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A staggering percentage of applications today, regardless of platform (native, mobile, web) can be fully implemented, as regards their UI, with the usual set of

A staggering percentage of applications today, regardless of platform (native, mobile, web) can be fully implemented, as regards their UI, with the usual set of UI widgets such as text boxes, dropdown lists, radio boxes, buttons, etc. These widgets are available in any toolkit or browser in highly polished and performant implementations that require very little from the developer in terms of fiddling with the UI. So it completely boggles the mind that, during the last decade, we are witnessing an unbelievable onslaught to any sane UI convention that people have come to expect. At the top of my head: - No accessibility at all, even though there are extensive sets of standards fully implemented by the UI toolkit. - No scrollbars at all. Even worse, scrollbars that don't behave quite right. - Ugly styling that doesn't follow even the most basic modicum of guidelines crystalized around the 80s. - Text boxes and other widgets that have hidden weird behaviours, or are generally ridiculously slow. - UI widgets that are badly sized and don't correctly follow the regular zoom controls. - Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area. - Trivial apps for which the browser has to download megabytes of js and raise the CPU to a point that the fans need to start spinning. - Cryptic icons that don't have any semantic connection with what they are supposed to accomplish. - My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact with it. - Phone button menus that have an unknown size below the bottom of the screen and there is no visible clue how many icons below the bottom are not visible. We are possibly very near hitting rock bottom in terms of UI in 2021, which (oddly enough) means that there is bound to be a renaissance of some sort as regards those things. After the middle ages many turned to the classical antiquity for inspiration. Drooling over the skeuomorphic UIs of the original iPhone and the pseudo-3d toolkits of the 1990s...

andrekandre 5y ago
Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area. big sur right there: plain white/black windows with no divider line, yet you can only drag from the tiny sliver of the now non-visible bar at the top same thing happens when a dialog appears, you can only drag from that tiny little sliver even though the whole window is darkened... ugh
mcphage 5y ago
> My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact with it. This is absolutely the worst thing that interfaces do. It’s terrible, I hate it so much.

andrekandre 5y ago

Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area. big sur right there: plain white/black windows with no divider line, yet you can only drag from the tiny sliver of the now non-visible bar at the top same thing happens when a dialog appears, you can only drag from that tiny little sliver even though the whole window is darkened... ugh

mcphage 5y ago

> My favourite, UI widgets that cannot stay where they where originally placed, resulting in failures to click them as they keep moving/reflowing under the button. Because the toolkit decided to reflow while the user was already allowed to interact with it. This is absolutely the worst thing that interfaces do. It’s terrible, I hate it so much.