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in reply to @AriaSalvatrice's post:
wow this really blew up
reminder this is a kai krause stan account
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I sure love too find a service that has an app on the Microsoft Store, install it, and find that somewhere between half and most of its functionality is disabled because UWP doesn't let you do that. Go download our REAL EXE which is allowed to "talk to APIs that do meaningful things". Dropbox can't do files. Bitwarden can't ASK WINDOWS HELLO TO DO A BIOMETRIC AUTH AND JUST FUCKING TELL IT - USER_PRESENT_YES_OR_NO?? The UWP API is just breathtaking in the scope and range of its uselessness.
I'm so old I remember being able to see the scrollbar! (I remember scrollbars being new!)
disabling scroll bars by default has led to me actually, for the first time since windows xp, reg editing the shit out of my windows install to get things back to usable
.00005% of us can tell exactly what typeface it is because we have the Font Curse
the self hiding scrollbar is infuriating, i want to put buttons on the right side of a scrollable table on a web.site but can't because the scrollbar doesn't have a dedicated gutter but instead phases in and out of existence and covers my buttons and ahhhhfhdjsj. it's like browser vendors actively want every ui component reimplemented poorly in js
It's bonkers to me that the solution to "how wide is the scrollbar really?" requires creating a DOM element and measuring it to tell. Like, browser vendors should really expose a CSS env() variable for that kind of stuff 😩
oh my god that's so cursed but thank you for pointing me to the solution to this problem
Haha no worries, we had to do this at work for some reason I forgot about so the solution was kinda engraved in my brain as one of those cursed hacks you just have to do in web dev lol
idk its not so much that it actively aesthetically bothers me, it's more the way it shows they kinda just don't give a fuck. there's effectively a duopoly on desktop operating systems and they truly do not care about making a good product anymore.
Goddess save us from marketing teams and UI designers stapled to Steve Job's corpse's teats who feel compelled to "reimagine" perfectly functional things into something less functional that fits some snob's idea of "attractive" or "clean".
you're not wrong but it's ironic considering every time stebe was involved in a GUI project his entire input was humiliating anyone who tried to pull shit like this
like the moment he got too sick to focus his Hater Beam and that's when stupid shit like inverted scrollwheels happened to macs
i'm reminded that both the mac and windows 95 were the results of years long scientific enquiry into the best way to design a GUI in terms of comprehensability, clarity, discoverability, intuitiveness, and speed. They went through extremely expensive iterative redesign processes where everything was painstakingly observed, quantified, and used to inform the next iteration.
no such work is done anymore and it hasn't been in a long time. there is no scientific testing, the people making these UIs are not engineers of man-machine interaction. They're "designers", which is a word that in UI means "someone who wants to make art, but has no creative spark, so just fucks around with the art supplies randomly until their manager puts it on the fridge".
being more usable than the last version is not the goal. being equally usable as the last version also isn't the goal. being different than the last version is the goal
these people should be prohibited from working on tools or devices of any kind. they would probably be happier and more appreciated making abstract sculptures.
i was looking at the os 9 hig pdf a while ago and i want to cry
so much of that book is "this is bad. do not do this. if you do this i will come to your house". i think we should include it's teachings in all of our projects for 2023
where'd you get that? dev.os9.ca only seems to have the Mac OS 8 one
pretty sure i was just mistaken about the vintage of it lol, it was a while ago i read it, i'm just finding a pdf from 1995 in my browser history.
that'd be system 7, so non platinum appearance. the OS 8 stuff on that site is basically just an addendum covering the changes
i don't think very much changed (in UI) between 8.0 and 9.2. mostly a couple quality of life improvements and then that hideous move where they "helpfully" prepared you for running OSX full time by cramming everything into like 3 folders named shit like "Applications (Mac OS 9)". i hate that they did that
worse yet, when something is being tested it's the result of giving 8 people two different UIs to use for 20 minutes (more is expensive sorry we only make billions) and summing up some random scores they give on a scale of 1-5. then they repeat it until they find the right 8 people that are like "idk I don't understand it so that's on me I guess, 5 stars" as if they're rating some individual delivery person or whatever
or A/B testing where they're measuring stuff like interaction™ without trying to compensate for user confusion with this new design they did not ask to try. there is a lot to unpack on the harms of A/B testing and I don't think the tech world is ready for it
See commercial software generally. Applications reach an optimum point where they have the UI and feature set that a majority of users find ideal for their workflow. But there always has to be a new version coming out, there has to be new action to prop up the stock price, and there has to be justification for putting out yet another version of the same program. So they mess with things that already work perfectly fine, make changes solely to differentiate this version from the last, and we move steadily backwards. See also monetizing features which were once universally standard.
remember that arial is just helvetica that looks worse and feels off