7 ms·

The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a

The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a few characters -> enter). What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Just gimme the damn thing, I don't need those animations. (Yes I know on most plattforms I can disable them, but this often takes quite a few steps)

abraxas 1y ago
Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces is total inconsistency in looks and behaviour across different applications. Even common action icons vary in style, colouring and shape from one application to another. Title bars are hijacked for whatever fanciful ideas the app designers had in mind, scrollbars and other basic widgets are rarely drawn using native desktop components, tab ordering is a dream of the distant past and so on and that's if a given app even responds to the tab key.
- SirFatty 1y ago
  Personally, I dislike the flatness. It's hard (at times) to distinguish one from another when multiple windows are open.
  - whatevergoes 1y ago
    Window shadows are the solution here in my experience.
- chairhairair 1y ago
  This will never happen because: 1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles. 2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels. Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.). NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.
  - dharmab 1y ago
    Some projects are doing (2) anyway to get a better result. Examples: Kitty, Zed, File Pilot.
    - LoganDark 1y ago
      File Pilot has got to be the biggest fuck-you to modern app development practices I've seen in a long time.
      - Y_Y 1y ago
        I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.
        dharmab 1y ago
        It's one of those things where you try it and feel how snappy it is. Like when people switched from Internet Explorer to Chrome.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.
    - SR2Z 1y ago
      But you're describing pretty much every UI toolkit!
    - lmz 1y ago
      No-one would claim building a web browser is easier than putting some widgets together in Win32/Cocoa/GTK+/whatever, yet here we are with Electron.
- btbuildem 1y ago
  You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
        andsoitis 1y ago
        There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
      - bunderbunder 1y ago
        I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting. Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
- WD-42 1y ago
  It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    But for a lot of use cases that's not possible anymore, that is, a lot of the applications using the OS' UI libraries are no longer maintained. And a lot of people have to use the applications as supplied, e.g. Slack or Microsoft Teams. Which can be accessed via a web browser, sure, but dedicated apps for these are also nice because they have a dedicated spot in the app switchers.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  This is self induced misery. Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop. You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.
noja 1y ago
The screenshot with the wrong width+height values is not helping appearances.
cjbgkagh 1y ago
AFAIK there was a case being made at the time that the animations were to provide predictability in performance, users get into a bit of a rhythm and it was better to slow everything down a bit to lower the overall variance of response. This made more sense when HDDs were slow.
imiric 1y ago
> Good font rendering A large part of the charm of these 90s UI recreations is precisely the lack of antialiasing and other niceties we expect of modern UIs. There was another project recently on HN that uses modern font rendering with a Windows 9x look, and it's just not the same, IMO. SerenityOS comes closer to what I remember, though it still doesn't quite match the look of MS Sans Serif(?).
- immibis 1y ago
  You can always turn it off. I don't think lack of antialiasing is what gives these UIs their character.
- mardifoufs 1y ago
  I agree that it is charming when I want to tinker with stuff. But if it's for "real world " usage, I don't think that being charming matters a lot. I mean, it really depends, not everything has to be about "serious" usage but if it's the intended goal then I think that good font rendering is something that still matters a lot. I still use chrome sometimes for example just because it seems to have a better font rendering (on Linux but also on Windows) than Firefox. It's completely irrational in a way but it does matter sometimes
- aembleton 1y ago
  You might need a CRT to properly recreate the look of a 90s UI.
ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
Agreed! Whenever I use someone's phone I instantly notice how sluggish it feels with animations turned on. If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after. My pet peeve: Animations are a crutch used by designers who think they need them when in fact they should just have improved the UI so users don't get confused about the origin of a popup or window. The only justified use of animations in UIs that make sense is in scrolling, everything else is just adding latency to hide your incompetence.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after. If you're using Android there's also a "visible touches" option you can turn on in the Developer settings. It's a big UX enhancement of its own and IMHO should be promoted to the Accessibility settings (together with the options for speeding up or disabling animations).
  - arcanemachiner 1y ago
    What are the benefits of enabling this feature?
    - zozbot234 1y ago
      It provides a quick feedback loop when you're trying to poke at stuff on-screen with your fingers. Which is nice since it lets you know quite seamlessly (1) how good your aim is, which gets kind of critical when using fingers on a touchscreen compared to a mouse. and (2) whether a tap has even registered in the first place, which is often problematic for many users who may be wearing gloves, have drier skin that doesn't register as easily, etc. etc.
- pdntspa 1y ago
  Idunno man, I enjoy the animations. They're a big part of the 'feel' of MacOS. But they could be faster in some cases.
ferguess_k 1y ago
My No.1 pet peeve is the scrollbars. Somehow every modern UI designer hates it, and hates it deeply. They always want to get rid of it. And TBH I'd prefer the other way around - how about we get rid of them instead?
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left. I’m also perplexed why the mail developers would allow such a thing or what kind of bug causes such behavior.
  - ferguess_k 1y ago
    My hunch is that they are just using an existing framework that does that, and it may require some digging into the configuration to disable that (or worse, have to change some code). Since this is never going to be an urgent thing it will never be fixed. I work in MacOS VSCode frequently, and whenever I open a large repo with a huge number of files, it's PIA to find the scrollbar. I have to hover the mouse above it to make it appear, but how can I hover above it without knowing where it is? BTW if you share the same frustration with VSCode, please vote this ticket: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/244123 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/244123
  - bromuro 1y ago
    > Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left. Yet in iOS you can swipe vertically some pixels and you will see the scrollbar telling you this exact information.
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      For most emails, yes. Some other emails, no. I don't know what determines when it works and when it doesn't.
    - deleted 1y ago
thewebguyd 1y ago
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. This is what drives me crazy on macOS. Specifically, the animation for switching between virtual desktops. When I hit Ctrl+1/2/3/etc I want it to switch instantly, no animation - not slide into place. It's even unresponsive until the animation finishes.
- nextos 1y ago
  I don't use Mac because I prefer Linux tiling WMs, but this is easy to fix? Most animations can be disabled using the defaults system. I think the desktop animation option is called workspaces-swoosh-animation-off or similar. I also recall that Settings > Accessibility has a reduce motion option that disables lots of things.
  - doix 1y ago
    I have to use a Mac for work and it drives me crazy. I disabled everything I could find, enabled reduced motion preferences or whatever it's called and still got some animations. My "solution" is to use Aerospace [0], which reimplements window management. That's the only way I found to not have animations. Unfortunately i still feel some delay when switching windows compared to i3wm/sway in Linux. [0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
- airstrike 1y ago
  I use the Aerospace tiling window manager for macOS just so I can move my apps to different spaces and opt+key move to them. usually vscode in opt+1, firefox in opt+2 and discord in opt+d
GuB-42 1y ago
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster. For me, it is an impressive technical feat and it took years for Android to catch up (see: "project butter"), and in the end, it was mostly by brute force, i.e. putting ridiculously overpowered hardware in smartphones. Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent. Why you have latency to hide in the first place is another problem. There may also be some clueless designers who put slow animations for no good reason, maybe because they are just copying Apple, not understanding why Apple did it in the first place.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  There are also some animations that that have utility beyond eye candy in communicating to the user what’s going on, which is particularly important for non-technical individuals. For example the animation associated with minimizing windows in most desktop environments makes it crystal clear where your window went after you press the minimize button, even for novices. Removing that animation makes the interaction significantly more confusing.
  - winternewt 1y ago
    Those animations are a no brainer because they both communicate something meaningful and don't get in your way. While the animation is happening you can keep working with whatever you were doing. I think a great UI can both be animated and allow you to work unhindered, if the designers put their mind to it.
- shaftway 1y ago
  > Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent. This is my number one trick on Android phones. Enable developer options and change the animation speeds from 1x to 0.5x. It makes your old phone feel new.
ZuLuuuuuu 1y ago
I hate the default animation speed of Androids that come with Pixel phones. They are too long and makes it feel like the phone is slow. One of the first things I do after buying a new phone is to half the animation durations using developer settings, and the phone feels much faster.
mvdtnz 1y ago
> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. I get it, and I agree. But what I personally hate the most on modern UIs is hiding things. Why aren't my scroll bars visible when I'm not interacting with them (and even when visible, are ridiculously small and low-contrast)? Why does IntelliJ hide the buttons for interacting with tool windows until I mouse over where they should be? Why does MacOS hide my application launcher bar by default? Stop hiding things!

abraxas 1y ago

Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces is total inconsistency in looks and behaviour across different applications. Even common action icons vary in style, colouring and shape from one application to another. Title bars are hijacked for whatever fanciful ideas the app designers had in mind, scrollbars and other basic widgets are rarely drawn using native desktop components, tab ordering is a dream of the distant past and so on and that's if a given app even responds to the tab key.

SirFatty 1y ago
Personally, I dislike the flatness. It's hard (at times) to distinguish one from another when multiple windows are open.
- whatevergoes 1y ago
  Window shadows are the solution here in my experience.
chairhairair 1y ago
This will never happen because: 1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles. 2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels. Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.). NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.
- dharmab 1y ago
  Some projects are doing (2) anyway to get a better result. Examples: Kitty, Zed, File Pilot.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    File Pilot has got to be the biggest fuck-you to modern app development practices I've seen in a long time.
    - Y_Y 1y ago
      I like the idea of trying crazy and new ideas, but this looks like they just thought corners weren't round enough, and that people will pay money for a file manager that has no sharp edges and won't integrate with your OS.
      - dharmab 1y ago
        It's one of those things where you try it and feel how snappy it is. Like when people switched from Internet Explorer to Chrome.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  The OS / UI toolkit should be strongly opinionated, making the consistent, happy path easier to develop and making customization possible but with great effort.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    But you're describing pretty much every UI toolkit!
  - lmz 1y ago
    No-one would claim building a web browser is easier than putting some widgets together in Win32/Cocoa/GTK+/whatever, yet here we are with Electron.
btbuildem 1y ago
You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Yes, it’s wonderful having to figure out 50 different UIs designed by 50 different artists with 50 different ideas of what a drop-down should look like and how it should work.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    Do you have a solution in mind? While a platform (OS) can provide a UI toolkit and provide a HIG, one cannot stop language and programming tools vendors or programmers from doing whatever they like.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43762571 But realistically, you’re never going to stop a motivated app designer who is dead set on making their app an unique snowflake art project rather than a tool that users need to use.
      - andsoitis 1y ago
        There are also some classes of apps where the platform UI kit is insufficient. Immediate examples that come to mind are kiosk software, trading software, games, etc.
    - bunderbunder 1y ago
      I'm starting to think that it would take replacing basically everything that's happened on Web frontend development since XMLHttpRequest with an alternative system that's still standards-based, platform-agnostic and Web-centric, but designed from the ground up as a GUI toolkit instead of a markup language for hypermedia formatting. Because with the current status quo, the platform that dominates everyone's mindshare is HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Which has a really rudimentary concept of UI controls, and human interface guidelines that spend 90% of their effort on begging people to manually implement usability features that we used to get for free with native GUI toolkits. And I think that we might need to get away from that mess before it's possible for anyone to have any energy left over for worrying about HCI on the level that we used to in the late '90s and early '00s.
WD-42 1y ago
It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  But for a lot of use cases that's not possible anymore, that is, a lot of the applications using the OS' UI libraries are no longer maintained. And a lot of people have to use the applications as supplied, e.g. Slack or Microsoft Teams. Which can be accessed via a web browser, sure, but dedicated apps for these are also nice because they have a dedicated spot in the app switchers.
prmoustache 1y ago
This is self induced misery. Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop. You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.

noja 1y ago

The screenshot with the wrong width+height values is not helping appearances.

cjbgkagh 1y ago

AFAIK there was a case being made at the time that the animations were to provide predictability in performance, users get into a bit of a rhythm and it was better to slow everything down a bit to lower the overall variance of response. This made more sense when HDDs were slow.

imiric 1y ago

> Good font rendering A large part of the charm of these 90s UI recreations is precisely the lack of antialiasing and other niceties we expect of modern UIs. There was another project recently on HN that uses modern font rendering with a Windows 9x look, and it's just not the same, IMO. SerenityOS comes closer to what I remember, though it still doesn't quite match the look of MS Sans Serif(?).

immibis 1y ago
You can always turn it off. I don't think lack of antialiasing is what gives these UIs their character.
mardifoufs 1y ago
I agree that it is charming when I want to tinker with stuff. But if it's for "real world " usage, I don't think that being charming matters a lot. I mean, it really depends, not everything has to be about "serious" usage but if it's the intended goal then I think that good font rendering is something that still matters a lot. I still use chrome sometimes for example just because it seems to have a better font rendering (on Linux but also on Windows) than Firefox. It's completely irrational in a way but it does matter sometimes
aembleton 1y ago
You might need a CRT to properly recreate the look of a 90s UI.

ulrikrasmussen 1y ago

Agreed! Whenever I use someone's phone I instantly notice how sluggish it feels with animations turned on. If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after. My pet peeve: Animations are a crutch used by designers who think they need them when in fact they should just have improved the UI so users don't get confused about the origin of a popup or window. The only justified use of animations in UIs that make sense is in scrolling, everything else is just adding latency to hide your incompetence.

zozbot234 1y ago
> If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after. If you're using Android there's also a "visible touches" option you can turn on in the Developer settings. It's a big UX enhancement of its own and IMHO should be promoted to the Accessibility settings (together with the options for speeding up or disabling animations).
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  What are the benefits of enabling this feature?
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    It provides a quick feedback loop when you're trying to poke at stuff on-screen with your fingers. Which is nice since it lets you know quite seamlessly (1) how good your aim is, which gets kind of critical when using fingers on a touchscreen compared to a mouse. and (2) whether a tap has even registered in the first place, which is often problematic for many users who may be wearing gloves, have drier skin that doesn't register as easily, etc. etc.
pdntspa 1y ago
Idunno man, I enjoy the animations. They're a big part of the 'feel' of MacOS. But they could be faster in some cases.

ferguess_k 1y ago

My No.1 pet peeve is the scrollbars. Somehow every modern UI designer hates it, and hates it deeply. They always want to get rid of it. And TBH I'd prefer the other way around - how about we get rid of them instead?

jimbokun 1y ago
Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left. I’m also perplexed why the mail developers would allow such a thing or what kind of bug causes such behavior.
- ferguess_k 1y ago
  My hunch is that they are just using an existing framework that does that, and it may require some digging into the configuration to disable that (or worse, have to change some code). Since this is never going to be an urgent thing it will never be fixed. I work in MacOS VSCode frequently, and whenever I open a large repo with a huge number of files, it's PIA to find the scrollbar. I have to hover the mouse above it to make it appear, but how can I hover above it without knowing where it is? BTW if you share the same frustration with VSCode, please vote this ticket: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/244123 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/244123
- bromuro 1y ago
  > Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left. Yet in iOS you can swipe vertically some pixels and you will see the scrollbar telling you this exact information.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    For most emails, yes. Some other emails, no. I don't know what determines when it works and when it doesn't.
  - deleted 1y ago

thewebguyd 1y ago

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. This is what drives me crazy on macOS. Specifically, the animation for switching between virtual desktops. When I hit Ctrl+1/2/3/etc I want it to switch instantly, no animation - not slide into place. It's even unresponsive until the animation finishes.

nextos 1y ago
I don't use Mac because I prefer Linux tiling WMs, but this is easy to fix? Most animations can be disabled using the defaults system. I think the desktop animation option is called workspaces-swoosh-animation-off or similar. I also recall that Settings > Accessibility has a reduce motion option that disables lots of things.
- doix 1y ago
  I have to use a Mac for work and it drives me crazy. I disabled everything I could find, enabled reduced motion preferences or whatever it's called and still got some animations. My "solution" is to use Aerospace [0], which reimplements window management. That's the only way I found to not have animations. Unfortunately i still feel some delay when switching windows compared to i3wm/sway in Linux. [0] https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
airstrike 1y ago
I use the Aerospace tiling window manager for macOS just so I can move my apps to different spaces and opt+key move to them. usually vscode in opt+1, firefox in opt+2 and discord in opt+d

GuB-42 1y ago

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster. For me, it is an impressive technical feat and it took years for Android to catch up (see: "project butter"), and in the end, it was mostly by brute force, i.e. putting ridiculously overpowered hardware in smartphones. Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent. Why you have latency to hide in the first place is another problem. There may also be some clueless designers who put slow animations for no good reason, maybe because they are just copying Apple, not understanding why Apple did it in the first place.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
There are also some animations that that have utility beyond eye candy in communicating to the user what’s going on, which is particularly important for non-technical individuals. For example the animation associated with minimizing windows in most desktop environments makes it crystal clear where your window went after you press the minimize button, even for novices. Removing that animation makes the interaction significantly more confusing.
- winternewt 1y ago
  Those animations are a no brainer because they both communicate something meaningful and don't get in your way. While the animation is happening you can keep working with whatever you were doing. I think a great UI can both be animated and allow you to work unhindered, if the designers put their mind to it.
shaftway 1y ago
> Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent. This is my number one trick on Android phones. Enable developer options and change the animation speeds from 1x to 0.5x. It makes your old phone feel new.

ZuLuuuuuu 1y ago

I hate the default animation speed of Androids that come with Pixel phones. They are too long and makes it feel like the phone is slow. One of the first things I do after buying a new phone is to half the animation durations using developer settings, and the phone feels much faster.

mvdtnz 1y ago

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. I get it, and I agree. But what I personally hate the most on modern UIs is hiding things. Why aren't my scroll bars visible when I'm not interacting with them (and even when visible, are ridiculously small and low-contrast)? Why does IntelliJ hide the buttons for interacting with tool windows until I mouse over where they should be? Why does MacOS hide my application launcher bar by default? Stop hiding things!