I have to pile onto the criticism of the hidden scroll bars, and other similar features (like the hidden buttons of PDF viewers now, such as in Chrome). Discoverability is a problem.
For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when that "feature" came out.
I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look? Those are real and important functions I desire. What I actually need is for news and blog sites to stop covering 1/4 of their vertical window space with hovering frames, ads, and banners asking me to subscribe. Which, by the way, subsequently don't properly calculate into that now hidden scroll bar's movement and cause you to overshoot the displayable area when paging down. End rant.
For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features
You don't even have to be elderly.
The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears.
How did that conversation go?
Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go?
Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or ever think to look for it.
Who thought that was a good idea?
I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
I couldn't agree more. I once had a really interesting conversation with an accessibility person who said in passing "accessibility is for everyone". He didn't make a big point of it, but it really stuck with me, and I'm always reminded of it when I see things like this. I've been working in the digital world since the late 90s, keep everything up to date, have a recent iPhone etc. etc. etc. and I'm stil occasionally stumped by things like how to turn on repeat in Apple Music on my phone.
Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had to scroll down to hide it.
Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it.
I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it.
Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:
1. They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.
2. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).
For the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things.
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Your point in general still stands, though. Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit.
I’m 28, and I don’t know how to use most apps and websites anymore, and I’m a web developer. My intro to computers was when I was 6 years old, and I was trying to install games on Windows 95 in a language I didn’t understand(English). The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work. So many of my childhood experiences with computers relied on consistent spatial representations. Kids seem to do just fine learning all these unique UI’s, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a loss of “general computing capability”, for lack of a better term?
I openly admit it these days. If I had a VCR today I'd be the one struggling to figure out how to record something with it, even though as a kid I loved that stuff. And I'm only in my 30's. It's not really about whether I'm able to figure it out (if 8 year old me could figure it out, 30+ year old should be able to as well), it's about whether I have the patience for a badly designed UI.
One of the common responses I see when I complain about a bad UI is someone saying "no it's easy you just do ____". It's frustrating because that's not the point - the point is that I had to do research to find the answer!
There are cases, especially with specialized tools for complex tasks, where you are expected to spend time learning how to use the tool effectively. Photoshop is a great example. Vim is a great example. Figuring out stupid stuff like whether that grayish light blue vs dark gray fill on the checkbox means "enabled" or "disabled" is not an example.
Being tech savvy can be a burden when it comes to discovering new features because you're afraid of making a "stupid" mistake. Accidentally posting to Facebook is something the tech illiterate do, not us, so why would we click a random icon when we're not sure if it will do something embarrassing?
I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when
1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and
2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.
I am a UI spelunker. I right-click, option-click, dobule-clicke, force-press every little interface element and I am so happy when the software delights me with a surprising feature.
I type the konami code as soon as I discover a web app supports keyboard input. I have no problem pulling-to-reveal and shaking to undo. In fact, it makes me feel awesome to know all this little secrets and have people all like: Wait! how did you do that?
But when I design software I don't do it for people like me. I want my users to feel awesome and delighted without being UI spelunkers. Good design doesn't make you think.
Even worse than undiscoverable features are land mine features, where some subtle gesture triggers a wild and unwanted mode change. Extra credit if the mode change is hard to get out of.
I do think age can play a role, or rather experience. As you live through more UI churn the less your willing to invest time into each new UI generation or fad.
If an application isn't either essential to me or incredibly obvious to use, I am unlikely to learn it's fancy new UI. Why bother?
This extends to APIs and DSLs too since there are often so short lived.
My suspicion is that Apple’s design mentality is to strive toward the minimalist ideal of an interface in which everything necessary fits on one (phone) screen, and users are acclimated to ask Siri for anything/everything else, e.g. “Siri show me a print/download dialog”
>I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.
> I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
I suspect I don't know some crucial (in Apple designers' mind) swipes on my iOS devices, because they're just hard to discover.
There's a language to UIs that evolves over time. The menu hamburger, the on/off circle with a line. Take those back a decade or more and you would have the same problems, but eventually they percolate through people's experiences and expectations and you can rely on people knowing what they are now, for the most part (it helps that the on/off icon is used for physical devices too).
Pull down for search is something that it maybe Apple is trying to cement (and only for mobile, I guess?), but hasn't crossed (and maybe won't) to Android devices. Apple is known for doing stuff like this and pushing changes, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. no floppy in laptops, no CD-ROM in laptops, no Mic jack, etc)
The reason why they pull the "what about the elderly?" card is simple. Most of us can figure it out, even if it's stupid. My parents however have a much, much harder time trying to figure out how to do something that is counter-intuitive. It's more about problem solving and experience with existing user interfaces than anything else. Designers nowadays definitely design things in a manner that suggests they assume some pre-existing knowledge of UI patterns.
I have this complaint about iOS all the time that often the "clean look" in iOS leads to grids that exactly match the available viewport and without scrollbars you have no idea if there is more to scroll without idly swiping things around.
I notice that becomes something of a tic of iOS users, if you watch others, in that just about every new screen or panel there's often at least a squiggle of pushing the screen or panel around just to figure out the boundaries.
One of the things I thought was brilliant about early Windows 8-era "metro" design: it was the only era Windows briefly experimented with going scrollbar free (it went back to scrollbar "light" soon after) and when they did so they absolutely made sure that the application grids never lined up with viewport. If there was something to scroll, it would stick out a bit, always that little hint that there was something more further down or right.
It got some flak, especially from macOS design fans, for not being "clean enough", but you'd have apps with no visible scrollbar and you knew whether or not there was anything to scroll just looking at them. You didn't have to squiggle your finger around (or fiddle with the scroll wheel) to check.
Oh so I'm not alone (iOS user here). There have been parts of UIs I have totally failed to notice because I didn't realise you could scroll, because it didn't look like anything was beyond the screen.
"Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.
No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.
The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage."
When my girlfriend got an iMac I spent a minute or two trying to find the power button. I think it’s a good example of form over function. You can’t even turn the damn thing on.
The part about recovery and the lack of a universal undo/back function and instead offloading it to the developer, resulting in an inconsistent mess really drives the point home.
What's most telling is how even Apple often does an astonishingly bad job at it - it really sets the precedent regarding diminished importance.
As an exercise: Browse the App Store for a while and count the number of different ways it implements "go back one step".
It's funny how when the world ran at 640x480 we had scroll bars, separators and buttons with 3D effects, but nowadays with higher resolutions and bigger screens designers strive for the ultimate clean design. Hidden elements that appear when certain gestures are performed, flat buttons that are indistinguishable from labels/text with a colored background, borders and separators get removed or turned into barely visible thin lines.
One time, I thought I was going crazy because I could see a file with ls, but it wasn't in my Finder window. The problem was the hidden scrollbars, and the file was outside the window.
I changed the setting to Mac OS always shows scroll bars, but I have no idea how someone thought hiding them was a good idea.
The first thing I thought of while reading your comment were graphical adventure games, where you pretty much had to click on everything to see what did something.
The fundamental difference with modern user interfaces is that you now have to tap, drag your finger across the screen in different directions, drag both fingers across the screen in different directions, pinch, unpinch, and whatever other gestures seem to be relevant to the situation. For good measure, try gestures that don't seem to be relevant either because the software may surprise you!
Now I know that a lot of these user interface decisions do offer value, but they are only valuable if you know that they exist.
I use this every single day on my locked-down work laptop. It fixes so many sites! I recommend it as often as I can, and I'm surprised that its use is not more widespread.
I use this probably a hundred times a day :( It makes me so sad.
I've considered writing an extension to kill them all by default, but I'm afraid I'll break some site in a way that really confuses me and end up wasting more time figuring out what happened than I save with the extension.
This is great, but to use it I need to sticky the bookmarks bar to the top of my screen when vertical space is already precious. Does anybody know something else that does the same thing without this issue?
> For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features.
I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability.
Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display is off, long press is Siri.)
30 here. On my iPad, if I bring up an app in the floating view, I often have to rediscover how to dismiss it. I just tried to do it now and this is how it went:
My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar at the top and realized it was probably a drag handle. Grabbed that and tried to flick it downwards. No luck, but it moved in a way that made it seem like dragging down more would do it, but nope of course that wasn't it either. How about a flick to the right? Nope. Dragging it to the right? Agh! It's trying to dock into split screen mode! I dragged it around some more hoping for different behavior before dropping it back into place and again trying a flick to the right using the handle at the top. And that FINALLY did it. Apparently I didn't put enough enthusiasm into the first flick I tried... What a pain in the ass.
I don't like how sensitive to speed some of the actions are. I have similar issues with bringing up the dock. I usually end up going to the home screen instead.
Good games are pretty good at discoverability like this. I remember playing GTA IV or V and if I hadn't been using some skill, it surfaces tips. Apple has to be slightly more careful because it can't just spam you with "Double-tap to Apple Pay," but recognizing that you just used Apple Pay, but you unlocked you phone and did it from Wallet might mean there's a new skill they can show you.
Especially with the usual screen ratios nowadays, their huge width goes unused 99% of the time anyway. So there's an only 1% incentive from usability side to remove the right vertical scrollbar...
As a matter of fact, I actually use in my Firefox vertical tabs stacked left, to spare me some vertical space on the laptop screen.
That means that even if I run Safari full-screen, which is inconvenient, I have only 680 vertical pixels for content.
It's amazing how many web sites I run into that throw up fixed-position pop-ups that are bigger than that, and I can't close them or scroll to see their content because the designers or middle managers decided that every person on the planet is rocking a 27-inch 5K display.
Usually I just close the window and never visit the site again. If it's important, I break out the dev tools and start invoking display:none until I hit the right element.
If I might ask, what are you using for vertical tabs? I haven't found a good add-on that shows the tabs on the side and also hides the tabs on the top.
It’s so strange to me to read these kind of comments, and to even see this article.
I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen.
It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see!
No negative feelings toward people who prefer them - it’s actually quite interesting to see the comments, I assumed everyone agreed they were better hidden until today! (Which, as a Mac user, is obviously part of the problem being expressed!)
> how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see!
Why should I try scrolling everywhere all the time instead of having the UI indicate to me that there is more content? Especially if it isn't clear by having a word or sentence cut of. Maybe the scroll area ends with a paragraph and it's not clear there is more. Why put aesthetics over usability?
Some other comments here claim iPhone users develop some kind of swipe tic where they instinctively try to scroll around on every screen that opens. Would be a pretty sad testimony to this UI concept.
I've been super annoyed by trying to grab the scroll thing on the bar in a super long pdf. It keeps disappearing and on long PDFs where I want to scroll to, say, the middle, it disappears before I can precisely grab it. It's maddening sometimes.
I resort to the down key to make the scrollbar appear without losing my position in the doc. In fact, in Preview, my default workflow is to click on the main content panel as soon as the doc open; else the down key might take me to the next page, which defeats the purpose.
Discoverability is also a fascinating challenge for those home voice-control devices. What exactly can an Alexa do? Did it get any new features recently? Who could say? You could may be get an email telling you about its cool new ability to rename timers or something, but other than explicitly reading about the new features in a manual or newsletter, how would you possibly think to ask?
I feel the same way about other "unspecified functionality" services, like fancy hotels with "personal butlers." What does the butler do? "Whatever you need" is not an answer. I don't have familiarity with butlers, I don't know what is and is not a reasonable request.
There has always been a struggle with UX design, people want simplicity but at the same time they want clarity and complexity of ideas. People want great knowledge, but they don't want to read about the nuances that makes it a great knowledge.
There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.
Please don't blame people for wanting when it is "the design" department that forces these changes on people.
How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.
Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.
it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.
We used to achieve this balance with a manual.
A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.
So just a couple of days ago I decided to revamp my VPS VM host. I ended up putting Ubuntu on a VM.
So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things.
I open a window, and decide I need to resize it.
There's no cursor change when you move the mouse over the edge, or the corner. It just doesn't let you resize the window. There's no three-lines things in the corner either, you just can't grab the corner to resize it.
I ended up having to google that you need to ALT+RMouse to do this.
I don't know why that would be the default. It seems crazy.
This is how my WM (dwm) works (except I patched it to use Super instead of Alt), and it’s a better way of resizing (not requiring such finicky mouse placement). But that is really weird to hear XFCE doesn’t allow both methods like JWM (and I would have assumed, any WM not aimed at relatively extreme minimalists and power users), I wonder if it’s a bug.
There are several ways to fix this without needing to be aware of the window's off screen position.
- From the keyboard WIN+{Left|Right} resizes and pins the window to the side of the screen
- From the keyboard WIN+Up to maximize the window (or right click on the task bar and select maximize. Now, drag the title bar from the top and the window will unpin from the screen and move with the mouse
- Right click on the task bar and choose any of the windows arrangement options (Stack, tile, cascade)
Scroll bars weren't really "hidden", though; they were obviated.
At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling.
Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than desktop computers at this point—including many old people!) and has built the OS around the idea that, just like on a touchscreen, scrolling is a gesture that you can attempt to apply anywhere, whether there's an affordance for it built into the app or not—i.e. that scrollability is a universal, system-level operation, not something up to the application. Every application in macOS/iOS is inherently built in terms of having some kind of "viewport" with a "document" loaded into it; and scrolling moves the "document" around within the "viewport." Even if that's a pointless thing to do, it still attempts to perform the operation.
(Though in terms of feedback, iOS has a more coherent responsivity to "attempted" scrolling than macOS does. You can "tug" at the top and bottom edges of the screen in pretty much any iOS app and get some extra out-of-document blank space, with a snapback when you let go. Whereas, in macOS apps, this only happens for "content" regions; whereas for "chrome" regions—e.g. the top-level icon listing in System Preferences—the region will only have snapback if the window is small enough for the region to be scrollable. If the window is large enough that everything is presented, your scroll gestures just go unacknowledged, as if the window wasn't a "document" in a "viewport" at all. Interestingly, you also can't resize such all-chrome windows; you only ever get a scrollbar on them if running on a computer with a too-low display resolution.)
What is missing, though, is a visual indication of whether scrolling will do anything, before you try it. Scrollbars used to help with this, yes. But the fix isn't simply reintroducing them. The world scrollbars were built for no longer exists: both web apps and modern native apps now do progressive loading/"infinite scroll", where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware of whether more content will be discovered when it tries to demand another chunk of data from its backend. Even when you force-enable the scrollbar, the size and relative position of the "scroll-thumb" now communicates no information about your "actual" scroll position in many apps.
As well, there are now real infinte-canvas apps (like Maps) where a scroll "position" wouldn't even be a coherent concept, because the document under the viewport is a self-connected torus. Universal gesture scrolling adapts well to this concept; scrollbars don't.
IMHO, I'd like to see a slight fade-to-black or 3D "bend away from camera" applied to the inner edges of the scrollable viewport, whenever the document in the viewport is not sitting flush with that edge of the viewport. This would provide a visual affordance of "scrollability" without providing any often-misleading information of relative scroll-position. Infinite-scroll documents would just always be "faded out" on all edges. Seems obvious?
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look?
Nah, it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. Stick a title/tab bar, tool bar, and maybe an always-on bookmarks bar on top of the window, and an always-on start menu at the bottom, and you'll find that the PDF only gets about 400px of viewport real-estate. And now you want the PDF's own controls to steal more of that? There's a reason that Chrome first made the status bar into an overlay, and then merged the title bar with the status bar — it's trying to reclaim vertical space for exactly these constrained scenarios.
> it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays.
We had scrollbars on 640x480 both ways and liked it. Even SGIs with 1280x1024 monitors had scrollbars, and it wasn't a burden that some folks today seem to think it was.
Speaking of title bars, the trend to move content into the title bar is terrible for usability. There is nowhere left to click to move a window. Not to mention each app choosing a different color/style for this region. Do designers assume everyone runs 1 full screen window at a time?
I think you're comparing apples and pears when you talk about Maps. There's a clear use case for scrollbars on vertical documents (i.e. most of them), and even when viewing something in an infinite scroll, so you know where you are when scrolling back up. (Although don't get me started on the UX of infinite scrolling!)
Edit: Thinking further about this, the affordance for maps is a change in the cursor to a grabbing hand. You have to learn that, but there's a clear visual difference in the cursor to show that something differnt happens there.
I have such display. It is quite spacious once you remove all decorations [1], that is no window decorations (xmonad), hide URL bar and browser tabs [2], no page scrollbars [3]. I encourage everyone to try at least browser addons.
> shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays
So users should purchase new equipment to suit designers? Or maybe - crazy idea, I know - designers should design for the equipment people actually have and not whine or look down their noses because not everyone makes designer salaries.
> where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware
That's a really poor excuse. If that "awareness" is missing then the code is structured wrong, probably because somebody cargo-culted a design pattern without ever once thinking of the user.
But srsly, that's not a snide comment but rather a hint that your personal sensibility may not reflect broad sensibilities. And of course, there may not even be a single broad sensibility -- look at the political parties in the US, both the major divisions and the subdivisions within each. Sometimes, the maker of something has to make a design choice consistent with their [market success proven] direction.
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed.
When I'm on my laptop, I do. Every inch of vertical space is precious. On my display monitor, not so much, but having the buttons reveal rather than permanent doesn't detract in the slightest.
> For anyone (cough, elderly parents)
For a long time, I have belived that these were problems that the elderly somehow could not figure out. I blamed it on them for a long time.
Then I opened Adobe After Effects for the first time and it suddenly made sense to me, the UI I found intuitive was just years of practice. How is an x in a corner a close button? What's so intuitive about swiping up to see a menu?
Another one of such thing: please try to scroll on your site using a mouse wheel from time to time, even if you're normally using a touchpad (from your laptop or an external one)!
Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad.
Oh wow, so that’s what’s making people create those utterly horrible "fancy experience" sites. I always wondered if they never use their own site. Turns out they do, on one specific device that has a bit of a special snowflake thing going on.
This highlights the bigger issue of web developers and designers only working on the latest and greatest hardware with the fastest performance and the best user experience. Their users may not have access to the same hardware, while developers and designers are totally blind to how their software might perform on anything but a recent model MacBook Pro or XPS.
I'm definitely in the mouse club. Using a touchpad all day long makes my fingers cramp up. It's fine for couch laptopping, but when I'm sitting at a desk I use a display, mouse, and mechanical keyboard for an overall better (and more ergonomic) experience.
I would expect devs who use macbooks to generally use them the same way as the general population generally uses them. I can't think of a plausible reason to suspect that developers specifically might prefer traditional mice.
One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. When I play a first person game I always use my trusty old intellimouse. Otherwise, I use the trackpad unless I'm simultaneously using my mechanical keyboard, but if my keyboard had an attached trackpad I'd probably be using that. But mousing in general just isn't a very important to my workflows and trackpads work just as well as mice for nearly all tasks. Arguably they work better for some since you don't have to move your hand far from the laptop's keyboard to use the trackpad, while using a dedicated mouse means taking your hand completely off the keyboard.
It's definitely personal preference. I love touchpads and actually use a drawing tablet (with finger support) as a large touchpad when I am at my desk. I have a mouse nearby because it works better for some things but most of the time use the touchpad.
yes, that's pretty terrible, I always scroll with the mouse wheel, since I'm tool old to be rubbing a plate of glass and not feel like a moron. But this one, made my finger hurt a bit and I din't even make it half way down.
Middle click "open in new tab" breaks on lots of thing using fancy web frameworks because someone forgot to code-up support and thought "why bother with A tags. I can use divs and spans!"
Works fine on my ThinkPad in Firefox as well. But if I try to scroll with my normal mouse, it doesn't scroll smooth but a set amount per "click" of the scroll wheel. So it looks really laggy.
I guess it depends on your scrolling device and browser? Using my mouse wheel the animation feels as if it was jumping 20 frames every time I go up or down, which makes it really frustrating to read text content or even see what the animation is trying to demonstrate.
Wow, it's truly awful, even on an Apple trackpad or scroll mouse! Like a video except instead of pressing play once, you have to keep scrolling down to play. Why not just embed a video? I know I've seen this terrible pattern on other sites, too.
When I scroll down, I expect one thing to happen: content on the page moves from the bottom to the top, revealing previously un-seen content on the bottom. That's it. Please stop trying to make scrolling do something else!
That website froze my browser (Chrome) for about 5 seconds and then continued to scroll poorly. 2018 MBP with 32GB memory. I never really had a problem with apple's marketing pages previously. This one's really bad.
additionally, if your mouse is over top of the web page when you scroll, and your scrolling hovers over some item that responds to scrolling (say a text box), the page scrolling comes to a stop or stutters until the text bar scrolls.
Annoying. The only fix is to hover over the scroll bar itself (and I have macos -> system prefences -> general -> show scroll bars: always)
I wonder if the designers of the systems , after becoming so bored with the status quo, begin to fetishize the sleek hidden thing that is scroll bar right now ... like when coders are writing algorithms for say, 10-15 years I bet their code gets a lot more compact and sleek looking , almost akin to tight 3 character variable leet code solutions etc.. maybe this is just the same phenomenon tearing its head in the design world , except instead of compact code blocks its compact UIs that , to a certain metric, yes , the designer has pushed further on a certain metric ex; see more of the application window cause scroll bar is hidden, but loses sight of what is lost.
> like when coders are writing algorithms for say, 10-15 years I bet their code gets a lot more compact and sleek looking , almost akin to tight 3 character variable leet code solutions
I have never seen that to be the case unless in an environment with very heavy constraints like embedded. If anything, a competent programmer 10-15 years in would skew towards more descriptive and clear variable naming as they've been burned in the past by having to maintain some of that "leet" code.
> when coders are writing algorithms for say, 10-15 years I bet their code gets a lot more compact and sleek looking
If those coders are like me their code becomes more verbose, less clever, more obvious, less dependent on the quirks of the programming language I use. The reason is that it's easier for me and the other developers in the team to read and understand what it does.
On my way to here I really hated many geeky clever and brilliant pieces of code I found in projects I inherited. They made me and my customers lose days at decoding all that brilliance.
> coders are writing algorithms for say, 10-15 years I bet their code gets a lot more compact and sleek looking , almost akin to tight 3 character variable leet code solutions etc..
What are you talking about? I've been programming a long time, and clean, readable code with clear, descriptive variable names gives me a stiffy. It suggests a more meticulous mind than mine wrote it.
You know who writes the worst Gordian-knot code? Engineers from other disciplines who learned programming as a means to do other engineering calculation. Smart guys, but it's a pain keeping track of what i1, i2, i3, and i4 mean, or their 1970s FORTRAN program flow.
Infinite scroll often make it nearly impossible to click on the site's privacy policy or terms of service in the page footer without going into dev tools. Whenever I come across that issue I wonder whether it's a feature or a bug.
> I don't even understand why they would remove them? Who ever complained of a scroll bar?
IMO it's all part of this push to combine mobile and desktop UI. On mobile there is a legitimate case to be made for removing them because screen real estate is so precious. But desktop gets clobbered as an unwanted side effect.
I actually think it has more to do with the increasing size and sophistication of the touchpad in Macs. There is no need for a scroll bar when you have a touchpad you can flick (likewise for magic mice).
The idea is to focus on the content and have the interface elements “fade away”. The problem is that you often need those interface elements to properly interact with the content.
> Alternatively, you can set the scrollbars to be visible at all times by setting System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars to Always.
Hidden scrollbars recently caused me an extra day of work. I was documenting all options in hundreds of html select boxes (dropdowns) on a legacy product being rewritten.
Many of these dropdowns were vertically scrollable, but macOS using Chrome did not display a scrollbar. I had no idea they were scrollable and missed many options in my documenta3.
I could not look at the html for it as it was minimized and not easily searchable.
Here's a tip you can try next time you have a problem like this. Maybe your task was somehow resistant to this, in which case I really do understand your pain and am not trying to paper it over, but just in case this could benefit you or folks like you:
In Chrome:
1) Right click on element you want to grab all of the contents of, and select Inspect Element. NOTE: If this element is the sort that isn't properly placed in the DOM and/or disappears when focus/mouse leaves, you can freeze the current DOM...but the right way to do that will depend on your context.
2) In Elements tab in Dev tools, the element should now be highlighted. You may need a parent or child element. But hopefully you can find it nearby and verify you have the right one with the Inspect tooling.
3) Right click on the element that has all your data in the DOM. Select Copy. Sometimes it will be enough to just Copy Element and paste it somewhere where you can start organizing the data. But for your task, it sounds like you might want to write a script for this so you can do it across multiple Elements. So, try Copy > Copy JS Path.
4) You now have access to the DOM element, even if it was created dynamically by JS and exists in the Shadow DOM. Try "paste" in the Console tab of Chrome DevTools.
5) The thing you grabbed might not be exactly the right one. Navigate down to the level you want to iterate across with the "children" attribute. Example:
> 1) Right click on element you want to grab all of the contents of, and select Inspect Element. NOTE: If this element is the sort that isn't properly placed in the DOM and/or disappears when focus/mouse leaves, you can freeze the current DOM...but the right way to do that will depend on your context.
Just to extend a touch—I use CMD+Shift+C or CTRL+Shift+C countless times in a day while debugging, or sometimes for this very reason. The shortcut is the same across browsers—at least Chrome/Edge/FF/Safari.
Instead of right clicking, it'll give you a "target" for selecting an element and highlight it before clicking.
In the console the selected element will be immediately accessible by `$0`.
Strongly related: viewport units (vw, vh, vmin, vmax) are fundamentally and irreconcilably broken if your document has scrollbars, because they include the size of document scrollbars, so that 100vw is equal to 100% + 17px if you have a 17px wide scrollbar there (the most likely value on Windows), so now all of a sudden you have a horizontal scrollbar too. Or your nicely calculated layout that thought that 33vw + 33vw + 33vw < 100% is now wrong and wrapping the third block on screens less than 1700px wide. There used to be a weird way of opting out of scrollbar inclusion (I think it involved `overflow: scroll` and something else on the root element, I think, but I don’t remember the exact incantation), but Firefox was the only browser that implemented it, and no one else wanted to (they said “no one wants this”—untrue, I say—“and it’s weird and inconsistent”—which was true).
We need a new set of units that excludes document scrollbars. Or a constant like env(scrollbar-width) that represents the scrollbar width so that you can subtract it yourself, which would be useful in a few other places as well (instead I’ve done the likes of `var(--scrollbar-width, 20px)` and calculate and define --scrollbar-width on the root element in JavaScript).
I dealt with this just a few days ago. A client's design was mocked in webflow and it decided to use 'static' for the header at 100vw. Which meant that on browsers that hide the scroll bar, the page jiggles left and right every time you scroll.
That was fun to fix because I had to rebuild the entire header since a ton of other webflow-generated CSS depended on that thing being static.
I’ve encountered this last year when I took over a project with a dev staff solely using Chrome on macOS.
The thing was: We catered for gamers which means Chrome or Firefox on Windows was the norm. We got a lot of bug reports like “hideous scrollbars in shop item description” or “hideous scrollbars in menu” where the devs were puzzled about the bug reports.
Yes! Far too many developers now only check that the page renders nicely on Chrome on their expensive macbook. While most of their users may be having a less than stellar screen and don't see the contrasts, run old hardware and a different OS+browser combo.
A couple years ago I actually had to buy a new monitor because everyone decided their login UI was ugly and needed to be ultra low contrast. I had to ctrl+a the page to find the text fields. My eyesight isn't particularly bad, just a minor astigmatism.
Kind of an off-topic but recently I noticed capturing a gameplay video of an HDR-enabled video game with any kind of software (OBS, Twitch Studio, GeForce Experience, FRAPS, Discord) also produces terrible results. This happens even if I capture the entire monitor or just the app window. Both OpenGL and DirectX games suffer from this.
How one can tell whether what you capture/develop is what you will see without testing it on a second monitor? What is the subject I must do research on to learn more about this?
I'm not just talking about color spaces, but also how these multiple software communicate image data in a lossless way, how window modes (fullscreen, borderless, windowed) affect these flows, where HDR stands in this.
I need to use a MacBook as my work machine (for a little over three years now), and generally have a strong dislike of the platform. It's just similar enough to Linux to lull me into believing that I kinda know what I'm doing, but just different enough to make me feel incompetent whenever I try to actually do anything nontrivial.
System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars to Always.
I stumbled across this little gem about a year ago, and has been one of the bigger quality-of-life improvements I've found on this machine.
Or Control, depending on which you're used to. Every time I try to use Windows I'm surprised that there's no easy-to-access setting for remapping Caps Lock like there is on every Linux DE and macOS.
Readit News
For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features, these things can be utterly mind-boggling and frustrating. Even I was stumped for a good minute the first time trying to print/save/download a PDF when that "feature" came out.
I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look? Those are real and important functions I desire. What I actually need is for news and blog sites to stop covering 1/4 of their vertical window space with hovering frames, ads, and banners asking me to subscribe. Which, by the way, subsequently don't properly calculate into that now hidden scroll bar's movement and cause you to overshoot the displayable area when paging down. End rant.
You don't even have to be elderly.
The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears.
How did that conversation go?
Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go?
Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or ever think to look for it.
Who thought that was a good idea?
I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.
Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it.
I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it.
Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:
1. They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.
2. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).
For the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things.
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Your point in general still stands, though. Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit.
One of the common responses I see when I complain about a bad UI is someone saying "no it's easy you just do ____". It's frustrating because that's not the point - the point is that I had to do research to find the answer!
There are cases, especially with specialized tools for complex tasks, where you are expected to spend time learning how to use the tool effectively. Photoshop is a great example. Vim is a great example. Figuring out stupid stuff like whether that grayish light blue vs dark gray fill on the checkbox means "enabled" or "disabled" is not an example.
I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when
1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and
2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.
I type the konami code as soon as I discover a web app supports keyboard input. I have no problem pulling-to-reveal and shaking to undo. In fact, it makes me feel awesome to know all this little secrets and have people all like: Wait! how did you do that?
But when I design software I don't do it for people like me. I want my users to feel awesome and delighted without being UI spelunkers. Good design doesn't make you think.
It all sucks. I'm convinced that devs are trying to frustrate me, and it's working.
Don't get me started on the icons-without-text design shit.
If an application isn't either essential to me or incredibly obvious to use, I am unlikely to learn it's fancy new UI. Why bother?
This extends to APIs and DSLs too since there are often so short lived.
Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.
A designer. Probably the same person who wanted to turn links from blue-and-underlined to same uniform gray with zero indication
I suspect I don't know some crucial (in Apple designers' mind) swipes on my iOS devices, because they're just hard to discover.
It's a leftover from when iPhone screens where much smaller: https://postimg.cc/WFdqPwfd
Pull down for search is something that it maybe Apple is trying to cement (and only for mobile, I guess?), but hasn't crossed (and maybe won't) to Android devices. Apple is known for doing stuff like this and pushing changes, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. no floppy in laptops, no CD-ROM in laptops, no Mic jack, etc)
I'm know my tech and I can't figure out how to reliably get Safari on IOS to display the bar at the bottom.
Makes me crazy
On Chrome I could't get the button to appear so I can save the PDF on my drive. Completely frustrating.
Dead Comment
I notice that becomes something of a tic of iOS users, if you watch others, in that just about every new screen or panel there's often at least a squiggle of pushing the screen or panel around just to figure out the boundaries.
One of the things I thought was brilliant about early Windows 8-era "metro" design: it was the only era Windows briefly experimented with going scrollbar free (it went back to scrollbar "light" soon after) and when they did so they absolutely made sure that the application grids never lined up with viewport. If there was something to scroll, it would stick out a bit, always that little hint that there was something more further down or right.
It got some flak, especially from macOS design fans, for not being "clean enough", but you'd have apps with no visible scrollbar and you knew whether or not there was anything to scroll just looking at them. You didn't have to squiggle your finger around (or fiddle with the scroll wheel) to check.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
"Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. It was a champion of the graphical user interface, where it is always possible to discover what actions are possible, clearly see how to select that action, receive unambiguous feedback as to the results of that action, and have the power to reverse that action–to undo it–if the result is not what was intended.
No more. Now, although the products are indeed even more beautiful than before, that beauty has come at a great price. Gone are the fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read. We have obscure gestures that are beyond even the developer’s ability to remember. We have great features that most people don’t realize exist.
The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple’s well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple’s design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage."
What's most telling is how even Apple often does an astonishingly bad job at it - it really sets the precedent regarding diminished importance.
As an exercise: Browse the App Store for a while and count the number of different ways it implements "go back one step".
I changed the setting to Mac OS always shows scroll bars, but I have no idea how someone thought hiding them was a good idea.
The fundamental difference with modern user interfaces is that you now have to tap, drag your finger across the screen in different directions, drag both fingers across the screen in different directions, pinch, unpinch, and whatever other gestures seem to be relevant to the situation. For good measure, try gestures that don't seem to be relevant either because the software may surprise you!
Now I know that a lot of these user interface decisions do offer value, but they are only valuable if you know that they exist.
I works a surprising amount of the time!
I can't live without firefox's reader mode, which is pretty much Gopher-for-html.
And for Nuke Overdrive mode, add a check for position: sticky, i.e.
I've considered writing an extension to kill them all by default, but I'm afraid I'll break some site in a way that really confuses me and end up wasting more time figuring out what happened than I save with the extension.
I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability.
Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display is off, long press is Siri.)
My first instinct was to flick it up from the bottom, but that brings up the recents switcher. Next instinct was to try flicking it off to the right, but it just moves a bit and springs back. While trying more times to fight the spring I noticed a short bar at the top and realized it was probably a drag handle. Grabbed that and tried to flick it downwards. No luck, but it moved in a way that made it seem like dragging down more would do it, but nope of course that wasn't it either. How about a flick to the right? Nope. Dragging it to the right? Agh! It's trying to dock into split screen mode! I dragged it around some more hoping for different behavior before dropping it back into place and again trying a flick to the right using the handle at the top. And that FINALLY did it. Apparently I didn't put enough enthusiasm into the first flick I tried... What a pain in the ass.
I don't like how sensitive to speed some of the actions are. I have similar issues with bringing up the dock. I usually end up going to the home screen instead.
You set the phone next to the terminal and the card comes up when radio contact is made.
My computer is an 11-inch MacBook Air.
That means that even if I run Safari full-screen, which is inconvenient, I have only 680 vertical pixels for content.
It's amazing how many web sites I run into that throw up fixed-position pop-ups that are bigger than that, and I can't close them or scroll to see their content because the designers or middle managers decided that every person on the planet is rocking a 27-inch 5K display.
Usually I just close the window and never visit the site again. If it's important, I break out the dev tools and start invoking display:none until I hit the right element.
I detest scroll bars. When I work on my windows machine I cannot stand seeing them plastered all over the screen.
It’s actually quite fascinating to read all these comments - it’s so weird to see people complaining about how they don’t know when a scroll is available. Just scroll and see!
No negative feelings toward people who prefer them - it’s actually quite interesting to see the comments, I assumed everyone agreed they were better hidden until today! (Which, as a Mac user, is obviously part of the problem being expressed!)
Why should I try scrolling everywhere all the time instead of having the UI indicate to me that there is more content? Especially if it isn't clear by having a word or sentence cut of. Maybe the scroll area ends with a paragraph and it's not clear there is more. Why put aesthetics over usability?
Some other comments here claim iPhone users develop some kind of swipe tic where they instinctively try to scroll around on every screen that opens. Would be a pretty sad testimony to this UI concept.
I feel the same way about other "unspecified functionality" services, like fancy hotels with "personal butlers." What does the butler do? "Whatever you need" is not an answer. I don't have familiarity with butlers, I don't know what is and is not a reasonable request.
There are valid reasons for both sides of the equation, it is just difficult to find the balance to satisfied the myriad of different perspectives.
How about people (designers) start thinking about their users and some some strict adherence to someone else's opinion about Material Design. I hope we see Material Design like we see touch screens in vehicles. An embarrassing mistake at best and potentially fatal at worst.
Design should always serve the user. If it doesn't, it needs to go away.
We used to achieve this balance with a manual.
A printed manual. Not a URL printed in 3 point Helvetica in light gray on a white background on a tiny leaflet in amongst a dozen similar-looking regulatory leaflets that will all go into the recycling bin when the new shiny shows up.
So I connect to it via RDP for the first time, and it is using XFCE. I'm not a big user of the desktop, I have no idea what the choices are or what features are offered in Gnome or KDE, or whatever. I just sometimes need a GUI to do some random things.
I open a window, and decide I need to resize it.
There's no cursor change when you move the mouse over the edge, or the corner. It just doesn't let you resize the window. There's no three-lines things in the corner either, you just can't grab the corner to resize it.
I ended up having to google that you need to ALT+RMouse to do this.
I don't know why that would be the default. It seems crazy.
- select non-maxmised open window
- keyboard shortcut Alt+Space. Then M. to move.
- use arrow keys to move windows offscreen, say to the right. Don't touch the mouse!
- Hit Enter key to confirm position.
From now on. Anything but "full maximise from the taskbar" makes the window "disappear" without a trace. "Restore" from the taskbar doesn't help.
And assuming you even know exactly happened, you still have to guess which direction they took the window and how far...
How is it there is no "Position Reset to 0,0" option?
At least on macOS, all the mouse-like input peripherals that Apple will sell you (both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad), and all the inputs for their laptops, have two-finger "natural" scrolling.
Apple seems to expect/assume that you've scrolled a touchscreen at some point in your life (in fact, many people have scrolled more touchscreens than desktop computers at this point—including many old people!) and has built the OS around the idea that, just like on a touchscreen, scrolling is a gesture that you can attempt to apply anywhere, whether there's an affordance for it built into the app or not—i.e. that scrollability is a universal, system-level operation, not something up to the application. Every application in macOS/iOS is inherently built in terms of having some kind of "viewport" with a "document" loaded into it; and scrolling moves the "document" around within the "viewport." Even if that's a pointless thing to do, it still attempts to perform the operation.
(Though in terms of feedback, iOS has a more coherent responsivity to "attempted" scrolling than macOS does. You can "tug" at the top and bottom edges of the screen in pretty much any iOS app and get some extra out-of-document blank space, with a snapback when you let go. Whereas, in macOS apps, this only happens for "content" regions; whereas for "chrome" regions—e.g. the top-level icon listing in System Preferences—the region will only have snapback if the window is small enough for the region to be scrollable. If the window is large enough that everything is presented, your scroll gestures just go unacknowledged, as if the window wasn't a "document" in a "viewport" at all. Interestingly, you also can't resize such all-chrome windows; you only ever get a scrollbar on them if running on a computer with a too-low display resolution.)
What is missing, though, is a visual indication of whether scrolling will do anything, before you try it. Scrollbars used to help with this, yes. But the fix isn't simply reintroducing them. The world scrollbars were built for no longer exists: both web apps and modern native apps now do progressive loading/"infinite scroll", where the view-controller isn't necessarily aware of whether more content will be discovered when it tries to demand another chunk of data from its backend. Even when you force-enable the scrollbar, the size and relative position of the "scroll-thumb" now communicates no information about your "actual" scroll position in many apps.
As well, there are now real infinte-canvas apps (like Maps) where a scroll "position" wouldn't even be a coherent concept, because the document under the viewport is a self-connected torus. Universal gesture scrolling adapts well to this concept; scrollbars don't.
IMHO, I'd like to see a slight fade-to-black or 3D "bend away from camera" applied to the inner edges of the scrollable viewport, whenever the document in the viewport is not sitting flush with that edge of the viewport. This would provide a visual affordance of "scrollability" without providing any often-misleading information of relative scroll-position. Infinite-scroll documents would just always be "faded out" on all edges. Seems obvious?
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed -- and for what, a "clean" look?
Nah, it's for shitty low-end laptops that still to this day have 1366x768 displays. Stick a title/tab bar, tool bar, and maybe an always-on bookmarks bar on top of the window, and an always-on start menu at the bottom, and you'll find that the PDF only gets about 400px of viewport real-estate. And now you want the PDF's own controls to steal more of that? There's a reason that Chrome first made the status bar into an overlay, and then merged the title bar with the status bar — it's trying to reclaim vertical space for exactly these constrained scenarios.
We had scrollbars on 640x480 both ways and liked it. Even SGIs with 1280x1024 monitors had scrollbars, and it wasn't a burden that some folks today seem to think it was.
Edit: Thinking further about this, the affordance for maps is a change in the cursor to a grabbing hand. You have to learn that, but there's a clear visual difference in the cursor to show that something differnt happens there.
[1] http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/convert-to-popup/i...
[3] https://github.com/sergeykish/hide-scrollbars # chromium, firefox has another rule:
So users should purchase new equipment to suit designers? Or maybe - crazy idea, I know - designers should design for the equipment people actually have and not whine or look down their noses because not everyone makes designer salaries.
That's a really poor excuse. If that "awareness" is missing then the code is structured wrong, probably because somebody cargo-culted a design pattern without ever once thinking of the user.
Even you? Wow!
But srsly, that's not a snide comment but rather a hint that your personal sensibility may not reflect broad sensibilities. And of course, there may not even be a single broad sensibility -- look at the political parties in the US, both the major divisions and the subdivisions within each. Sometimes, the maker of something has to make a design choice consistent with their [market success proven] direction.
> I don't really need the small sliver of menu space in PDF view to be reclaimed.
When I'm on my laptop, I do. Every inch of vertical space is precious. On my display monitor, not so much, but having the buttons reveal rather than permanent doesn't detract in the slightest.
Deleted Comment
Then I opened Adobe After Effects for the first time and it suddenly made sense to me, the UI I found intuitive was just years of practice. How is an x in a corner a close button? What's so intuitive about swiping up to see a menu?
It's to stop the offset shift. Pages with scrollbars and pages without have different document widths but the same viewport width.
When you click between the two, the page "shifts" half a scrollbar width if it's centered.
To fix this, Apple made the scrollbar an overlay. That stops the shifting. But then everything on any page with a scrollbar looks off-center.
To fix that, Apple made it disappear when it's not being used.
Lot of fancy homepage with scroll animations are awful on anything that isn't scrolling as smoothly as a MacBookPro touchpad.
Example: https://www.apple.com/ipad-pro/ is horrible to use on anything that isn't a mobile device or a Mac.
I guess this is an example of being in my own bubble, but I can't stand touchpads. I've used the touchpad on MacBook, like, twice in 2 years.
One demographic I would expect traditional mouse usage from would be gamers. When I play a first person game I always use my trusty old intellimouse. Otherwise, I use the trackpad unless I'm simultaneously using my mechanical keyboard, but if my keyboard had an attached trackpad I'd probably be using that. But mousing in general just isn't a very important to my workflows and trackpads work just as well as mice for nearly all tasks. Arguably they work better for some since you don't have to move your hand far from the laptop's keyboard to use the trackpad, while using a dedicated mouse means taking your hand completely off the keyboard.
It's so much easier on the fingers that I'm amazed I haven't been able to find it anywhere else.
When I scroll down, I expect one thing to happen: content on the page moves from the bottom to the top, revealing previously un-seen content on the bottom. That's it. Please stop trying to make scrolling do something else!
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/PGdyt1c.jpg [2]: https://i.imgur.com/AXLi4Yu.jpg
Annoying. The only fix is to hover over the scroll bar itself (and I have macos -> system prefences -> general -> show scroll bars: always)
a) find out how big the page is b) scroll more precisely
I don't even understand why they would remove them? Who ever complained of a scroll bar?
I have never seen that to be the case unless in an environment with very heavy constraints like embedded. If anything, a competent programmer 10-15 years in would skew towards more descriptive and clear variable naming as they've been burned in the past by having to maintain some of that "leet" code.
If those coders are like me their code becomes more verbose, less clever, more obvious, less dependent on the quirks of the programming language I use. The reason is that it's easier for me and the other developers in the team to read and understand what it does.
On my way to here I really hated many geeky clever and brilliant pieces of code I found in projects I inherited. They made me and my customers lose days at decoding all that brilliance.
What are you talking about? I've been programming a long time, and clean, readable code with clear, descriptive variable names gives me a stiffy. It suggests a more meticulous mind than mine wrote it.
You know who writes the worst Gordian-knot code? Engineers from other disciplines who learned programming as a means to do other engineering calculation. Smart guys, but it's a pain keeping track of what i1, i2, i3, and i4 mean, or their 1970s FORTRAN program flow.
Literally in this case :)
IMO it's all part of this push to combine mobile and desktop UI. On mobile there is a legitimate case to be made for removing them because screen real estate is so precious. But desktop gets clobbered as an unwanted side effect.
Hidden scrollbars recently caused me an extra day of work. I was documenting all options in hundreds of html select boxes (dropdowns) on a legacy product being rewritten.
Many of these dropdowns were vertically scrollable, but macOS using Chrome did not display a scrollbar. I had no idea they were scrollable and missed many options in my documenta3.
I could not look at the html for it as it was minimized and not easily searchable.
In Chrome:
1) Right click on element you want to grab all of the contents of, and select Inspect Element. NOTE: If this element is the sort that isn't properly placed in the DOM and/or disappears when focus/mouse leaves, you can freeze the current DOM...but the right way to do that will depend on your context.
2) In Elements tab in Dev tools, the element should now be highlighted. You may need a parent or child element. But hopefully you can find it nearby and verify you have the right one with the Inspect tooling.
3) Right click on the element that has all your data in the DOM. Select Copy. Sometimes it will be enough to just Copy Element and paste it somewhere where you can start organizing the data. But for your task, it sounds like you might want to write a script for this so you can do it across multiple Elements. So, try Copy > Copy JS Path.
4) You now have access to the DOM element, even if it was created dynamically by JS and exists in the Shadow DOM. Try "paste" in the Console tab of Chrome DevTools.
5) The thing you grabbed might not be exactly the right one. Navigate down to the level you want to iterate across with the "children" attribute. Example:
6) You now have an HTMLCollection. You could be done! See if this gives you what you need: -7) Unfortunately, HTMLCollections are only Array-like. Fortunately, it's very easy to convert. -8) Now that you have a proper Array filled with HTML elements, you can do any kind of processing you need to grab the data you want. Hope this helps somebody write a script to remove the tedium from a data extraction job.Just to extend a touch—I use CMD+Shift+C or CTRL+Shift+C countless times in a day while debugging, or sometimes for this very reason. The shortcut is the same across browsers—at least Chrome/Edge/FF/Safari.
Instead of right clicking, it'll give you a "target" for selecting an element and highlight it before clicking.
In the console the selected element will be immediately accessible by `$0`.
Eg,
Give the Chrome dev tools a try. It "un-minifies" the html making it viewable and easily traversable.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/dom/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
We need a new set of units that excludes document scrollbars. Or a constant like env(scrollbar-width) that represents the scrollbar width so that you can subtract it yourself, which would be useful in a few other places as well (instead I’ve done the likes of `var(--scrollbar-width, 20px)` and calculate and define --scrollbar-width on the root element in JavaScript).
That was fun to fix because I had to rebuild the entire header since a ton of other webflow-generated CSS depended on that thing being static.
The thing was: We catered for gamers which means Chrome or Firefox on Windows was the norm. We got a lot of bug reports like “hideous scrollbars in shop item description” or “hideous scrollbars in menu” where the devs were puzzled about the bug reports.
Yes your giga HD retina Mac displays these colours perfectly, I'm sure it looks great. On my screen however I can't read a damn thing.
How one can tell whether what you capture/develop is what you will see without testing it on a second monitor? What is the subject I must do research on to learn more about this?
I'm not just talking about color spaces, but also how these multiple software communicate image data in a lossless way, how window modes (fullscreen, borderless, windowed) affect these flows, where HDR stands in this.