Hi, I'm posting here on Zig Forums because where else can I rant a little? Who knows maybe some of you do UI work and this may touch your thoughts. I'm a dinosaur and I'm still not using touchscreens. And I won't live long enough to use Johnny Mnemonic style VR headset and gloves neither. Anyway here goes:
* Don't make buttons, menus, gauges and other stuff appear and disappear. Disable or enable (grey out) if you must, but never make them ghost in and out from nowhere. * Don't resize the dialog or its controls automatically. Resizing stuff should be left manual, up to the user. * If your program or webpage has a "mobile" version then it's assumed that the other version is for desktops: this means mouse and keyboard. Stop giving desktop users your touch optimized interfaces when a mouse pointer is 1000x more accurate than any phonefag's greasy finger.
Thank you very much, have a nice and productive day. Alternatively I'll see you in hell!
Sorry. I don't use software written by trannies and pajeets.
Luis Howard
All modern software is written by trannies and pajeets
Camden Hall
I thought so, too. I didn't know that about their anatomy.
Polite sage for offtopic.
Logan Brown
Developers should know this: each operating system or desktop environment provides a document called Human Interface Guidelines. But you can call it the holy bible. Heed its rules. Do not deviate from it. Your interface must not stand out. It must look like it belongs with the system and every other program for it. You must never use custom window borders, custom buttons, any shit like that. Good user interface is plain.
Good user interface is actually one that works with the psychology of how all humans work. The Window Icon Menu Pointer paradigm of user interfaces does not work optimally for humans because of the modal nature of how this paradigm works that hinders the nature of humans to form habits. Jef Raskin wrote a book about the proper way to design a human interface that works in account of human psychology.
I have clicked on "use this device for backup" far too many times in Windows 7 after inserting a usb stick due to the change in layout 1 second after the dialog comes up. If you can't do the layout when the window appears, kill yourself and don't write software. This goes for websites, too.
Juan Wood
This is an insult to flat. Even a DFC has some definition.
Nathaniel Miller
Um no sweetie, we write our own widgets in HTML5/CSS so that our electron app looks the same everywhere.
You think I'm going to write 5 interfaces for my program? Or actually "port" it to your platform like it's 1980? Or write it in an outdated language like C/Obj-C, or LISP/Scheme?
Right, and pretty much no one does it. "Do you really want to close without saving?". Yes you fuck, get out of the way.
Brayden Bailey
Now that you mention this I want to find the inventor of popups and annoy him until he seppukus himself
Leo Fisher
this is mostly true. and it is as it should be. open-source = trannies commercial = pajeets
consider the following- as any technology progresses across time, the price of it drops--but the people making it change as well. it begins with the wealthiest and most-educated workers, and progresses away from them, to the poorest and least-educated workers
Jose Peterson
Anybody tried out his Cat/LEAP editor's interface to see how it compares with vi/emacs?
The proper term is "modality"
David Morales
I fucking hate this shit so much I got angry just reading this
Nathaniel Jones
No, they are adequate at times. It's too easy to slip onto the close button.
Jonathan Baker
Why not make the close button double-click?
Connor Bell
look very non-text tbh
Jacob Butler
Why would open sores have a tendency to attract trannies and lose non-trannies over time?
Ryder Powell
That popup dialog that is a nuissance >95% of the time will still save you from accidentally discarding your work once in a blue moon.
Asher Bennett
hands off my goose, bastard
Logan Hill
Autosaves every few minutes are a better way.
Jose Ortiz
few minutes? why not automatically and transparently? like Sublime Text does
Matthew Nelson
How often do you open a productive program, do some shit with it, and then close it without wanting to save your progress? That shit has saved me countless times.
A normal person can make a lot of progress in a "few minutes", pajeet.
Cooper Bennett
autosaves are garbage. Every editor should have automatic version control.
Juan Collins
Autosaves are discarded on close. They are for when the shitty app crashes
Thomas Watson
found the brainlet
Connor Scott
It's happened a lot. I'll start to edit something in vi or create a new file, and then decide what I was going to do is wrong or come up with a better idea, and then just :q!
Isaac Brown
You're too goddamn finnicky. Nuisance gone in 0.1 seconds
Xavier Sullivan
Often I have two files open but only want to keep the changes in one of them. I've literally never forgot to save my shit, Ctrl+S before close is hardwired into my brain by now.
Gavin Sanders
...
Brody Kelly
doesn't x do the same?
Chase Nguyen
all the time, you stupid nigger. for example temporary stuff in notepad. of course i just press the close button and then alt+n
Brody Mitchell
t. retard
Tyler Hughes
Please report yourself to the nearest gassing station immediately.
Jose Wright
...
Brandon Anderson
A real text editor keeps all the opened files in tabs, saves the session if you close the editor, and resumes when you open it again, including files that haven't been saved. And it won't ask for confirmation about tabs that have never been saved as files, and don't have anything in them.
How about you stop using shit software. If I make a program that shows a popup every time you click it, that means my program is shit, not that popups are shit.
Nicholas Adams
way to show your reddit. lurk more
Lincoln Nelson
Geese always terrified me, but They don't want you dead. They want you to suffer.
TV Tropes has always been, and always will be gay. Just like you.
Nathan Richardson
I agree. The UI on the Linux kernel bothers me to no end.
Jeremiah King
EVERY TIME
Ethan James
That's a great explanation, thanks
Kevin Wood
The Great Crash, the first time the entire site imploded due to DDOS, and had to be restored from Google/Wayback cache, because Eddie didn't back up anywhere near often enough.
The site's downfall IMHO was before SJWs, and would better be described as a rulecuck/no fun allowed coup in what had before been a pretty much unmoderated site. By the time SJWs really hit around 2012, the site's soul was long dead in my eyes.
Maybe, but much like Zig Forums, it was also fun.
Caleb Thomas
Do you prefer cupboards with glass doors to wooden ones? Usually it's your system scaling preferences that manage that. My dialogs don't resize at all. Stop using that 96dpi CRT monitor, gramps. My Retina display does not have this problem. Try visiting those websites on 50% scale to see how they look for normal people.
Mouse is a substitute for lightpen input interface with is in fact a skeuomorph for normal pen which had a predecessor in form of stilo, a carved wooden stick for clay tablets which came as a more robust way to keep data compared to ink and brush on stone which was preceded with finger, ink and stone walls. A computer mouse and GUI pointers are mix of skeuomorphs for both finger and pen.
Hudson Campbell
UIs should only be a frontend to text commands.
Oliver Murphy
bullshit do you know about DPI scaling?
Michael Jones
Yeah, that analogy actually works better in favor of stable interfaces that better exploit muscle memory. OP was referring to windows that animate to change size, shape, and position when changing modes. OP's not referring to different DPI scales, but to having giant buttons and text fields that have labels ten times bigger than body text, to compensate for the imprecision of conductive touchscreens.
Colton Collins
My sides. They actually lost data over a fucking DDoS? What database were they using?
Are you talking about when they deleted the awesome tentacle rape page because of google ads? I tink they also dumbed down pages so the tropes listing wasn't very specific. I used to go to a page and see literally hundreds of examples, now it's been "cleaned up". They don't like people documenting tropes for real life personalities or stuff like panty shots.
Isaac Clark
Don't remember, but judging from their use of some incredibly ancient version of PMWiki, LOOOONG after MediaWiki had become the standard, probably not one up to date or properly configured.
That was a bit later, although it certainly helped accelerate the problem by giving more "justification" for recruiting more mods (from among the worst lickspittles) and giving them more power, in addition to forming sections of the site like TRS & Crowners that functioned solely to cultivate grievance-mongering from busybodies.
Just purging racy stuff (TBH the bulk of that was self-indulgent fanfic filler that didn't show up until newfags came along) would've been infinitely less lame than the bulk of what happened, which was purging "negativity". Anything that expressed disdain, sarcasm, or disapproval, trope or example, was purged. And just for good measure, anything that resembled conversation, humor, irony, wordgames, "obscure" references (seriously! I got three tropes purged due to highschool-level history references!), or worst of all "controversy", no matter how obviously polite and lighthearted, was purged as well.
Luis Brown
They deserve everything that happens to them.
Oh shit I just remembered that Internet Backdraft page. Used to be so fun to read about various internet dramas, now it's literally neutered as no examples are allowed.
David Foster
actually mouse and any other pointers are retarded which OP failed to mention. good luck doing anything productive when all you can do is move a pointer around the screen and slowly press 5 buttons. then again half your PC trash right now lacks keyboard shortcuts
Jackson Thompson
modal windows are cancer period. this includes programs that take 10 seconds to load and then appear. a simple fix window systems could use is to show a window right away and have the program's content appear in it later
Jordan Scott
Which units should be preferred to design GUI?
I personally think we should go with DPI and vague virtual units or percentages, but I dunno. Thoughts?
Jack Baker
+ an expressive DSL for definition of constraints which are solved for specific combinations of fonts, content, DPI, etc. + margins, padding, etc. in virtual units which depend on DPI and can also be scaled by user whenever they like + same as above for fonts, but it uses different scale, so it can be scaled by user independently
Android is close to this if the application developer is not a shithead.
Kevin Bailey
It depends on the application. Image applications would want to show a picture using 100% zoom at pixel perfect precision, therefore those programs would use pixel units some of the time. Most programs would deal with buttons and text areas and such things, which would be measured using non-pixel measurements. Some professional print programs might want to display a page or a picture in 1:1 scale with real life, so a physical measurement might be useful in those cases. However, not all monitors can guarantee a physical size (projectors for example, but CRTs also to an extent), so the pixel density should generally not be trusted to be in correspondence with physical reality.
Julian Barnes
36495 pixels have been wasted on this UI. Why are old people so dumb?
I am a big fan of Olia Lialina's even though I always forget her name writings on UI, and feel like tech designers unending quest to make computers as hidden, transparent and invisible as possible is doing us great disservice. When it comes to computer screens this quest manifests as treating them as paper emulator which is quite poor at it's job. Both extremes do it. Console purists treat screen as a teletype, macOS hipsters treat it as glossy magazine. But screen is a screen is a screen. It is important to recognize it as medium of our message and treat it as such. Disregarding the externals (wires, power supplies, cases and such) for now, screen is made of pixels, both in computer memory and now physically. Therefore pixels should be fundamental measure of all things on screen. I know it's inflexible, but I think benefit of less abstraction between hardware and user worth it. Resulting code simplicity is also a nice bonus. And well executed pixelart just looks fucking gorgeous.
Luke Jones
I can't even begin to imagine how would Olia approved UI would look like though. Blinkenlights switcheroo of Altair 8800?
Jack Cooper
...
Eli Hall
So much worse on Windows. The locked parent window cannot be moved, resized or minimized. Most Linux software seems to be less lock happy, and in the case where one does modal lock, the parent window can still be somewhat manipulated if you want to get it out of the way. It has been this way since at least Windows 3.x
More on Windows UI retardation: Scroll wheel focus on click instead of on hover! How did they even come up with this when every 3rd party mouse driver back in the Win95 days did it right?
Evan Smith
Only if the modal window is still within the bounds of the parent. Otherwise you forget which modal belongs to which parent.
