and reboot.
Far, far, far, FAR slower than in Windows. Yes, I consider this a bug. It's not 10 or 15%, it's 2-3x slower.
Most programs redraw very slowly, including web browsers which have a visible redraw trace running from top to bottom. Thus, video is totally unwatchable unless fullscreen.
Various login/out bugs (anything I type before the screen comes on out of standby bypasses the login and goes straight into the program I had open)
Closing the lid with the start menu open prevents standby.
Doing it again makes it sleep without logging out which allows me to return without entering my password.
Multimonitoring is implemented horridly as the two screens being windows into a single large rectangular desktop so windows can be lost off the parts you can't see and your icons (if the leftmost screen isn't at the top) can be out of reach.
And I've only had this install for three days!
On the flipside, those slightly absurd Compiz animations are butter smooth.
Sorry for adding more later, I forgot some :p
When I tried it on my 9500GT desktop a few years back I couldn't set the HDMI out resolution to anything other than standard TV resolutions, unlike the Windows drivers (using the official closed source nVidia both ways) which let me set the true native resolution of 1680x1050.
Also, the config utility would open and pretend to work without me explicitly sudo'ing it, but then not actually do anything and not save settings on close. Again, with no warning or error message and the standard shortcut for it in the settings menu would open it in a non-admin state.
I don't think the problem is that they couldn't fix these problems. I just don't think anyone really gives a damn.
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@nexekho said:
Want a list?
Changing screen resolution requires a logout and login.
Multimonitoring causes a misaligned primary monitor with four rows of noise.
No desktop VSYNC (only in render windows) without installing a VERY specific version.
Segfault in the OpenGL subsystem when retrieving extensions unless I punch some very cryptic stuff into the Terminal and reboot.
Far, far, far, FAR slower than in Windows. Yes, I consider this a bug. It's not 10 or 15%, it's 2-3x slower.
Most programs redraw very slowly, including web browsers which have a visible redraw trace running from top to bottom. Thus, video is totally unwatchable unless fullscreen.
And I've only had this install for three days!
On the flipside, those slightly absurd Compiz animations are butter smooth.Uh, OK...though you didn't answer the question, "What are you running?" I can definitely change screen resolution without logging out. I normally run with two monitors, and there's no problem with any part of the screen. I don't generally run compiz or any of that, but I don't recall getting errors, either.
I haven't noticed any sort of performance problems, although my old machine had an Intel integrated graphics card, and it couldn't do some sort of acceleration if the virtual screen (i.e., combination of the two monitors) went over some limit. I couldn't have my screens set up side by side or one would be slow like you said, so I put one of them above the other, and it worked fine, though it was a little weird. That was definitely a bit WTFy. Windows didn't have the same limitation, so obviously it was doing something different there. Not sure if that all has gotten any better, since I haven't kept up with the Intel stuff. AMD and NVidia have better ways of using two monitors so that it generally just works.
Now, on XP, I had to install a driver to get my external monitor (connected to a laptop) to work...connectied via the VGA port, no less. That was truly a WTF.
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I added more. :p
Anyway, I'm running the latest 32-bit x86 Ubuntu.
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@boomzilla said:
@BC_Programmer said:
@blakeyrat said:
I know nothing about Linux GUIs, except every time I've tried one it's a flickery, inconsistent, buggy mess of crap.
It has a lot of problems with all three of those issues. I have been impressed with how little of all three Emerald has shown. I'd blame Emerald myself but Chrome is the only application with that mysterious invisible caption button issue.
What the heck are you guys running? I haven't had these sort of issues in years, except for the Intel SNAFU a year or two ago (which really just made things slow for me, not really flickery, inconsistent or buggy). I've mostly used Debian / Kubuntu / Ubuntu / RHEL, locally, under vmware and remotely (using NX Machine). I'm sure there's hardware out there that fails to function acceptably, but these days that seems like more of a quality control issue than a general lack of drivers or support.I don't try Linuxes anymore. I'm sick of trying it, find it to be shit, then a couple years later someone assures me "oh it's much much better now", then trying it again, then finding it to be shit again. I've broken the cycle of crap. So whenever I talk about Linux, I'm talking about it circa 2008, I believe.
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@blakeyrat said:
I don't try Linuxes anymore. I'm sick of trying it, find it to be shit, then a couple years later someone assures me "oh it's much much better now", then trying it again, then finding it to be shit again. I've broken the cycle of crap. So whenever I talk about Linux, I'm talking about it circa 2008, I believe.
I totally understand. It's not too dissimilar to my experiences with windows.
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I perhaps should have been more clear how they applied. I haven't seen any flickering to be honest, but I never noticed that "issue" with windows where the frame hasn't "moved" properly. inconsistent applies more to some different applications, which all seem to use different "conventions".. although come to think of it this is hardly unique to Linux, but the "better" implementations of certain application types sometimes feel that way. "Buggy mess of crap" applies to the same things.. but again, it's not unique to Linux either since you can download buggy crap for Windows.
I'd probably be one of those people to say "oh blakeyrat, it's so much better" but I think there might be some selective skepticism when he tries it. Something that might just get a resounding meh on windows (like the title bar bug in Win7 and chrome) would inspire a flaming 2 page rant about usability if he found it on LInux. There is no "perfect" system or OS, but I really don't see Linux as being any farther from such a fictional goal then Windows or OSX; although there certainly is a mindset that users of Linux like to mess with configuration files with inconsistent formats between applications a lot.
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@BC_Programmer said:
I'd probably be one of those people to say "oh blakeyrat, it's so much better"
I've been hearing that song and dance since 1997, and I've tried Linux, I dunno, 4-5 times since then. And you know what? It probably is better. The problem is, Windows and OS X get better faster.
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@fire2k said:
Also their new release model is pretty much stolen from chrome, out of the fear of getting their asses handet to them.
For me as user as far as I am concerned, Chrome didn't make a single release in years. It never asked me to update it (it does that silently), never boasted that it's updated and looks still the same. It's release numbers should really be prefixed with '0.' for purpose of comparison with releases of anything else.
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We've gone from relevant discussion of Mozilla's abysmal roadmap to widget nitpicking.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
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@blakeyrat said:
The problem is, Windows and OS X get better faster.
I don't have much experience with OSX, but my general impression has been negative. But saying that Windows gets better faster...maybe that's true if you measure by release. XP..Vista...7. But given the time between XP and Vista that seems like a pretty big claim. Of course, if you stay with something like Debian stable, you're trading off the stability for frequent updates. Then there are distros like Arch which are rolling distros, so you're always at the bleeding edge.
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Frequent updates like universal search? Oh, wait. There is search but it's slow as molasses and it's a filesystem only search meaning it misses everything in that nice Ubuntu menu. Meaning I then have to go trawling trough it. OS X or W7? Open search (cmd+space or winkey) and type in maybe three letters of what you're after and BAM! Mou- mouse settings! Resol-resolution settings! Bl-Blender!
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@nexekho said:
Frequent updates like universal search? Oh, wait. There is search but it's slow as molasses and it's a filesystem only search meaning it misses everything in that nice Ubuntu menu. Meaning I then have to go trawling trough it. OS X or W7? Open search (cmd+space or winkey) and type in maybe three letters of what you're after and BAM! Mou- mouse settings! Resol-resolution settings! Bl-Blender!
Vista's winkey-search was a good start, though it still kinda sucked at finding what I want, but W7's is great.On the Linux front, I currently have Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, and Ctrl+Win calls a search menu for the application on the menu, but not recent files which is a shame.
I've recently upgraded my girlfriend's Ubuntu install and its search menu rivaled Win7's. But the Unity UI... it looked great but its usability.. let's just say it has a lot of space for improvement (or in other words, my vacuum cleaner doesn't suck as much and thank $dude_upstairs for the Gnome "fallback").
BTW, what the hell Windows? I'm glad you finally let me reorder my taskbar buttons somewhat, but stop grouping them by application, already! Also, I want my virtual desktops.
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@nexekho said:
Frequent updates like universal search? Oh, wait. There is search but it's slow as molasses and it's a filesystem only search meaning it misses everything in that nice Ubuntu menu. Meaning I then have to go trawling trough it. OS X or W7? Open search (cmd+space or winkey) and type in maybe three letters of what you're after and BAM! Mou- mouse settings! Resol-resolution settings! Bl-Blender!
I couldn't say. I've never used anything called "universal search." Whenever I want to run some app, I use Alt+F2, and start typing its name. After a couple of letters matches start showing up, though usually it's only the thing I'm after. Hit enter and it starts. Sounds very similar.
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That's not very useful if you're after settings though because that's just a very rough letter match search on the binary name, which I remember also being case sensitive.
Under W7:[img]http://i.imgur.com/BI3Ml.png[/img]
You're telling me Gnome has something a QUARTER as good as that for power users OR beginners. The Alt+F2 thing is like Run with an afterthought filename completion. This, on the other hand, is a comprehensive full-system indexed search giving me programs, files (sorted by type) and settings as well as troubleshooter wizards and help entries. OS X is similar.
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@BC_Programmer said:
I'm not saying that they should all use the same look for toolbars and stuff; (although I guess that wouldn't hurt, it would make things awful bland)
What's wrong with bland, when it comes to toolbars and stuff? The point of the software is to help me do a task, whether that's a productive task like writing UI code or a non-productive task like reading xkcd. If the toolbars (etc) are flashy and exciting, that's a distraction from the task at hand. That doesn't mean everything has to be black and white line drawings; they should be as colorful and complex as necessary to be useful, and NO MORE.
Unless the purpose of the software is entertainment, the software should not entertain.
@BC_Programmer said:
I guess what is most important is just plain old consistency
I am with you 100% on this one (more than 100%, if that were possible). We need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel, when it has been successfully rolling us along for decades. Maybe it's not hip, cool, and L33T to present a gray toolbar whose buttons are gently colored icons on a gray background, but EVERYONE RECOGNIZES IT!
Maybe you think you can invent a better way than a checkbox to present the user with a binary choice, but YOU CAN'T! (yes, designer-from-a-company-I-used-to-work-for, I'm talking to you!)
Maybe you imagine your users would prefer something other than a scrollbar to move large chunks of text up and down in a viewport, but THEY DON'T! (not you, specifically, BC_Programmer, since you're advocating for consistency, but the general "you" who are writing crap these days)
Yes, every once in a while, someone comes up with a new UI paradigm that works. But it's rare, and I'd rather see consistency than excitement.
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@nexekho said:
That's not very useful if you're after settings though because that's just a very rough letter match search on the binary name, which I remember also being case sensitive.You're telling me Gnome has something a QUARTER as good as that for power users OR beginners. The Alt+F2 thing is like Run with an afterthought filename completion.
Uh, no, I didn't say that. I've never really cared for Gnome. Actually, it's KDE. I've never used it that way before, but trying it out, it does appear to go down into the system settings at about that level of granularity. It does search recent documents. It probably hooks into whatever the native file indexing and search system is, but I've got that turned off.
Actually, one of the things I tend to miss the most when I'm using windows is that I can't easily maximize a window in only one dimension. Also, that there doesn't seem to be a way to put a taskbar on multiple monitors.
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Drag the window border up against a screen border and it maximizes that way only. I do like Compiz and its shiny effects, but just far too many bugs.
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@nexekho said:
Drag the window border up against a screen border and it maximizes that way only. I do like Compiz and its shiny effects, but just far too many bugs.
Hmm...when did that behavior start? I haven't used Vista/7 much. Either way, that's still a lot less easy than middle or right clicking on the maximize button.
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@Zecc said:
but stop grouping them by application, already!
So, instead of this...
You want this:
Or do you want to be able to move each window freely along the taskbar, like having the VLC playlist up one end and the actual player on the opposite end?
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@boomzilla said:
Hmm...when did that behavior start?
Windows 7. If you drag to the top, it fully maximises, drag it away from the top, it unmaximizes. Drag it to the left, it covers the left half of the screen, drag it to the right, same thing but on the left. You can also use WinKey+Up\Down\Left\Right respectively for the same thing.A seemingly pointless gesture that you will do once and only once on Windows 7 is to open many windows, grab one, shake it back and forth, and minimise all the others.
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i like waldorf salad type search where you just remember where you put shit.
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@Douglasac said:
Or do you want to be able to move each window freely along the taskbar, like having the VLC playlist up one end and the actual player on the opposite end?
Did you photoshop this taskbar or is that an actual feature?
My gripe, and I'm sure Zecc's, is that taskbar group collapsing forces one to click once, and hunt and select and item from the resultant random list, and then click again, which is SHIT ANNOYING compared to locating the button where you left it and clicking it once. Also, it drops the ability to quickly right-click on a taskbar button and close an app.
Your screenshot looks like a best of both worlds attempt. Usage will have to demonstrate whether it's actually useful or not.
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@Douglasac said:
@Zecc said:
The latter. I want to be able to reorder them the way *I* want. Because it is I who should decide what is a logical ordering/grouping at every given moment.but stop grouping them by application, already!
So, instead of this...
You want this:Or do you want to be able to move each window freely along the taskbar, like having the VLC playlist up one end and the actual player on the opposite end?
Unless the window manager suddenly becomes smart enough to group Explorer windows showing network shares next to remote desktops connections to the respective machines; source files open in my favorite editor next to the browser window where I've opened the web app; the PDF reader showing me documentation I need, my IDE, the Word document with documentation I'm writing (in that order).
@dhromed said:
My gripe, and I'm sure Zecc's, is that taskbar group collapsing forces one to click once, and hunt and select and item from the resultant random list, and then click again, which is SHIT ANNOYING compared to locating the button where you left it and clicking it once. Also, it drops the ability to quickly right-click on a taskbar button and close an app
I'd be okay with group collapsing if it were done in a "last recently used" fashion rather than per app. When it collapses a window I've just opened and store in a bunch of buttons with the exact same icon, it's doing me a disservice. Why is this so hard to understand?
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@dhromed said:
@Douglasac said:
Or do you want to be able to move each window freely along the taskbar, like having the VLC playlist up one end and the actual player on the opposite end?
Did you photoshop this taskbar or is that an actual feature?
Did you even look?
Because, seriously.
Edit: BTW dhromed, the grouping feature also adds the feature to kill all windows from the same app at once, which I find very handy and use all the time. You can still right-click to close a window, you just have to pop-up the taskbar button first, then right click the window you want to close. So the tradeoff is worth it for me.
Edit edit: Oh and look, Microsoft finally gave up on that retarded "Start Bar" name, and are actually calling it what it is now. Nice.
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Another thing is that middle clicking a window preview closes it. Very fluid. Also, hold start and tap a number and that taskbar button is pressed. Hold alt to right click. Hold shift to open another instance.
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@nexekho said:
Another thing is that middle clicking a window preview closes it. Very fluid. Also, hold start and tap a number and that taskbar button is pressed. Hold alt to right click. Hold shift to open another instance.
Yes, they also have little close boxes if you don't have a middle mouse button, or think middle mouse buttons are stupid.
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You'd rather zero in on a 8x8 square in the top right corner of a panel than just use another button on anywhere in a 192x192 panel? (sizes are approximate) Ok.
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@nexekho said:
You'd rather zero in on a 8x8 square in the top right corner of a panel than just use another button on anywhere in a 192x192 panel? (sizes are approximate) Ok.
Sad confession time:
I find the third mouse button impossible to hit without spazzing the wheel out. So, in general, I just ignore that it exists. My name is Blakeyrat, and I'm a third-wheel shunner! ("Hi, Blakeyrat.") Feel my pain.
Guess what? There's room in this world (and Windows) for 2-button mouses too. (Hell, there's room for 1-button mouses.) So don't judge me!
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I used to have a HP wheel mouse that had a wheel that could be pushed left/right to scroll left right, but it was far easier to do that than hit middle mouse, and after a while I just stopped using middle mouse at all, so in retrospect I understand. Most of the 3D software I use though uses chording of the mouse buttons for different camera movement modes, so I kinda had to get used to it again...
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@RobFreundlich said:
Maybe you imagine your users would prefer something other than a scrollbar to move large chunks of text up and down in a viewport, but THEY DON'T! (not you, specifically, BC_Programmer, since you're advocating for consistency, but the general "you" who are writing crap these days)
Actually, one of the things I think Windows badly needs is scrollbars with both arrows at one (or both) ends:
My personal preference is to have both arrows on the bottom and right edges of the window, so they're close to the most convenient place to resize it. Having the up arrow at the top and down arrow at the bottom is just irritating and annoying, though.
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Agreed on that. I don't tend to use the arrows at all but it makes no design sense to have the arrows either end. It looks the most "balanced" but it's a pair of tiny targets possibly a long way away from one another...
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@nexekho said:
I used to have a HP wheel mouse that had a wheel that could be pushed left/right to scroll left right, but it was far easier to do that than hit middle mouse, and after a while I just stopped using middle mouse at all, so in retrospect I understand. Most of the 3D software I use though uses chording of the mouse buttons for different camera movement modes, so I kinda had to get used to it again...
The funny thing is the RAT5 mouse I have right now middle-clicks like a champ. Instead of pushing down on the scrollwheel (extremely error-prone), you move your finger and tilt it to the left until it clicks. It's a brilliant solution to the problem, but you'll never see it on a cheap pack-in mouse, because it takes more mechanical parts.
So, really, the WTF is that I now have a mouse that I can do error-free middle-clicks on, but I never use middle-clicking because I avoided it for so many years I have no clue what it does in most cases. (Either way, my mouse at the office is still the "can't middle-click" kind.)
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@RobFreundlich said:
What's wrong with bland, when it comes to toolbars and stuff? The point of the software is to help me do a task, whether that's a productive task like writing UI code or a non-productive task like reading xkcd. If the toolbars (etc) are flashy and exciting, that's a distraction from the task at hand. That doesn't mean everything has to be black and white line drawings; they should be as colorful and complex as necessary to be useful, and NO MORE.
Unless the purpose of the software is entertainment, the software should not entertain.
Well, what I mean is, if an application is going to deviate from being consistent with everything else, it should at least be consistent with itself... if that makes sense. Like you said though, it shouldn't be about what looks pretty, but what works. Once everything works, then I think it's reasonable to "prettify" it, as long as it stays consistent in functionality. For example the standard implementation of toolbars where it's a line of icons, and it raises on mouseover, and you can press them (flat toolbars) I feel is mostly consistent with the older "blander" toolbars, and it provides a bit of feedback to the user that these buttons are selectable or not- (disabled buttons don't get the raised effect). And most "re-implementations" have kept the core concepts and are pretty much functionally identical.
The big problem with applications that do stuff like use their own special boolean widget (to use your example regarding the checkbox) is that not only is it inconsistent with rest of the system ("why do the checkboxes here have checkmarks, but these ones use X's?, "Because Pete thought it looked cool"), but usually they aren't even implemented correctly; the built-in User Interface components of all major operating systems are designed to handle stuff like OS themes, DPI resizing, RTL reading order, accessibility, and so forth; most GUI designers reimagining's of a basic concept do not, in fact, usually they don't even think about those things. Also, to the user, if it deviates harshly from what their other applications use, it will be sort of like suddenly having random foreign words thrown into your native language; even if you know that other language, it's still a "shift" of thinking to interpret it in the context of everything else. And what is really most important, is even if you magically create a better scrollbar or button that supports all these important features- the users using them will still only be familiar with the standard scrollbar controls they have been using all along. So even if your scrollbar is more intuitive or easier to work with, they are still going to blunder if they try to use it just like every other scrollbar, and they can't get too used to your "better" design because they still have every other program to work with, so you just end up causing needless inconsistency. Sometimes when I'm dealing with a program whose UI is nothing like the native OS stuff I almost feel like I'm playing minesweeper, and having to think twice about things that wouldn't get a second thought if some smartass designer didn't decide they were god's gift to the world and could single-handedly turn 30+ years of GUI design on it's head.
And this, in a nutshell, is sort of my problem with chrome; it doesn't really give much of a fuck about the users selection of theme or OS, and just arbitrarily decides to use something that sorta resembles Vista, but makes all the caption buttons the same colour for no good reason (except on windows with Aero Glass enabled or when you screw with it's settings on other Operating systems.)
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@blakeyrat said:
@RobFreundlich said:
Maybe you imagine your users would prefer something other than a scrollbar to move large chunks of text up and down in a viewport, but THEY DON'T! (not you, specifically, BC_Programmer, since you're advocating for consistency, but the general "you" who are writing crap these days)
Actually, one of the things I think Windows badly needs is scrollbars with both arrows at one (or both) ends:
My personal preference is to have both arrows on the bottom and right edges of the window, so they're close to the most convenient place to resize it. Having the up arrow at the top and down arrow at the bottom is just irritating and annoying, though.
I've used apps that had their arrows that way, and I always have trouble with them. I'll go to hit the up arrow and hit the down arrow instead, or vice versa. So for me, having them at their respective ends is easier and more usable. It also matches the way I think: if I want to move up, I'll move my mouse up and look for a control.
Having said that, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the OS to provide an option - you could select "put scrollbar arrows next to each other" and I could select "put scrollbar arrows at ends". Apps using the OS scrollbars would still be consistent, but you and I wouldn't necessarily be. And that's OK.
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[img]http://i.imgur.com/pIZpi.png[/img]
Just recalled that a lot of years back I had a go at making a prototype UI (not a window manager or anything, just a "UI engine" you'd use in a game or something) seen here. It was very broken, but I'd tried to design it to be elegant and simple... each window has four resize handles, can be moved by dragging either the toolbar or the titlebar at the bottom. The actual client area is a tree of objects, such as list views (like the import window, or all the way over on the right in the generic browser) tile views (middle of generic browser) or frame objects that could have multiple child objects like the browser itself, and of course in theory you could have multiple levels of these things stacked up... pretty naive but a fun experiment nontheless.
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@BC_Programmer said:
For example the standard implementation of toolbars where it's a line of icons, and it raises on mouseover, and you can press them (flat toolbars) I feel is mostly consistent with the older "blander" toolbars, and it provides a bit of feedback to the user that these buttons are selectable or not- (disabled buttons don't get the raised effect).
it's not as much an issue now, because these damned things are in so many apps that people have gotten used to them, but... many computers don't have the concept of "hover." Finger and pen-based computers (both of which run Windows), to make the most obvious examples. So if your UI depends on hover to be discoverable, it's not a very good design.
That said, your specific example isn't problematic because so many apps have done it for so many years that people will get it, as long as it's in the normal place for a toolbar to be. But whoever originally came up with the concept was a bad designer.
@BC_Programmer said:
The big problem with applications that do stuff like use their own special boolean widget (to use your example regarding the checkbox) is that not only is it inconsistent with rest of the system
And the rest of the world. Paper forms use square boxes for "check" and round circles for "mark only one". Computers took that iconography from paper forms in the first place.
I've been playing a game called Divinity 2, and it has an awesome example of a WTF UI in action. It took me ages to figure out how to get spells/skills/potions on the quick bar. I tried dragging the spell there-- nothing. I tried right-clicking the spell-- nothing. Turns out you have to right-click the bar, then select the spell from a little pop-up menu that appears. The UI is exactly backwards! I'm sure it made sense to the designers, but man, that was a hard game to play for the first 3 hours until I figured out what the hell was going on with the quick bar.
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@blakeyrat said:
Did you even look?
I don't have Windows 7.
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Ok, I tried it with our staging environment.
"Combine" in that dropdown means both "collapse/stack" and "connect/group", even though these are very different behaviours and deserving of a separate preference. Is it good UI copy when I have to create lots of windows just to experimentally test what an option does?
I just hope taskbarshuffle still works with 7.
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@blakeyrat said:
Paper forms use square boxes for "check" and round circles for "mark only one". Computers took that iconography from paper forms in the first place.
And there there are the "[X]" checkboxes on unix-y systems that I never understood.
I mean.
It's an "X"
X is wrong.
X is "No"
That means it's not selected, right?
A checkmark is unambiguously good, ok, right, selected, go for it.
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