5 ms·

> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do y

by bigstrat2003 1y ago

> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do? You keep the UIs separate. Dumbing down desktop UIs to mobile capabilities is just as bad of a design as it was when people tried to jam a desktop UI into mobile. You have to play to the strengths of the platform you are on, not limit each one based on the other. Yes, it's more work, but it's well worth it to have a product which is actually good.

amatecha 1y ago
Right? It's blatantly obvious, but apparently a 3.5 trillion-dollar-market-cap corporation has apparently forgotten this simple concept. It's so disappointing how far Apple has fallen, in terms of usability of their software.
- xgkickt 1y ago
  At least Apple still allows the user to reposition the dock/taskbar.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? Linux window managers are mostly made by volunteers, so I’m not picky at all. But, locking the dock and taskbar in place, if anything, seems like extra work. Why would anybody do extra work to make their window manager worse?
    - blooalien 1y ago
      > That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? I heard rumours that Win 11 was makin' folks jump through hoops to move the taskbar anywhere other than left or right along the bottom. Personally, I ain't used Windows since Win 7; (The last really decent / tolerable Windows), and even back then I was already dual-booting with Linux.
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        Not jumping through hoops, you just can't put it at the sides anymore
    - MiddleEndian 1y ago
      The taskbar can only go on the bottom in Windows 11 lol
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        "Guys, right now users can configure the positioning of the taskbar. We should remove it! Just hardcode it to the bottom!"
    - skirmish 1y ago
      Windows 11 has stupid unchangeable defaults that keep getting worse with each service pack. To survive in a Windows VM I run, the first thing I install is always a horrible hack to restore flexibility: [1]. [1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features
    - jm4 1y ago
      GNOME. You have to install an extension to get a dock at all. Almost nobody runs vanilla GNOME because it's missing basic things. They refuse to have a system tray. I don't particularly like the system tray, but that doesn't change the fact that some apps continue to run the background when you quit them by closing the window. Up until recently, you had to install a system tray extension so you could properly quit programs like Steam. Finally, the GNOME developers added functionality where you can see background apps and close them, but it's hidden behind a few clicks. A clipboard manager is another one. KDE includes it by default. GNOME? There's an extension for that. And the problem with extensions is they always break every single time GNOME is updated.
      - reissbaker 1y ago
        This generally isn't my experience with GNOME. You have to install an extension to get a dock at all. No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app. You had to install a system tray extension I'm sure you needed to at some point, but (as you mention), that's no longer the case: it's built in by default. clipboard manager If you mean clipboard history... That's true. Although macOS doesn't have a built-in clipboard history viewer either, and I never particularly missed having one. There are plenty of GNOME extensions with clipboard history if you want one. Generally speaking I like GNOME much more than KDE, since GNOME's gesture support is much better than KDE's. I also personally dislike Windows-style infinitely-nesting-menu taskbars, which is what KDE uses, whereas GNOME is more macOS-like (although it has its own, IMO slightly cleaner style... And of course, it's much more modifiable than macOS).
        jorvi 1y ago
        > No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app. So, not a Dock. People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click. Same for launching an application via keyboard / doing a calculation / finding an emoji. People just want something akin to Spotlight (think uLauncher on Linux). Something lightweight that pops over and allows them to quickly do the thing, without a lot of visual clutter happening and then happening again in reverse.
    - GreenWatermelon 1y ago
      Windows. Windows removed the task bar positioning feature in Windows 11.
      - oblio 1y ago
        People complain about that but I've been using Windows for 25+ years including working in tech almost exclusively on Windows desktops and laptops for 20+ years across about 10 companies and the amount of times I've seen a Windows taskbar be placed anywhere except at the bottom can be counted on one hand. I'm fairly sure it's one of those features used by 0.0001% of the user base but probably 95% of those 200 000 users are techies so every forum is filled with their complaints :-)
        lmm 1y ago
        Yeah. More relevantly I suspect that more people move the taskbar accidentally than deliberately - more than once I've seen a relative have it on the left or the top and ask how to put it back.
        wolvesechoes 1y ago
        That's the thing you need to keep mind when reading anything on HN. Otherwise you would believe no one uses Windows (mostly because of taskbar thing) or Firefox is just unusable because it is unavoidable you constantly keep 1234 tabs open.
        account42 1y ago
        The problem with that attitude is that while niche features might be used by a small percentage of the user base, for every feature its a different subset. If you remove all niche features you will end up with software that is worse for a large portion of your users. This is the reason why telemetry has negative value in the hands of the average developer. You can make all kinds of logically sounding conclusions from it but they are still wrong.
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    What's mad is how few people do it. You'd think on a 16:10 people would want to make the most of the 10.
dsego 1y ago
They are probably planning on converging the two platforms together soon. There are rumors of new macbooks having touch screens. You can imagine that with the Tahoe interface getting additional padding and looking more like iPadOS it's already planned that the future of computing will be hybrid devices.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  To be fair, a touchscreen is the one thing I miss moving from my thinkpad to my apple silicon macbook.
  - II2II 1y ago
    Everyone will have different opinions on the matter. My Lenovo has a touch screen, but I hardly ever use it because I forget that it is there. Likewise, it is Wacom compatible and I was as far as picking up the stylus for it. Hardly ever use it. For the most part, I prefer to interact with computers via keyboard. Different people like interacting with computers in different ways, unfortunately, this one size fits all philosophy that permeates the tech sector creates a lot of tension because those ways of interacting are not necessarily compatible with each other.
    - lmm 1y ago
      > Different people like interacting with computers in different ways, unfortunately, this one size fits all philosophy that permeates the tech sector creates a lot of tension because those ways of interacting are not necessarily compatible with each other. A touchscreen doesn't detract if you don't use it though. I use my laptop's touchscreen/stylus pretty much exclusively for Japanese writing practice, the rest of the time it's just a regular laptop, but I'd be very sad to not have that feature when I need it.
      - sirwhinesalot 1y ago
        This would normally be the case but many touchscreen drivers love to glitch out (specially lenovo's) and disabling them is almost impossible with windows updates constantly re-enabling things. If not for that I would 100% agree it is a nice to have.
wavemode 1y ago
Web designers have been having this same debate for 15 years - what many call "mobile-first design" is actually just worsening the experience of desktop users so that things look nicer on phones and the makers don't have to do double the design work.
- hirvi74 1y ago
  > the makers don't have to do double the design work. Attitudes like this sometimes make me regret going in to software engineering. I understand time may be of the essence in some instances, but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship, and it's now just gluing over-engineered and poorly designed shitware together. At least, in the Web Dev world -- maybe other subfields have faired better?
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    It gets even worse, when doing projects where you are basically glueing SaaS products together, the common trend in enterprise consulting.
  - guappa 1y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1988/ https://xkcd.com/1988/
  - gspencley 1y ago
    > but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship It's not just software. I'm very pro-business / pro-capitalism but I will happily agree that an omnipresent business pressure is to reduce costs and get products and services to market rapidly. My wife and I bought an antique store this year, and we're converting it into a small live theatre with a magic (stage magic) retail store up front. We are pouring our hearts and soul into this and are trying to bring a high degree of craftsmanship into the venture. We're taking queues from Walt Disney World and want you to feel like you've stepped into a completely different world when you step inside our doors. Yet now that we're running out of money and things have taken way longer than we had estimated, we have to cut scope. We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves." That's business and you see enshitification in all industries. We can see this in everything from clothing to furniture to product packaging. The incentive is always to try and deliver things to market faster and cheaper and this necessitates making cuts. Craftsmanship is a luxury that we all pine for. And there are small mom & pop shops (us included) that try to deliver craftsmanship. But the market for high-cost products with high-craftsmanship is niche. Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less and that high-craftsmanship furniture was often passed down from one generation to another because it's not like people could typically afford that stuff. It was that people had to save, DIY more, own less and count on hand-me-downs.

amatecha 1y ago

Right? It's blatantly obvious, but apparently a 3.5 trillion-dollar-market-cap corporation has apparently forgotten this simple concept. It's so disappointing how far Apple has fallen, in terms of usability of their software.

xgkickt 1y ago
At least Apple still allows the user to reposition the dock/taskbar.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? Linux window managers are mostly made by volunteers, so I’m not picky at all. But, locking the dock and taskbar in place, if anything, seems like extra work. Why would anybody do extra work to make their window manager worse?
  - blooalien 1y ago
    > That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? I heard rumours that Win 11 was makin' folks jump through hoops to move the taskbar anywhere other than left or right along the bottom. Personally, I ain't used Windows since Win 7; (The last really decent / tolerable Windows), and even back then I was already dual-booting with Linux.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Not jumping through hoops, you just can't put it at the sides anymore
  - MiddleEndian 1y ago
    The taskbar can only go on the bottom in Windows 11 lol
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      "Guys, right now users can configure the positioning of the taskbar. We should remove it! Just hardcode it to the bottom!"
  - skirmish 1y ago
    Windows 11 has stupid unchangeable defaults that keep getting worse with each service pack. To survive in a Windows VM I run, the first thing I install is always a horrible hack to restore flexibility: [1]. [1] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features
  - jm4 1y ago
    GNOME. You have to install an extension to get a dock at all. Almost nobody runs vanilla GNOME because it's missing basic things. They refuse to have a system tray. I don't particularly like the system tray, but that doesn't change the fact that some apps continue to run the background when you quit them by closing the window. Up until recently, you had to install a system tray extension so you could properly quit programs like Steam. Finally, the GNOME developers added functionality where you can see background apps and close them, but it's hidden behind a few clicks. A clipboard manager is another one. KDE includes it by default. GNOME? There's an extension for that. And the problem with extensions is they always break every single time GNOME is updated.
    - reissbaker 1y ago
      This generally isn't my experience with GNOME. You have to install an extension to get a dock at all. No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app. You had to install a system tray extension I'm sure you needed to at some point, but (as you mention), that's no longer the case: it's built in by default. clipboard manager If you mean clipboard history... That's true. Although macOS doesn't have a built-in clipboard history viewer either, and I never particularly missed having one. There are plenty of GNOME extensions with clipboard history if you want one. Generally speaking I like GNOME much more than KDE, since GNOME's gesture support is much better than KDE's. I also personally dislike Windows-style infinitely-nesting-menu taskbars, which is what KDE uses, whereas GNOME is more macOS-like (although it has its own, IMO slightly cleaner style... And of course, it's much more modifiable than macOS).
      - jorvi 1y ago
        > No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app. So, not a Dock. People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click. Same for launching an application via keyboard / doing a calculation / finding an emoji. People just want something akin to Spotlight (think uLauncher on Linux). Something lightweight that pops over and allows them to quickly do the thing, without a lot of visual clutter happening and then happening again in reverse.
  - GreenWatermelon 1y ago
    Windows. Windows removed the task bar positioning feature in Windows 11.
    - oblio 1y ago
      People complain about that but I've been using Windows for 25+ years including working in tech almost exclusively on Windows desktops and laptops for 20+ years across about 10 companies and the amount of times I've seen a Windows taskbar be placed anywhere except at the bottom can be counted on one hand. I'm fairly sure it's one of those features used by 0.0001% of the user base but probably 95% of those 200 000 users are techies so every forum is filled with their complaints :-)
      - lmm 1y ago
        Yeah. More relevantly I suspect that more people move the taskbar accidentally than deliberately - more than once I've seen a relative have it on the left or the top and ask how to put it back.
      - wolvesechoes 1y ago
        That's the thing you need to keep mind when reading anything on HN. Otherwise you would believe no one uses Windows (mostly because of taskbar thing) or Firefox is just unusable because it is unavoidable you constantly keep 1234 tabs open.
      - account42 1y ago
        The problem with that attitude is that while niche features might be used by a small percentage of the user base, for every feature its a different subset. If you remove all niche features you will end up with software that is worse for a large portion of your users. This is the reason why telemetry has negative value in the hands of the average developer. You can make all kinds of logically sounding conclusions from it but they are still wrong.
- walthamstow 1y ago
  What's mad is how few people do it. You'd think on a 16:10 people would want to make the most of the 10.

dsego 1y ago

They are probably planning on converging the two platforms together soon. There are rumors of new macbooks having touch screens. You can imagine that with the Tahoe interface getting additional padding and looking more like iPadOS it's already planned that the future of computing will be hybrid devices.

soulofmischief 1y ago
To be fair, a touchscreen is the one thing I miss moving from my thinkpad to my apple silicon macbook.
- II2II 1y ago
  Everyone will have different opinions on the matter. My Lenovo has a touch screen, but I hardly ever use it because I forget that it is there. Likewise, it is Wacom compatible and I was as far as picking up the stylus for it. Hardly ever use it. For the most part, I prefer to interact with computers via keyboard. Different people like interacting with computers in different ways, unfortunately, this one size fits all philosophy that permeates the tech sector creates a lot of tension because those ways of interacting are not necessarily compatible with each other.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > Different people like interacting with computers in different ways, unfortunately, this one size fits all philosophy that permeates the tech sector creates a lot of tension because those ways of interacting are not necessarily compatible with each other. A touchscreen doesn't detract if you don't use it though. I use my laptop's touchscreen/stylus pretty much exclusively for Japanese writing practice, the rest of the time it's just a regular laptop, but I'd be very sad to not have that feature when I need it.
    - sirwhinesalot 1y ago
      This would normally be the case but many touchscreen drivers love to glitch out (specially lenovo's) and disabling them is almost impossible with windows updates constantly re-enabling things. If not for that I would 100% agree it is a nice to have.

wavemode 1y ago

Web designers have been having this same debate for 15 years - what many call "mobile-first design" is actually just worsening the experience of desktop users so that things look nicer on phones and the makers don't have to do double the design work.

hirvi74 1y ago
> the makers don't have to do double the design work. Attitudes like this sometimes make me regret going in to software engineering. I understand time may be of the essence in some instances, but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship, and it's now just gluing over-engineered and poorly designed shitware together. At least, in the Web Dev world -- maybe other subfields have faired better?
- pjmlp 1y ago
  It gets even worse, when doing projects where you are basically glueing SaaS products together, the common trend in enterprise consulting.
- guappa 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1988/ https://xkcd.com/1988/
- gspencley 1y ago
  > but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship It's not just software. I'm very pro-business / pro-capitalism but I will happily agree that an omnipresent business pressure is to reduce costs and get products and services to market rapidly. My wife and I bought an antique store this year, and we're converting it into a small live theatre with a magic (stage magic) retail store up front. We are pouring our hearts and soul into this and are trying to bring a high degree of craftsmanship into the venture. We're taking queues from Walt Disney World and want you to feel like you've stepped into a completely different world when you step inside our doors. Yet now that we're running out of money and things have taken way longer than we had estimated, we have to cut scope. We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves." That's business and you see enshitification in all industries. We can see this in everything from clothing to furniture to product packaging. The incentive is always to try and deliver things to market faster and cheaper and this necessitates making cuts. Craftsmanship is a luxury that we all pine for. And there are small mom & pop shops (us included) that try to deliver craftsmanship. But the market for high-cost products with high-craftsmanship is niche. Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less and that high-craftsmanship furniture was often passed down from one generation to another because it's not like people could typically afford that stuff. It was that people had to save, DIY more, own less and count on hand-me-downs.