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You're talking about cross-cutting UI concerns (themes, widgets, window system), which I agree are largely mature, while I'm talking about vertical combinations
by jjoonathan 6y ago
You're talking about cross-cutting UI concerns (themes, widgets, window system), which I agree are largely mature, while I'm talking about vertical combinations of specific UIs and subsystems, which aren't mature by a long shot.
Example: "delete file" on Windows. Windows has relatively aggressive file locking, but if you try to delete a file that's open, it just errors out, it doesn't tell you what's using the file and give you the option to (force) quit it.
See also: networking, disk management, permissions, sound, preferences, ipc, etc. There are a hundred of these "just needs a bit of work" UI verticals, but designers keep trying to solve these problems with themes and functionality subsets, which are doomed to fail because the underlying issue is a lack of expressiveness in the existing UI, not an excess of it. Meanwhile, systems people live with "just use CLI / sysinternals / wireshark / nmap" like it isn't an issue that bog-standard tasks still require arcane tools in 2020 (arcane by the standards of typical users).
- grishka 6y agoYeah, in my Windows days, I remember having a lot of small utilities that filled the gaps of the OS. There was one for deleting files too, I don't remember the name, probably unlocker something — it showed you all currently open descriptors for a file and allowed you to close them. As opposed to macOS, which straight up tells you "this file is being used by X.app, close it to try again" when you try to delete an open file. But this is how it works, which is UX. UI is more about how it looks and how it's interacted with.