Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
I am sick of modern minimalist UI where functionality is not a priority.
I always prefer win32 applications for this reason.
Heck, I even prefer the ultra-skeuomorphic textured-everything approach of Mountain Lion-era OS X over the current ultra-minimalist approach where everything is either a hairline or a big flat monocolored shape.
It actually makes it harder to parse the UI when a button, a text field, a label, and a random part of the window can look exactly the same. I’d rather take a file manager that tries to look like a 1980s hifi stereo.
Or you know, a reasonable middle ground.
In the early '90s Alan Cooper wrote a book called About Face which unfortunately has dropped off the face of the earth as far as its influence on UI design is concerned. One of its many sensible proscriptions was that UI elements that can be interacted with should be visibly distinct from elements that are just there to display information. As a programmer, it drives me insane to have to use any of the modern apps that have completely abandoned this principle - or to have to deal with designers who have literally mocked me for thinking this is important.
Yes, that is the worst aspect of modern UI design. Interactable elements that are distinguished from labels solely by color because accessibility is so 2010. Labels that have that same color for emphasis. Flat black windows with black borders in front of other flat black windows that will get focus if you accidentally click them.
Or what the article is about: Tiny, hidden scroll bars because Fitts’s law means nothing and every user has a touchscreen and 20/20 vision.
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But but… but… Apple bad!
That shit started with win2k/winme already. That’s when the borders of controls were made thinner, icons were made with less contrast and the first flat buttons that only show their border on hover were being used. So it’s quite some time already that this is going downhill.
(tbf, I think the flat buttons were mostly intended for toolbars, but still, style won over function)
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You can hide ribbon menu afaik by double clicking on any tap. I’m sure least MS Office support it.
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I see.
So, is there a better alternative to ribbons?
I am a developer and I am genuinely interested to know if there’s a better way to make frequently used buttons accessible.
I can’t speak for games or something like that, but I’ve been using MS Office since the mid 90s, and they kept the menus well into 2000 and beyond. I never had a problem finding anything. But then at some point after allowing menus if you wanted them, they totally dispensed with them and made the ribbon mandatory across all Office apps.
It’s been fifteen goddamn years and I -STILL- can’t find shit. Like, I’ve used mail merge maybe three times in my life, but even today I could find it rapidly in the old menu system: it was grouped next to the labels over to the right somewhere but before Help, take me 10, 15 seconds tops to find it.
Today, it’s “ms word [version] mail merge location” in a search or dragging out the customize ribbon tool and simply skimming though All Commands to see if I find it there first. No fucking clue where it’s hidden now, because I hardly ever use it, and the menus are not organized in intuitive, regular layouts: some buttons perform a single task, some open a submenu, others open a full window of further options.
Menus are a simple, elegant and time effective way of organizing a complex GUI: intuitive, hidden until you need them, no excess use of real estate, can be flipped through rapidly if you’re not familiar with the app, fairly standard for all users, and easy to walk someone through remotely. The ribbon has none of that, IMO.
In an app like Word, put frequently used buttons on the old format bar and put the menus back above them; make the menus fixed but the toolbars customizable to a small degree, and now you have the best of all worlds, IMO.
I think what killed menus are all the people who can’t fucking read.
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I’m 100% with you on all of this! Just give me a classic windows menu at the top. I don’t want any ribbons, side bars, hovering bullshit that covers what I’m working on… Everything should have a keyboard shortcut. Everything should have visibility options.
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Control key shortcuts.
Form follows function! Not the other way around!
You’re correct.
However, in our capitalist world, form follows profit.