Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

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>Many of the UX "solutions" are either invented problems or not my problems or worse, grinding some anti-me agenda.

>These UI "innovations" are great for movie props but do they actually help in reality? Not that I see.

Scott Jenson specifically mentioned in this talk that he doesn't view open source devs as programmers who couldn't care less about needs of non-power users, but this is exactly that sort of a tone deaf response, and a really narrow perspective.

Most actually novel things in Linux desktops since the ~late 2000s target the extreme power users. They have near-zero discoverability, terrible defaults, building substantial skills and constant practice and maintenance are required to use it for rather routine operations, etc. I mean I also used to configure my WM by programming it in Lua (because it expected the users to know it and I do), I also use emacs for quarter a century, I use Nix to set up my entire desktop, but I'm not saying everything else is useless and carries "anti-me agenda".

Your animation example is really telling, most users are like "where did my window go??" without it, I'm talking from the first-hand experience of watching young people trying to use a computer. The CPU argument is simply inane and 100% irrelevant for the modern hardware, I'd understand if it was distracting for you (and me too), but wasting CPU is a silly hill to die on. Power user interfaces that make simple things hard is the primary reason most young people outside of a really narrow group are not tech-savvy and look at desktops as obsolete ancient tech.

There are arguments that it's impossible to target both power users and any others, but these are all simply wrong. Both target groups are totally compatible, you can look at Microsoft's ribbon or superbar as an example of such an interface. In the worst case you introduce a simple binary setting if you don't want the cues, don't tell me it offends you somehow please.

(That said, it's funny to hear SJ mentioning his work on Finder, because that's probably the worst non-power-user file manager in existence.)

I don't care about animations wasting CPU time. Any modern CPU has plenty of cycles to spare for animations. I care about wasting my own time. If I minimize a window, it should minimize immediately. I don't want to wait for some useless animation to play first.

That animation in particular (window minimization) is 200-300ms long in most DEs, and is located on the slow/discoverable UI path that is tolerable to such delays. If you want faster speeds, you likely use the keyboard and your muscle memory and aren't likely to find yourself in a scenario where you want to minimize or maximize a window at all, since you're using the hot/low latency path through the UI (e.g. Alt-TAB or a myriad other ways). If you use a pointer, it's a rather negligible delay compared to moving it, and of course you can make it faster in the settings. UI design is about thinking such details through and measuring them, not adding useless animations to annoy power users.

Anyway, it's not the point. You're always free to disable animations if you think they're making you slow. I think too many people in the discussions about UIs are confusing quirks of particular interfaces with first principles, and are extrapolating specific experiences to the whole field.

>it's a rather negligible delay compared to moving it

That's an irrelevant comparison. If you booked a long flight, would you accept somebody pointlessly delaying it for an hour just because that's short compared to the duration? The correct amount of avoidable latency is zero, regardless of how much unavoidable latency there is.

It's also false; I have a good mouse, good mouse skills, and my taskbar sits against the edge of the screen giving it effectively infinite height (see Fitt's law). I can hit taskbar targets in around 300ms.

You're assuming this is a sequential workflow, which it isn't. Animation is already done by the time you hit a target. I also am fast with the mouse, I used to play and design competitive FPSes for a living, that's precisely why without measurement and considering actual scenarios I have a really hard time believing that this specific thing actually slows anything down for real use cases and isn't just your personal preference/imagination. I disable it too but it's just my preference, as I find it distracting and breaking the focus.

I click the taskbar to minimize/restore the windows, so the animation starts only after I click them. And it's still sequential even if I use the title bar icons, because I have to wait for the animation to finish before I can use the space where the window once was.

> You're always free to disable animations if you think they're making you slow.

Sadly less and less true nowadays. I always try to turn off any animations. On Android the settings is not respected, not even by Google owns app. On KDE itseld, it respects it pretty well, but applications don't always do, and not consistently. Firefox has its own animation settind on Android, linux, and windows (never tried on mac), and firefox doesn't even respect it in some case when scrolling even though i turned off everything.

I hate animations. I want everything instant, my time is precious, my ability to suffer shit moving all over the place is limited.

I have animations minimized (whatever the setting is called) on my iphone, and there is still a maddening delay when doing many actions. Either the app has hard-coded some amount of time between presses or the program is so inept that it really takes fractions of a second to do basic activities.

> (That said, it funny to hear SJ mentioning his work on Finder, because that's probably the worst non-power-user file manager in existence.)

I’ve seen similar sentiments echoed many times but I’ve never really understood them. After enabling the status and path bars and setting window search default to the current directory, I don’t find the Finder any worse than the typical Linux file manager and in some ways prefer it to Windows Explorer.

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