5 ms·

Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces

Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces is total inconsistency in looks and behaviour across different applications. Even common action icons vary in style, colouring and shape from one application to another. Title bars are hijacked for whatever fanciful ideas the app designers had in mind, scrollbars and other basic widgets are rarely drawn using native desktop components, tab ordering is a dream of the distant past and so on and that's if a given app even responds to the tab key.

SirFatty 1y ago
Personally, I dislike the flatness. It's hard (at times) to distinguish one from another when multiple windows are open.
- whatevergoes 1y ago
  Window shadows are the solution here in my experience.
chairhairair 1y ago
This will never happen because: 1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles. 2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels. Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.). NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.
- dharmab 1y ago
  Some projects are doing (2) anyway to get a better result. Examples: Kitty, Zed, File Pilot.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    File Pilot has got to be the biggest fuck-you to modern app development practices I've seen in a long time.
    - Y_Y 1y ago
      I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.
      - dharmab 1y ago
        It's one of those things where you try it and feel how snappy it is. Like when people switched from Internet Explorer to Chrome.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    But you're describing pretty much every UI toolkit!
  - lmz 1y ago
    No-one would claim building a web browser is easier than putting some widgets together in Win32/Cocoa/GTK+/whatever, yet here we are with Electron.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      But people would claim that it's easier for a company to take a bunch of web frontend devs and have them develop a UI which rides on top the already-existing Electron. Which is why we have such a plague of bloated Electron apps - because companies are lazy and don't care about the end user experience.
      - lmz 1y ago
        Well, yes. Just saying that once you make draw calls and raw input events available they will be used against you.
btbuildem 1y ago
You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
    - bunderbunder 1y ago
      I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting. Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
WD-42 1y ago
It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  But for a lot of use cases that's not possible anymore, that is, a lot of the applications using the OS' UI libraries are no longer maintained. And a lot of people have to use the applications as supplied, e.g. Slack or Microsoft Teams. Which can be accessed via a web browser, sure, but dedicated apps for these are also nice because they have a dedicated spot in the app switchers.
prmoustache 1y ago
This is self induced misery. Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop. You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.

SirFatty 1y ago

Personally, I dislike the flatness. It's hard (at times) to distinguish one from another when multiple windows are open.

whatevergoes 1y ago
Window shadows are the solution here in my experience.

chairhairair 1y ago

This will never happen because: 1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles. 2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels. Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.). NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.

dharmab 1y ago
Some projects are doing (2) anyway to get a better result. Examples: Kitty, Zed, File Pilot.
- LoganDark 1y ago
  File Pilot has got to be the biggest fuck-you to modern app development practices I've seen in a long time.
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.
    - dharmab 1y ago
      It's one of those things where you try it and feel how snappy it is. Like when people switched from Internet Explorer to Chrome.
ryandrake 1y ago
The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.
- SR2Z 1y ago
  But you're describing pretty much every UI toolkit!
- lmz 1y ago
  No-one would claim building a web browser is easier than putting some widgets together in Win32/Cocoa/GTK+/whatever, yet here we are with Electron.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    But people would claim that it's easier for a company to take a bunch of web frontend devs and have them develop a UI which rides on top the already-existing Electron. Which is why we have such a plague of bloated Electron apps - because companies are lazy and don't care about the end user experience.
    - lmz 1y ago
      Well, yes. Just saying that once you make draw calls and raw input events available they will be used against you.

btbuildem 1y ago

You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.

ryandrake 1y ago
Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
  - bunderbunder 1y ago
    I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting. Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.

WD-42 1y ago

It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
But for a lot of use cases that's not possible anymore, that is, a lot of the applications using the OS' UI libraries are no longer maintained. And a lot of people have to use the applications as supplied, e.g. Slack or Microsoft Teams. Which can be accessed via a web browser, sure, but dedicated apps for these are also nice because they have a dedicated spot in the app switchers.

prmoustache 1y ago

This is self induced misery. Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop. You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.