<story><title>The end of the nice GTK button</title><url>https://blog.brixit.nl/the-end-of-the-nice-gtk-button/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Derbasti</author><text>&amp;gt; In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.&lt;p&gt;The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I&amp;#x27;m done I hit enter and it unlocks.&lt;p&gt;On Windows, the first letter merely makes the prompt appear, but does not yet type into the prompt. In fact, it will only start feeding letters into the prompt once the little prompt-appearing-animation has finished. If I just start typing my password, it will eat the first three or four letters. So I hit enter, wait for the animation to finish, and only then start typing.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I&amp;#x27;d asked it to do. It just goes to show the attention to detail that makes a UI feel fluid and frictionless.</text></item><item><author>Flow</author><text>I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt&amp;#x27;s Law and so on. It was not just opinion.&lt;p&gt;Today I get the feeling it&amp;#x27;s mostly just opinion. Either the designer&amp;#x27;s opinion or the wish to copy the look of something.&lt;p&gt;Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think &amp;quot;Here someone has given up&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.&lt;p&gt;Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there&amp;#x27;s no visual clues?&lt;p&gt;Things like &amp;quot;Hide cursor while typing&amp;quot; in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad.&lt;p&gt;Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.&lt;p&gt;I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I&amp;#x27;ve been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there&amp;#x27;s less consideration of almost everything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>inetknght</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I&amp;#x27;m done I hit enter and it unlocks.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Congratulations! You were able to recognize that it&amp;#x27;s a _login screen_ without seeing that there&amp;#x27;s a hidden password field.&lt;p&gt;The first time I booted to Gnome I waited damn near ten minutes for it to tell me it&amp;#x27;s ready for my login before I decided to start typing things to see if it was stuck.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s _not_ intuitive.</text></comment>
<story><title>The end of the nice GTK button</title><url>https://blog.brixit.nl/the-end-of-the-nice-gtk-button/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Derbasti</author><text>&amp;gt; In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.&lt;p&gt;The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I&amp;#x27;m done I hit enter and it unlocks.&lt;p&gt;On Windows, the first letter merely makes the prompt appear, but does not yet type into the prompt. In fact, it will only start feeding letters into the prompt once the little prompt-appearing-animation has finished. If I just start typing my password, it will eat the first three or four letters. So I hit enter, wait for the animation to finish, and only then start typing.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I&amp;#x27;d asked it to do. It just goes to show the attention to detail that makes a UI feel fluid and frictionless.</text></item><item><author>Flow</author><text>I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt&amp;#x27;s Law and so on. It was not just opinion.&lt;p&gt;Today I get the feeling it&amp;#x27;s mostly just opinion. Either the designer&amp;#x27;s opinion or the wish to copy the look of something.&lt;p&gt;Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think &amp;quot;Here someone has given up&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.&lt;p&gt;Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there&amp;#x27;s no visual clues?&lt;p&gt;Things like &amp;quot;Hide cursor while typing&amp;quot; in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad.&lt;p&gt;Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.&lt;p&gt;I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I&amp;#x27;ve been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there&amp;#x27;s less consideration of almost everything.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hulitu</author><text>Win 10 tought me to type again at least CTRL+ALT if i want my password to be accepted from the first time. Clicking with the mouse sometimes works before entering the password. It seems that at MS and also in other areas (Android, Gnome) people want just to code new things but not debug or fix bugs. They also must be as simple as possible because: 1. code reuse sucks. 2. Thinking is hard.</text></comment>