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I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laugh

I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone. I've recently switched to using KDE with the Oxygen theme and it's a joy to use without any eye strain. These scrollbars are absolutely pathetic, with no room for customisation. (good luck theming a locked-down application) It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. I am not entirely sure why this is the case but it's a sad regression from the days when we had good-looking, functional, accessible and snappy software. Not locked-down, unthemable electron bullshit. Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible.

jfim 3y ago
> I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. We've hit peak usability about twenty years ago, in the Windows 2000 era. The screenshot in the article is actually from about that era, it's one of the early 10.x (10.3 I believe) OS X releases.
- masswerk 3y ago
  Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. Just for the highly functional visual grouping of elements. (MacOS has drifted off from this quite a distance, since.)
  - eadmund 3y ago
    > Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. System 7 or 8, methinks. Clean, cool and collected.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  Today in HN: A billion armchair rants about Windows 2000 being the best UI forgetting just how much it actually sucked at usability or accessibility features.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    I'll have to admit that I don't know about its accessability features, but I was at least as productive in Windows 2000 and XP as I am in todays systems.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      In Windows 10 i lost a lot of time because of UI bugs: double click registered on single mouse clicks, UI elements dissapearing when connecting monitors, no scrollbars, no window border, no titlebar.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It's possible that people remember how much it sucked, but they also recognize that the UI sucks even more now.
g-b-r 3y ago
I think it's just become common belief among developers that scrollbars are bad... (facepalm)
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  My experience is 'developers' have no issue with scrollbars; it's the higherups and designers that find scrollbars antiquated and obsolete in a world with touchscreen devices.
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    true
jwells89 3y ago
> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible. Contrast is a factor yes, but the other thing that's happened with the flat UI epidemic is banishment of mid grays and light grays in favor of stark white and off-whites, making "light mode" much more bright looking than it had been previously. It's no wonder people were clamoring for dark mode after blinding flat UI had taken over.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Not only that but it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. I'd get it if these companies making the UX were small, because yes its super hard to deal with accessibility and different color blindness but I agree - we've lost anything but the extremest of the extreme colors.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    The ironic thing about icons losing their color and detail is that it happened right as high DPI displays began to become commonplace in consumer hardware. We have these amazing screens with barely visible pixels and excellent color reproduction being wasted on rendering monochrome lines.
    - bitwize 3y ago
      Forget Gtk or Qt, we may as well link against libXaw. It's a perfect match for the detail in "modern" UIs.
      - hulitu 3y ago
        Xaw is much, much better. Colors are configurable, scrollbar width is configurable.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Monochrome lines are cool tho, ink or charcoal can be gorgeous, and “barely visible pixels” are genuinely needed to get them. That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.
Gualdrapo 3y ago
One thing I just love about KDE is that when you right-click on an "empty" area of a scrollbar, it offers you options to go to the very top or the very bottom of whatever view you're seeing. I seem to recall that something like QtCurve offered buttons to do that within the scrollbar. If only everyone did that, many time wasted in scrolling would be saved and "go to the top" buttons in websites wouldn't exist
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  That sounds nice, but I'm using KDE right now and just tried it on several apps and it doesn't work. In Chrome, it just brings up the regular right-click menu the browser normally provides. In actual KDE apps, it does nothing.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It didn't work for me either.
speeder 3y ago
I don't use dark mode for contrast, I use because a lot of software "light mode" is just plain white. And screens been getting more and more powerful. Often using software without white mode the thing is so bright, that the walls near me get lighted up as if I was using a flashlight or something. Thus I have to make the screen less bright, but often this also make the screen colors and contrast get all screwy and I still can't see anything. I miss Win 9x era grey interface... it wasn't beautiful but I could actually see stuff.
- Groxx 3y ago
  ... Ya know, I haven't thought about that before, but screens are a lot brighter now aren't they. I wonder how much of the dark mode thing is just that the old good defaults are now eye-burningly bright, so of course people don't like them as much.
  - franga2000 3y ago
    Screens can get brighter now, but if your screen is too bright, that's entirely on you. Adjusting the brightness is trivial and you can even do it without using the buttons on the display (DDC/CI).
    - TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
      On the contrary, some new monitors are so bright even on their lowest setting that you have to find alternative solutions.
      - layer8 3y ago
        That’s really just bad tech not fit for the purpose, though.
        poszlem 3y ago
        Oh, okay, problem solved then.
treyd 3y ago
> It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. Especially with this new "don't theme my app" movement. It's really unfortunate. The issues with CSS stylesheets in GTK should be solved with replacing CSS with a better way to describe styles, not with just throwing it all away and not letting the user set their own themes.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  There's also the consideration that a decent style sheet can be ~100 - 200 lines long. Yet I see ~5000 line css files that have so much custom formatting for JS frameworks that build everything with divs, rather than using semantic HTML5 which has accessibility baked in.
  - MereInterest 3y ago
    It seems like there's two wildly different ways that CSS gets used. In one style, a CSS class is a semantic category of things on the page, and the style sheet defines how it looks. In the other, a CSS class has no semantic meaning, and the style sheet defines a list of options to choose from. It's the difference between `<div class="user-comment>` and `<div class="bg-lt-gray-fg-dark-gray-bold-text">`. The first type of CSS can be written succinctly, but the second cannot.
  - airtonix 3y ago
    [dead]
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  Yup. GNOME/GTK is a lost cause in my eyes. Literally worse UX than Windows. The developers basically say "fuck you" if your use case does not perfectly align with their "vision".
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Honestly I want the app to just set its look exactly. I really don't care if different programs look slightly different as long as its internally consistent in app. What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack. Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same on all distros. One complete and verified experience.
o11c 3y ago
"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point. The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white". ** That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivially be done directly in RGB, just check the min and max color channel of the pixel, then adjust all channels to flip them), rather than requiring ad-hoc color schemes all over the place.
- callalex 3y ago
  This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I’m surprised Linux doesn’t have some ubiquitous “use the camera to do auto-brightness” option (pinging the camera on a proprietary OS would be creepy, but if it is open source…).
    - callalex 3y ago
      That wouldn’t work very well because pretty much every webcam has auto exposure adjustment. Also a camera is good at determining how much light is in the room behind you, not how much light is hitting the screen. There really is no substitute for a photodiode and a halfway decent control algorithm. It only costs a penny so there really is no excuse not to include one.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      I know a lot of people who have covered their camera with tape. Some laptops even come with a physical shutter. This is something company policy often recommends - if the camera is physically covered an attacker can't see the next product we are working on.
tom_ 3y ago
How old are you? I bet you a pound you're 40, or thereabouts. Trust me, your eyesight is becoming worse...
- tom_ 3y ago
  I got a downvote. OK, let's upgrade that to 2 pounds ;) (Of course, that was a lot of money when we were both young...)
  - vidanay 3y ago
    I'd down vote you if I could see the damn tiny arrow.
    - tom_ 3y ago
      I gave you an upvote, so it cancels out.
    - worik 3y ago
      I voted. Up. Down. I'm really not sure....
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  I am 20 years old^^
  - tom_ 3y ago
    Actually a mildly interesting response! - thanks. If we ever meet, £2 is yours. When I was 20, the idea that my eyesight might have become meaningfully worse over time never really occurred to me. Fascinating.
    - Pannoniae 3y ago
      You seem like an interesting person^^:)
    - 3y ago
katakuri 3y ago
I love oxygen theme. I was so glad to find out that it was still installable as an application style in KDE 5. I hope it still is in the next one
hulitu 3y ago
> I am not entirely sure why this is the case Earlier we had ICCCM (inter client communication convention manual). Now we have freedesktop.org.
alpaca128 3y ago
> we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible Have you tried dark mode in Windows 11? It turns the entire window bar black, if multiple window bars happen to overlap it is impossible to tell them apart visually. On top of that in some programs it also turns the close/min/max window buttons completely black unless hovered by the cursor! Microsoft should fire everyone at the company who ever made a UX design decision - except for the people who made the Windows Phone 8 UI, their only consistent and intuitive UI in the last 15 years.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I use "dark" mode in Windows 11, but it turns the title bar a nice blue shade since I actually went and configured it (it's right next to the mode setting). I actually can't configure the color in "light" mode where it's always white if I recall, though. The other criticisms are valid though, the last good Explorer UI was Windows 7.
- psd1 3y ago
  Windows Phone was visually stunning. Thanks for reminding me of it! I don't know what you mean about turning the window bar black. Did you set the theme to "high contrast"? I've used dark mode on windows since it became an OS feature and never had that problem. Microsoft's UX has been poor since Win8, but not for graphical reasons. 10 and 11 look great out of the box - far better than any other OS I've seen, although tbf I haven't done much distro-hopping.
Podgajski 3y ago
If we are talking UI we need to talk about Apple. The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.
- leokennis 3y ago
  I saw those fat candy looking aqua scrollbars in the linked article and I immediately thought how great OS X used to look and work. Truly sad the mess macOS is now.
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  Not getting it. I mean, if Mac OS lets you configure scroll bars (and I haven't noticed a problem with the defaults so far either) that's much much more than can be said about gnome isn't it? Where gnome theming has gone from black magic in v3 to ... anathema in v4.
- chefandy 3y ago
  It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have them hidden and revealable by scrolling a bit. Not having them take up screen real estate and working with most people's usage styles while being configurable for others is the right decision. The problem is systems and applications that don't let you configure them. People talk about accessibility and their preferences like they are absolute truths— it's a lot more complex. Not having scroll bars sucks for people that never got comfortable with other scrolling input methods and people who use sight interfaces, for example. They couldn't possibly be less relevant to people who use screen readers, and as an input method rather than an Univision visual indicator, only slightly more relevant to people on phones and tablets. Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. Adding visible UI elements adds cognitive load, and for people who never worked with scroll bars out of necessity, they're just another bulky animated distraction on the screen. Most younger users would probably think them about as useful as an always-visible on-screen keyboard. I guarantee you— the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.
thepra 3y ago
You're right about the scrollbar contrast, even though I've customized the hell out of the scrollbar in my collAnon pwa I made the mistake to make it less contrasting for design appeal reasons alone. I guess that's gonna go in the next release
kps 3y ago
> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such … People with cataracts may benefit from dark mode. People with glaucoma or higher order aberrations (e.g. me) may benefit from light mode. Web sites should use `prefers-color-scheme`; native GUI programs should use the native equivalents (or default colours); command-line programs should not assume a particular background. Edit: there's a comment chain that fell off the first page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865396
- hulitu 3y ago
  The main problem is that there is no dark or light mode. It is light gray on white or dark gray on black (and the white and black are also gray). It is just sick.
  - kps 3y ago
    Low contrast is a problem, but high-contrast light mode and high-contrast dark mode are each also problems for some people.
- CRConrad 3y ago
  https://imgur.com/a/EPQbkld https://imgur.com/a/EPQbkld
pjettter 3y ago
I often wish we had more analog control in the digital world. I wish there were turn knobs instead up/down buttons with 10 steps (where it is easy to accidentally leave a menu... When trying to get back to where you were, you are suddenly adjusting something else entirely). Manual control with digital devices has become too digital and too cumbersome. It used to be easy to adjust contrast and brightness on a display, volume on an amplifiee, an analog TV, a termostat, a car radio, etc. I realize that we are not really on course (yet?) for reintroducing a lot of analog controls, but in the end, our world is analog. Input is analog via speech, muscle motion, etc. Output is analog, via light and other vibrations that reach our senses. Why isn't control more analog? It's probably a cost thing. I would totally buy a display or a laptop with analog controls. I don't even care if the turn dial actually has 16M steps, so long as the response is pretty much immediate and feels like a real potentiometer. It should feel like direct manipulation and like you're in control, instead of these digital roundabout abominations. As to the subject, I imagine having some knobs that I can adjust under different circumstances to quickly vary intensity or cycle through alternatives in order to make things more readable or audible. 90% Of what we do is in the browser today. Browsers could have an "accessibility" API such that turn knobs (bluetooth? whatever) could be used for control. Like scroll wheels but on steroids?
- xahrepap 3y ago
  And when you finally have a along controls everything is overloaded. Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow. But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote. Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass. Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.
  - rapind 3y ago
    The worst offender of this is the Apple TV remote. Most of my actions with the Apple TV remote have been unintentional.
awiejailwrj 3y ago
My current favorite is the vanishing scrollbars that appear for two seconds after you start scrolling. Chrome is awful with this. When I'm trying to review a couple-thousand-line PR, Chrome stutters and freezes, and the scrollbar won't show up for several seconds and then it immediately vanishes as the UI catches up with the input. Or sometimes I click on the ephemeral scrollbar but my click doesn't register until after it's vanished again. It's infuriating.
stcredzero 3y ago
The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone...It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users’ needs I’ve seen this trend going on for over a decade now, like a slow parabolic arc. Somehow the aim of developers and designers turned around 180 degrees and became less and less about pleasing the users and more and more about impressing other people in your field. (Both programming and design.)
ilyt 3y ago
It's also sad that 10-15 years ago near-everything I used was just themed based on system/windows manager and it was possible to make those changes system-wide (with some mess if you used QT apps with gnome and vice versa, but still), and now we're locked in hellhole of HTML and CSS "native" apps

jfim 3y ago

> I have come to a funny realisation recently. It's not my eyesight which is becoming worse, it's the UIs which are becoming worse. We've hit peak usability about twenty years ago, in the Windows 2000 era. The screenshot in the article is actually from about that era, it's one of the early 10.x (10.3 I believe) OS X releases.

masswerk 3y ago
Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. Just for the highly functional visual grouping of elements. (MacOS has drifted off from this quite a distance, since.)
- eadmund 3y ago
  > Arguably, Snow Leopard was peak interaction design. System 7 or 8, methinks. Clean, cool and collected.
agloe_dreams 3y ago
Today in HN: A billion armchair rants about Windows 2000 being the best UI forgetting just how much it actually sucked at usability or accessibility features.
- steve1977 3y ago
  I'll have to admit that I don't know about its accessability features, but I was at least as productive in Windows 2000 and XP as I am in todays systems.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    In Windows 10 i lost a lot of time because of UI bugs: double click registered on single mouse clicks, UI elements dissapearing when connecting monitors, no scrollbars, no window border, no titlebar.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It's possible that people remember how much it sucked, but they also recognize that the UI sucks even more now.

g-b-r 3y ago

I think it's just become common belief among developers that scrollbars are bad... (facepalm)

wildrhythms 3y ago
My experience is 'developers' have no issue with scrollbars; it's the higherups and designers that find scrollbars antiquated and obsolete in a world with touchscreen devices.
- g-b-r 3y ago
  true

jwells89 3y ago

> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible. Contrast is a factor yes, but the other thing that's happened with the flat UI epidemic is banishment of mid grays and light grays in favor of stark white and off-whites, making "light mode" much more bright looking than it had been previously. It's no wonder people were clamoring for dark mode after blinding flat UI had taken over.

hypercube33 3y ago
Not only that but it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. I'd get it if these companies making the UX were small, because yes its super hard to deal with accessibility and different color blindness but I agree - we've lost anything but the extremest of the extreme colors.
- jwells89 3y ago
  The ironic thing about icons losing their color and detail is that it happened right as high DPI displays began to become commonplace in consumer hardware. We have these amazing screens with barely visible pixels and excellent color reproduction being wasted on rendering monochrome lines.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Forget Gtk or Qt, we may as well link against libXaw. It's a perfect match for the detail in "modern" UIs.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      Xaw is much, much better. Colors are configurable, scrollbar width is configurable.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Monochrome lines are cool tho, ink or charcoal can be gorgeous, and “barely visible pixels” are genuinely needed to get them. That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops, there’s not many of them and the aspect ratios and ancillary features are extremely limited.

Gualdrapo 3y ago

One thing I just love about KDE is that when you right-click on an "empty" area of a scrollbar, it offers you options to go to the very top or the very bottom of whatever view you're seeing. I seem to recall that something like QtCurve offered buttons to do that within the scrollbar. If only everyone did that, many time wasted in scrolling would be saved and "go to the top" buttons in websites wouldn't exist

shiroiuma 3y ago
That sounds nice, but I'm using KDE right now and just tried it on several apps and it doesn't work. In Chrome, it just brings up the regular right-click menu the browser normally provides. In actual KDE apps, it does nothing.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It didn't work for me either.

speeder 3y ago

I don't use dark mode for contrast, I use because a lot of software "light mode" is just plain white. And screens been getting more and more powerful. Often using software without white mode the thing is so bright, that the walls near me get lighted up as if I was using a flashlight or something. Thus I have to make the screen less bright, but often this also make the screen colors and contrast get all screwy and I still can't see anything. I miss Win 9x era grey interface... it wasn't beautiful but I could actually see stuff.

Groxx 3y ago
... Ya know, I haven't thought about that before, but screens are a lot brighter now aren't they. I wonder how much of the dark mode thing is just that the old good defaults are now eye-burningly bright, so of course people don't like them as much.
- franga2000 3y ago
  Screens can get brighter now, but if your screen is too bright, that's entirely on you. Adjusting the brightness is trivial and you can even do it without using the buttons on the display (DDC/CI).
  - TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
    On the contrary, some new monitors are so bright even on their lowest setting that you have to find alternative solutions.
    - layer8 3y ago
      That’s really just bad tech not fit for the purpose, though.
      - poszlem 3y ago
        Oh, okay, problem solved then.

treyd 3y ago

> It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users' needs, not even in FOSSland. Especially with this new "don't theme my app" movement. It's really unfortunate. The issues with CSS stylesheets in GTK should be solved with replacing CSS with a better way to describe styles, not with just throwing it all away and not letting the user set their own themes.

gonzo41 3y ago
There's also the consideration that a decent style sheet can be ~100 - 200 lines long. Yet I see ~5000 line css files that have so much custom formatting for JS frameworks that build everything with divs, rather than using semantic HTML5 which has accessibility baked in.
- MereInterest 3y ago
  It seems like there's two wildly different ways that CSS gets used. In one style, a CSS class is a semantic category of things on the page, and the style sheet defines how it looks. In the other, a CSS class has no semantic meaning, and the style sheet defines a list of options to choose from. It's the difference between `<div class="user-comment>` and `<div class="bg-lt-gray-fg-dark-gray-bold-text">`. The first type of CSS can be written succinctly, but the second cannot.
- airtonix 3y ago
  [dead]
Pannoniae 3y ago
Yup. GNOME/GTK is a lost cause in my eyes. Literally worse UX than Windows. The developers basically say "fuck you" if your use case does not perfectly align with their "vision".
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Honestly I want the app to just set its look exactly. I really don't care if different programs look slightly different as long as its internally consistent in app. What I hate is installing a program that was designed for a KDE distro and because you run gnome all the icons are the same color as the background and alignments on things are whack. Package it all up in a flatpak so it looks and works exactly the same on all distros. One complete and verified experience.

o11c 3y ago

"Dark mode" is needed in dark rooms, since screens don't autoadjust their backlight based on the room's white point. The concept of "white point" is often spoken of in terms of color, but brightness very much does matter too. It is painful for there to be something (especially something large) brighter than "white". ** That said, we should have automatic dark mode based in inverting HSL's "lightness" (this can trivially be done directly in RGB, just check the min and max color channel of the pixel, then adjust all channels to flip them), rather than requiring ad-hoc color schemes all over the place.

callalex 3y ago
This is one thing Apple got right a veeeery long time ago. Every screen they have sold since like the mid 2000s, both integrated and standalone, has had auto brightness. I don’t understand why other manufacturers still can’t that right, to this day, no matter the price category. Even most non-Apple smartphones these days still suck at this.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I’m surprised Linux doesn’t have some ubiquitous “use the camera to do auto-brightness” option (pinging the camera on a proprietary OS would be creepy, but if it is open source…).
  - callalex 3y ago
    That wouldn’t work very well because pretty much every webcam has auto exposure adjustment. Also a camera is good at determining how much light is in the room behind you, not how much light is hitting the screen. There really is no substitute for a photodiode and a halfway decent control algorithm. It only costs a penny so there really is no excuse not to include one.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    I know a lot of people who have covered their camera with tape. Some laptops even come with a physical shutter. This is something company policy often recommends - if the camera is physically covered an attacker can't see the next product we are working on.

tom_ 3y ago

How old are you? I bet you a pound you're 40, or thereabouts. Trust me, your eyesight is becoming worse...

tom_ 3y ago
I got a downvote. OK, let's upgrade that to 2 pounds ;) (Of course, that was a lot of money when we were both young...)
- vidanay 3y ago
  I'd down vote you if I could see the damn tiny arrow.
  - tom_ 3y ago
    I gave you an upvote, so it cancels out.
  - worik 3y ago
    I voted. Up. Down. I'm really not sure....
Pannoniae 3y ago
I am 20 years old^^
- tom_ 3y ago
  Actually a mildly interesting response! - thanks. If we ever meet, £2 is yours. When I was 20, the idea that my eyesight might have become meaningfully worse over time never really occurred to me. Fascinating.
  - Pannoniae 3y ago
    You seem like an interesting person^^:)
  - 3y ago

katakuri 3y ago

I love oxygen theme. I was so glad to find out that it was still installable as an application style in KDE 5. I hope it still is in the next one

hulitu 3y ago

> I am not entirely sure why this is the case Earlier we had ICCCM (inter client communication convention manual). Now we have freedesktop.org.

alpaca128 3y ago

> we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such if the UIs had any contrast and were legible Have you tried dark mode in Windows 11? It turns the entire window bar black, if multiple window bars happen to overlap it is impossible to tell them apart visually. On top of that in some programs it also turns the close/min/max window buttons completely black unless hovered by the cursor! Microsoft should fire everyone at the company who ever made a UX design decision - except for the people who made the Windows Phone 8 UI, their only consistent and intuitive UI in the last 15 years.

Dalewyn 3y ago
I use "dark" mode in Windows 11, but it turns the title bar a nice blue shade since I actually went and configured it (it's right next to the mode setting). I actually can't configure the color in "light" mode where it's always white if I recall, though. The other criticisms are valid though, the last good Explorer UI was Windows 7.
psd1 3y ago
Windows Phone was visually stunning. Thanks for reminding me of it! I don't know what you mean about turning the window bar black. Did you set the theme to "high contrast"? I've used dark mode on windows since it became an OS feature and never had that problem. Microsoft's UX has been poor since Win8, but not for graphical reasons. 10 and 11 look great out of the box - far better than any other OS I've seen, although tbf I haven't done much distro-hopping.

Podgajski 3y ago

If we are talking UI we need to talk about Apple. The first thin I do on MacOS is turn on the scroll bars. Yes, MacOS Has them set as "Only Show When Scrolling" by default, which is probably the most ridiculous setting.

leokennis 3y ago
I saw those fat candy looking aqua scrollbars in the linked article and I immediately thought how great OS X used to look and work. Truly sad the mess macOS is now.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
Not getting it. I mean, if Mac OS lets you configure scroll bars (and I haven't noticed a problem with the defaults so far either) that's much much more than can be said about gnome isn't it? Where gnome theming has gone from black magic in v3 to ... anathema in v4.
chefandy 3y ago
It seems like most people who scroll use touch, wheel, or other non-scroll-bar interfaces, and the scroll bars are just a visual indicator of document size and position while navigating it. I know I do— and have for 20 years unless I was using a shitty laptop without a scrolling input method. Maybe unless I'm scrolling through literally millions of lines of text, which is infrequent enough that I'd prefer to have them hidden and revealable by scrolling a bit. Not having them take up screen real estate and working with most people's usage styles while being configurable for others is the right decision. The problem is systems and applications that don't let you configure them. People talk about accessibility and their preferences like they are absolute truths— it's a lot more complex. Not having scroll bars sucks for people that never got comfortable with other scrolling input methods and people who use sight interfaces, for example. They couldn't possibly be less relevant to people who use screen readers, and as an input method rather than an Univision visual indicator, only slightly more relevant to people on phones and tablets. Phone and tablet usage has outpaced regular computer usage for quite some time, and that informs users interaction style. Adding visible UI elements adds cognitive load, and for people who never worked with scroll bars out of necessity, they're just another bulky animated distraction on the screen. Most younger users would probably think them about as useful as an always-visible on-screen keyboard. I guarantee you— the designers at Apple who chose to hide those scroll bars probably thought more about scrolling more than every one of these commenters combined, and that was before they did formal usability studies.

thepra 3y ago

You're right about the scrollbar contrast, even though I've customized the hell out of the scrollbar in my collAnon pwa I made the mistake to make it less contrasting for design appeal reasons alone. I guess that's gonna go in the next release

kps 3y ago

> Also, we wouldn't need "dark mode" or the such … People with cataracts may benefit from dark mode. People with glaucoma or higher order aberrations (e.g. me) may benefit from light mode. Web sites should use `prefers-color-scheme`; native GUI programs should use the native equivalents (or default colours); command-line programs should not assume a particular background. Edit: there's a comment chain that fell off the first page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37865396

hulitu 3y ago
The main problem is that there is no dark or light mode. It is light gray on white or dark gray on black (and the white and black are also gray). It is just sick.
- kps 3y ago
  Low contrast is a problem, but high-contrast light mode and high-contrast dark mode are each also problems for some people.
CRConrad 3y ago
https://imgur.com/a/EPQbkld https://imgur.com/a/EPQbkld

pjettter 3y ago

I often wish we had more analog control in the digital world. I wish there were turn knobs instead up/down buttons with 10 steps (where it is easy to accidentally leave a menu... When trying to get back to where you were, you are suddenly adjusting something else entirely). Manual control with digital devices has become too digital and too cumbersome. It used to be easy to adjust contrast and brightness on a display, volume on an amplifiee, an analog TV, a termostat, a car radio, etc. I realize that we are not really on course (yet?) for reintroducing a lot of analog controls, but in the end, our world is analog. Input is analog via speech, muscle motion, etc. Output is analog, via light and other vibrations that reach our senses. Why isn't control more analog? It's probably a cost thing. I would totally buy a display or a laptop with analog controls. I don't even care if the turn dial actually has 16M steps, so long as the response is pretty much immediate and feels like a real potentiometer. It should feel like direct manipulation and like you're in control, instead of these digital roundabout abominations. As to the subject, I imagine having some knobs that I can adjust under different circumstances to quickly vary intensity or cycle through alternatives in order to make things more readable or audible. 90% Of what we do is in the browser today. Browsers could have an "accessibility" API such that turn knobs (bluetooth? whatever) could be used for control. Like scroll wheels but on steroids?

xahrepap 3y ago
And when you finally have a along controls everything is overloaded. Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow. But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote. Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass. Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.
- rapind 3y ago
  The worst offender of this is the Apple TV remote. Most of my actions with the Apple TV remote have been unintentional.

awiejailwrj 3y ago

My current favorite is the vanishing scrollbars that appear for two seconds after you start scrolling. Chrome is awful with this. When I'm trying to review a couple-thousand-line PR, Chrome stutters and freezes, and the scrollbar won't show up for several seconds and then it immediately vanishes as the UI catches up with the input. Or sometimes I click on the ephemeral scrollbar but my click doesn't register until after it's vanished again. It's infuriating.

stcredzero 3y ago

The tiny scrollbars with laughable contrast are in no way accessible to anyone...It's blatant how UI designers don't give a damn about the users’ needs I’ve seen this trend going on for over a decade now, like a slow parabolic arc. Somehow the aim of developers and designers turned around 180 degrees and became less and less about pleasing the users and more and more about impressing other people in your field. (Both programming and design.)

ilyt 3y ago

It's also sad that 10-15 years ago near-everything I used was just themed based on system/windows manager and it was possible to make those changes system-wide (with some mess if you used QT apps with gnome and vice versa, but still), and now we're locked in hellhole of HTML and CSS "native" apps