5 ms·

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

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.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    >That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      > No, they aren't. Yeah they are. > ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. Leaving side your wilful misunderstanding of fairly standard concepts, no they are not: the monitors you are talking about were generally tiny, and the minor increase in median pixel density was largely counteracted by the blocky precision of LCD pixels.
    - mort96 3y ago
      In modern parlance, "high-DPI" or "HiDPI" does not refer to your 24" 1080p screen. That's solidly a "low-DPI" screen; it's perfectly usable with UI elements rendered at "1x".
    - steve1977 3y ago
      Not really. DPI is dots per inch. As screens were much smaller then, their DPI (or rather PPI) wasn’t much less. For example, Macintosh was 72 ppi for a long time ( it is 109 ppi now). My first LCD screen was 15“. And that was for a desktop, not a laptop. 17“ or 19“ were for rich guys or graphics designers ;) What is certainly the case though is that GUIs nowadays are much more wasteful with space.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  There's also an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays. Though some of these are colour-capable, most are monochrome, and I've definitely had challenges negotiating apps and content which use colour as a key differentiator.
  - mort96 3y ago
    Is there actually an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays? I know there technically exists some "high refresh rate" e-ink screens these days (meaning you can get 10 FPS if you're comfortable with a whole lot of ghosting), but aren't e-ink screens still pretty much only used in dedicated e-book readers? Personally, I think it's just that monochrome icons are fashionable. I can't imagine that the GIMP developers for example chose to make GIMP's icons monochrome because that works better on e-ink screens.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      There's a wide range of e-ink tablets and displays available. Many of the tablets run Android and are largely the same as any other Android device. The displays can be used with any OS, obviously. There are also e-ink phones (smart and otherwise), watches, and other devices. For text and graphics, you'd generally want to use a higher-quality, lower-refresh-rate mode. Which is to say that there's quite a bit of established UI/UX knowledge that wants a refresh. I've distilled a set of basic principles: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better. Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well, raster images not quite so much, though can be acceptable. <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba8448a5b29e257 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844...> For a demonstration of a wide range of displays (the best ones are featured last) as of 2021, see: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4>
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
CRConrad 3y ago
> it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. No, light grey -- or some other light pastel colour -- and white.

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.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >That aside, high dpi displays are still a rare sight on desktops No, they aren't. ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. But the window managers back then were FAR better (in functionality and appearance) than what most of us use today.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    > No, they aren't. Yeah they are. > ALL displays these days are high-dpi, when you compare to the 640x480 and 800x600 screens that were normal in the late 1990s. Leaving side your wilful misunderstanding of fairly standard concepts, no they are not: the monitors you are talking about were generally tiny, and the minor increase in median pixel density was largely counteracted by the blocky precision of LCD pixels.
  - mort96 3y ago
    In modern parlance, "high-DPI" or "HiDPI" does not refer to your 24" 1080p screen. That's solidly a "low-DPI" screen; it's perfectly usable with UI elements rendered at "1x".
  - steve1977 3y ago
    Not really. DPI is dots per inch. As screens were much smaller then, their DPI (or rather PPI) wasn’t much less. For example, Macintosh was 72 ppi for a long time ( it is 109 ppi now). My first LCD screen was 15“. And that was for a desktop, not a laptop. 17“ or 19“ were for rich guys or graphics designers ;) What is certainly the case though is that GUIs nowadays are much more wasteful with space.
dredmorbius 3y ago
There's also an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays. Though some of these are colour-capable, most are monochrome, and I've definitely had challenges negotiating apps and content which use colour as a key differentiator.
- mort96 3y ago
  Is there actually an increasing prevalence and popularity of e-ink displays? I know there technically exists some "high refresh rate" e-ink screens these days (meaning you can get 10 FPS if you're comfortable with a whole lot of ghosting), but aren't e-ink screens still pretty much only used in dedicated e-book readers? Personally, I think it's just that monochrome icons are fashionable. I can't imagine that the GIMP developers for example chose to make GIMP's icons monochrome because that works better on e-ink screens.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    There's a wide range of e-ink tablets and displays available. Many of the tablets run Android and are largely the same as any other Android device. The displays can be used with any OS, obviously. There are also e-ink phones (smart and otherwise), watches, and other devices. For text and graphics, you'd generally want to use a higher-quality, lower-refresh-rate mode. Which is to say that there's quite a bit of established UI/UX knowledge that wants a refresh. I've distilled a set of basic principles: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent, and the more ambient light the better. Paginated-navigation (whole screen changes in one go), line-art, and dithered or halftoned images work relatively well, raster images not quite so much, though can be acceptable. <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba8448a5b29e257 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/638a8d10e041013afba844...> For a demonstration of a wide range of displays (the best ones are featured last) as of 2021, see: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=KdrMjnYAap4>
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 3y ago

CRConrad 3y ago

> it seems like color from icons has gone - now we get black and white ones. No, light grey -- or some other light pastel colour -- and white.