alt Hacker NewsWe also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc.
But we did gain some nice things!
- Tabs.
- Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.
- Document editors remembering unsaved changes.
- Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
- Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings (we need more of those).
- Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc).
- Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`).
- Map widgets, a small miracle we take for granted.
- Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.
Replies
> Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
Not always positive. The form briefly loses focus for two seconds (while you open your password manager or whatever) and you are shouted at to “PLEASE ENTER A VALID USERNAME” in red.
> loading bars (replaced with throbbers)
There is a very practical reason for this; most GUI apps are webapps (whether local or not is irrelevant), and the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
There might have been worse ways to design the fetch API, but off-hand, I can't think of any - what came before it was immensely better for a user experience.
I appreciate this balanced take! Let's hope one day we'll get the best of today's and yesterday's era.
There was a brief moment in history where we had the best of both worlds.
I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha).
We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
> Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings
Wasn’t that in Emacs for decades?
Titlebar buttons are actually bad. The titlebar exists (or existed) for a reason, so you'd have somewhere you could grab to manipulate the window. Now it's kind of a guessing game with every app on where you can grab without causing the app to do something you didn't want.