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Fully agree on the UI. Every platform has regressed significantly compared to just 10 years ago. Modern UIs are slow, laggy, visually poorly designed (both in

Fully agree on the UI. Every platform has regressed significantly compared to just 10 years ago. Modern UIs are slow, laggy, visually poorly designed (both in layout and in control design - they're just "flashy"), they're completely inconsistent with each other. They seem to completely have lost 20 years to refinement in user interaction. During the amiga times you would be yelled at for placing the "cancel" button of a dialog in the unexpected position. And I would say: rightly so. Following system guidelines to have consistency gave you great productivity as a side-effect. Today you're lucky if you can guess that the dialog is modal at all, let alone figure out which one is the ack button and which one is a link that redirects to generic online help page. The system design guidelines are ignored by system and app developers alike. It's a free-for-all.

watwut 6y ago
I feel like living in another world when I am reading these. In what world were UI 10 years old better or good? Not that current are super great, but the past ones were neither looking better nor easier to figure out.
- bsdubernerd 6y ago
  To make some examples that I didn't use to see: I get a good chuckle when I see flip-switch style checkboxes which include a description text that also flips in meaning when you toggle it. Because flip-switch style are already frequently more ambiguous than a checkbox already, but the changing text really brings the ambiguity to a whole new level. Checkboxes were perfectly easy and took less space, but flipswitches took over most modern UIs on mobile and desktop because they look cool somehow? Drop-downs popping-up a borderless dialog showing you some choices, with a modern scroll-bar that's hidden by default. Depending on vertical size, you might not realize there's more if you scroll, since there's no indication of further elements unless the next element happens to be truncated at the text, making it obvious. Actions (which were traditionally buttons) interspersed into the text as links, making the distinction a crapshoot. Responsive "desktop" UIs that can't fit 10 toolbar elements in view and switch to a hambuger menu if the window is smaller than 2/3 of the screen. Make it better by actually shrinking the available workspace when that happens due to an extra-large sidebar that pops in it's place. Broken scrolling (as in non-standard behavior/travel lenght and so on) is something I've never seen in desktop apps until recently. Custom widgets that do not replicate correctly the system behavior. People complained for decades about Gtk/Qt not behaving exactly like Win32 (or say the same with Cocoa/Qt on Mac, or any combination), and yet they perform like a dream compared to Electron, Flutter, even QML. Of course you had bad UIs back then and now. But I've never been so frustrated by so many commercial programs switching over to multiplatform development and custom UIs.

watwut 6y ago

I feel like living in another world when I am reading these. In what world were UI 10 years old better or good? Not that current are super great, but the past ones were neither looking better nor easier to figure out.

bsdubernerd 6y ago
To make some examples that I didn't use to see: I get a good chuckle when I see flip-switch style checkboxes which include a description text that also flips in meaning when you toggle it. Because flip-switch style are already frequently more ambiguous than a checkbox already, but the changing text really brings the ambiguity to a whole new level. Checkboxes were perfectly easy and took less space, but flipswitches took over most modern UIs on mobile and desktop because they look cool somehow? Drop-downs popping-up a borderless dialog showing you some choices, with a modern scroll-bar that's hidden by default. Depending on vertical size, you might not realize there's more if you scroll, since there's no indication of further elements unless the next element happens to be truncated at the text, making it obvious. Actions (which were traditionally buttons) interspersed into the text as links, making the distinction a crapshoot. Responsive "desktop" UIs that can't fit 10 toolbar elements in view and switch to a hambuger menu if the window is smaller than 2/3 of the screen. Make it better by actually shrinking the available workspace when that happens due to an extra-large sidebar that pops in it's place. Broken scrolling (as in non-standard behavior/travel lenght and so on) is something I've never seen in desktop apps until recently. Custom widgets that do not replicate correctly the system behavior. People complained for decades about Gtk/Qt not behaving exactly like Win32 (or say the same with Cocoa/Qt on Mac, or any combination), and yet they perform like a dream compared to Electron, Flutter, even QML. Of course you had bad UIs back then and now. But I've never been so frustrated by so many commercial programs switching over to multiplatform development and custom UIs.