I think there are two parts to the problem: ① a popular developer platform using overlay scrollbars; and ② the fact that `overflow: scroll` sounds like what people want, when it’s actually not (as you say, they wanted `overflow: auto`). If I could rewrite the history of just this one property, I’d rename `scroll` to `always-show-scrollbar` or `show-scrollbar-even-if-insufficient-content-to-scroll` or similar. Or maybe split `overflow` in two and use `scrollbar-show: always;`.

Hmm. I wonder if we could convince browser makers to kill off `overflow: scroll`, making it equivalent to `overflow: auto` due to rampant abuse (there’s precedent for this sort of thing), and replace it with a new, more clearly-named property `scrollbar-show: always`. (And `scrollbar-{x,y,inline,block}-show` to go with it.) Maybe `always` wouldn’t be quite the right keyword, given that it wouldn’t be affecting the behaviour of platforms with overlay scrollbars. But this actually sounds both reasonable and feasible to me, given that `overflow: scroll` is subject to rampant abuse due to misunderstanding and was basically only a tiny quality of life thing for certain corner cases in layouts anyway.

I have on idea what school of thought has brought forth the no-UI UI but I absolutely think they are idiots.

When I first saw it the first thing I did was to find a way to get rid of it. In Windows it's: Settings > Ease of Access > "Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows" > Off

This just reminds me of how lovely it would be to have complete interoperability between every browser, every OS, mobile or desktop... And how unlikely it is to happen in the near future.

They're undoing much of what Ive did to MacOS, it's time to include making scroll bars as big and useful as they used to be!

I felt absolutely ridiculous and ashamed after that. So, I make a point of designing all my software with visible scroll bars and other visible features that a user could reasonably expect to find without having to hunt or guess.

Sure, it doesn't look as "pretty" but it's so much more useable.

I misunderstood the intent and I thought that they were just replacing the scrollbar to style it, which as a side effect broke the behavior with a mouse in Windows/Linux, but it took me long to understand that it was because Mac OS removed them by default and it was not just designers being obsessed about styling the scrollbars...

That stuck with me for a long time, and I remembered it when MacOS and iOS first began departing from that philosophy with their modern looks. I would say Jony Ive contributed a lot to this transition from user-friendliness to design-led, form-over-function.

The fact that I can only toggle it at an OS level is pretty bad. I love the invisible scroll bars and I would prefer to have them in all apps I use myself, but I do respect the platforms and users who have visible ones, but I shouldn’t have to choose between my own user experience and testing for their user experience

In the Gmail Admin interface for users, the scrollbar vanishes unless I have my browser nearly maximized. Do the designers live in a world where their browser is always nearly full screen?

You'd think huge companies would notice and care about these things.

I remember on IRIX they were so bold, a real tool to be used. Same on Windows up to and including Windows 7. Now it's like you have a 2 pixel wide invisible border, hard to click, which may be the shadow of the window, or at the edge in the window; it's hard, specially when working over VNC. Nothing is gained by freeing up those 10 horizontal and vertical pixels.

I think this is a lost cause. A lot of macOS people are "zealots" and they feel that anyone who uses anything else is simply "wrong." I've long dealt with designers like this and realized I can't win.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/kusIhDh.png

It would be a lot nicer if, while typing a command, a list of options came up, along with a short explanation and example, and by clicking the option the full documentation for it would come up.

But that cannot happpen, console apps have no connection to a UI.

The amount of hidden-ness/clevery fuckery in OSX is maddening. I would implore every one to complain to Apple to fix their broken OS.

The web is fine, the garbage developers are putting out is because of the broken dumpster fire of OSX.

You'll notice that Apple loves to champion usability (HIG etc) ... except when it flies in the face of their minimalist aesthetic.

Solution: web developers should change how they do CSS to accommodate Apple.

Grab your ptichfors brothers and sisters, we have another heretic to burn at the stake!

I really like the hidden scrollbars that Apple settled on. They are easy to identify by hovering the cursor over scroll-able content and they just act as an overlay over the content. In windows, the content is actually shifted the width of the scrollbar which is terrible for UI consistency in some cases. There is the problem that hidden scrollbars remove the "discovery" aspect of traditional scrollbars, but I find this to be a very minor loss in practice. I don't miss having a sliver of a scrollbar for large content blocks.

I ultimately just settled on styling scrollbars in CSS, making them a bit slimmer and forcing that behavior on the Mac for consistency. Scrollbars look nice, match my UI look and feel, minimally shift content and look consistent across all platforms.

I threw away all of the custom JS approaches that try to mimic Apple's solution because none were perfect and, in every case, introduced new problems that disqualified them entirely.

Agreed.

> Alternatively, you can set the scrollbars to be visible at all times by setting System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars to Always.

Disagree. Now you're using a different UI layout than the vast majority of your users!

Stop complaining about discoverability, everyone that knows how to browse the web knows how to scroll. It's like worrying whether the user will know how to use a mouse when you're designing a web page. Scrolling is not something like shortcuts or tabs - you need it to move around, which means you get to know it as soon as you start your computer and after the first knowing phase it's visual clutter.

Also, I would like to ask whether users will usually even want to click on the scrollbar to move around. Unless the small number of cases where the page is long and you want to move around quickly (and if you have ever been in that case, you know that even there using the scrollbar is pretty useless because it's too sensitive - you are usually less precise when you use a scrollbar, not more), there's virtually no reason to click it. Computer screen estate is precious because not everyone is using a 27-inch display (13-inch display here), so that's a pretty big reason to hide the scrollbar.

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.

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.

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.

* It's the experienced users who were were less likely to recognize the "burger menu" or the three dots (does that have a catchy name) as something potentially useful. They didn't look like "real" controls. It was the less experienced users who just naturally tried clicking on anything near the top that looked interesting, or waving the cursor around looking for hovertext on active components.

* Confronted with a landing page that seems to have nothing more than some splashy graphics and a few words - notably no scrollbars - experienced users are likely to wonder if the page is broken for them (because that was a very common experience at the height of the browser wars and still persists). Less experienced users who grew up with smartphones are more likely to start swiping right away.

A user who was older but not experienced with computers would align more closely with the young 'uns on most of this. When everything's completely new you just start experimenting. It's when you think you know things work but they don't work that way any more that things start to get frustrating.

Hell yes. In most instances, I'm way beyond this point at only 30 years old. Come to think of it, it actually makes me wonder how I will feel about UIs at 50 or 60 years old.

Because some things are scrollable and it’s usually fairly obvious if there’s going to be more content.

If it’s not clear to you, I totally get why you think that.

But I don’t suffer the same issue.

Why should I have to have scrolbars plastered all over the show to tell me that something is scrollable when I can check it myself in less than a second?

I understand why people disagree - why is it so hard for you to understand that I disagree?

Generally it feels like the pro scroll bar opinion is actually quite aggressive, needlessly so.

There are subtler themes for scrollbars as well so that they don't have to stand out.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

Although, you probably still need to print a leaflet with updates between when you sent the manual out and when you finalized the software.

Don't blame Xfce for that but Ubuntu. For some reason they decided to make the resize area 1 pixel wide. It's specific to recent versions of Ubuntu. It worked fine on LTS 16 (or was it 14?) and on Debian.

And because their designs make windowed use problematic (both because of the title bar issues, and because space is used poorly in the name of "clean design"), they encourage even full screen use.

Add to that the fact that more than a few applications default to full screen at first run, and ...

This is why we can't have nice things.

IntelliJ IDEA also fell victim to this trend of abusing the title bar, but they are be reverting the change and providing a setting after listening to the inevitable criticism: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-219212

I'm not talking about shitty old laptops. I'm talking about shitty new laptops. There are laptops you can go into an electronics store and buy right now that have 1366x768 displays. And that's ridiculous.

Yes, these laptops are cheaper. But putting a 1080p panel in these laptops wouldn't be that much more expensive. Maybe an extra $0.50 on BOM, compared to the current design. Or, in fact, it might have exactly the same upstream cost. Why, then, use the shittier panel?

The 1366x768 display is purely there for market segmentation. It's an artificial constraint hardware makers impose on their low-spec devices, in order to make them unattractive to people with higher budgets.

A lot of these low-spec devices would be just fine for the small amounts of work many people have to do on computers, and so these people would buy them if they only needed "a little bit of" computer, even if they could afford something more expensive. (Just like you buy a $50 blender, not a $500 blender, if you're only making piña coladas.)

But the people who would consider these low-spec devices (despite having the budget for higher-spec devices as well), are pushed away from the low end, by these artificially-imposed pain points.

And that means that the people who do only have the budget for a low-spec laptop, are getting an artificially-imposed screwing, getting a shittier laptop than their money would buy them in an efficient market, purely because the supplier went to extra design effort to make their low-end products actively repel middle-end customers.

And taken in that lens, the fact that modern OSes don't work well on 1366x768 displays is actually kind of the point. It's not something the OS manufacturer can fix on their end. Because this would be a vicious cycle: if the OS began to work just fine on a 1366x768 display, then the laptop mfgrs would design their next series of low-end laptops to have even smaller displays, in order to re-introduce the market-segmenting "cramped feeling."

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'Cute' code that leverages language features in creative and surprising ways, generally belongs on code golf competitions, not production systems. If your code is so 'clever' that only you can understand it, that means you're a bad programmer, not a good one. (That's not to say you should avoid making appropriate use of advanced language features for fear of ignorant readers, though. That's another matter.)

Ada was far ahead of the game here, explicitly prioritising readability over writeability, in its language design.

With all that said, an experienced programmer may feel less need to write comments, as their own familiarity with the problem-domain and with the language will be well developed.

https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-...

The number of designers who will march up to their VP and boldly declare that all the company's apps are just fine and don't need any kind of redesigning is small.

You get a similar thing any time a development team runs out of feature work or actual stress points in an application they maintain. They wind up reworking the thing mainly to have something to do to justify the continued paychecks until the business thinks of an actual reason.

Here's what Windows XP (not even really from the 640x480 era!) looks like on a modern display: https://ibb.co/W5mVgHT

You could fit a lot of Windows XP, and XP-era apps, on a 1366x768 display. You can't fit much of a modern OS+apps on one.

(That's honestly for the best; text and icons in modern OSes are both a lot more legible due to the increased fidelity and breathing room they have. But display resolutions have to keep up; and, at least for low-end PCs, they aren't.)

Anecdotally, most engineers I know use Chrome on a MacBook. The only people I know who use Safari are my parents.

Some mice (Microsoft ones IME) have horribly clunky middle-click, at least the Logitech mice I normally use are softer with less travel, which I prefer.

Not all apps seem to allow middle-click on Win10. I can't recall any that didn't on KDE though.

I keep meaning to look for a good iPad tutorial, to see how to do all this stuff.

As a general rule of thumb, if it has anything to do with colors and comes from either computer or photography people, there's a solid 99 % chance it's broken or doesn't even know what color is. If you want to know how it's done right, you gotta look at how the "moving photos" people do it.

(Note: "everything" for me means "everything that's not Apple", because I cba to care about those snowflakes)

[1] Yes, yes, OpenGL has sRGB types for framebuffers, which doesn't work on half the devices in the wild (on the other half it applies the sRGB gamma function to linear sRGB data) and isn't meaningful anyway, because we _don't_ want to use sRGB. DXGI only does Rec.709 and Rec.2020, no DCI P3, and it also treats everything that's not HDR as sRGB.

Took me a week or so to get used to Mac. I can't care less about what OS I'm using, they all excel and suck in different ways.

Now that macOS is every bit as complicated as windows, it’s often Microsoft’s OS that can’t do something. WSL helps some of that, but there are usability shortcuts that Windows doesn’t have. Windows is also insultingly condescending with its verbiage (“Getting Windows Ready” or “Working on Updates”). Maybe aiming low in their explanations is their one-button-mouse moment.

I don’t think the users were ever all tech-illiterate on either platform. Only perceptions have changed.

Why do you miss Finder? Search feature? Preview.app? Opposite to you, I never like it.

1. there's a potentially-huge result set;

2. almost nobody ever wants to see the whole result set, but rather almost always just wants to see the first N chunks, and then drops off;

3. the results are sourced from a data lake, or from eventually-consistent geographic shards, or any other process where you need to actively gather results together with a map-reduce.

When these three factors apply, it becomes very expensive to know exactly how many results you will have, because that changes your partial streaming map-reduce workload into a complete map-reduce workload, over potentially billions of records, just to validate their inclusion and then count them.

Think "Twitter timeline." If every client displaying a Twitter timeline needed to know in advance how many tweets they could ever see, total, if they "scrolled all the way back" — then Twitter's servers would fall over from the load of calculating that number.

Another example is Google Search, which, while not "infinite scroll" on the client, is still a "map-reduced stream" on the backend. Google has put some extra effort into heuristic scheduling logic for its Search map-reduce: it grabs an initial 20-page-or-so chunk of the stream and caches it on a sticky-session node for you. This means that, if your search-result set is less than 20 pages, you get to know the actual result-set size. If it's more than 20 pages, though, Google Search reverts to exactly the same "you'll only know when you're at the end when you get there" semantics of SQL cursors. You see the first 20 pages, with a "next" arrow to go beyond them; and then it just starts counting up, and up, and up...

It's still janky (and buggy?) as hell on Chrome on Windows with a mouse with a scroll wheel.

Apps and media can do whatever to the scrolling since it just an implementation detail to achieve some effect like slide transitions.

Documents shouldn’t touch it and leave it up to the client.

This has burned me more times than I’d like to admit. I have a macbook for work and activated iMessages for my personal account. One day I accidentally posted something in a chat room meant for someone I was chatting with in iMessages. It was kind of personal but thankfully vague enough that I could brush it off. I also was on some screensharing sessions when I switched to iMessages which briefly showed personal conversations. After a few times of that happening I disabled my iMessages account for on that machine and made it a personal rule to never mix business and personal activity on any company-issued device, which has served me well over the years.

Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.

You’re completely right that this doesn’t hold true for other countries, and that ignoring Android is not the play, though.

What are some examples of the two approaches?

"Apps" to folks in storage (like myself), networking, OS, etc.

With examples given like curb cuts for wheelchairs helping everyone, and OXO brand kitchen utensils meant for impaired hands just being better for everyone.

Better is better.

Why would you expect that? What concrete advantage does a mouse have over a trackpad for gaming that doesn't translate to regular use?

Neither can I, actually. I work with my MacBook plugged into a large monitor with an external keyboard and mouse 99% of the time, and just assumed everyone else did as well without really thinking about it.

I imagine that developers would prefer mice if people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably prefer mice, and I suspect people who use computers intensively and knowledgeably do prefer mice, the same way that I believe we prefer good keyboards and good monitors.

Better accuracy and muscle memory. Faster. It's not just for "gamers".

I also see them frequently have a bug where they'll just keep cycling through the same first page-equivalent of results.

[1] If you click a result and then hit back, it usually just reloads the page and starts you from the beginning. I think the function of a back button changed at some point. It used to be that "back" was always instant and took you to the exact state of the page before you clicked a link. Now, there's a huge lag on all but the most minimal sites (like HN) and some reload of something gets triggered.

Side note, I've always suspected it's an issue of too many cooks in the kitchen. They spend tons on UX but end up with something barely usable.

WHAT?!

I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time:

(I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)

As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0].

Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English.

--

[0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.

It seems natural to spend a little time exploring the interface of an extremely complicated instrument that is an integral part of your daily life, reading Tips, etc. That also means if this device is not exactly that heavily used (say you have assistants for that), you are spared of wasting your cognition cycles on simply being aware about all the features it has in store.

FWIW search field in Apple’s own apps like Settings mentioned upthread is revealed to me every time I scroll from the bottom back up to the top of the list due to inertia, I don’t know if they changed it recently or not. (Other apps often make a mess of the same UI pattern. In WhatsApp it is much more difficult to discover, requiring to really pull down and wait to see Archived Chats, and meanwhile Search field is just there wasting screen space despite being used once every few months.)

That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about message timestamps in particular—I believe there are ways of showing them smartly if you haven’t used your phone for a while and missed a bunch of messages without overloading the UI for people like me who couldn’t really care less about that (RIP my IRL social life as of late). Perhaps Messages could use more attention from a good product designer.

Hey, it's better than clicking through the Medium digest and getting your 10th consecutive "you can use a switch statement instead of a bunch of if statements" article written by someone in week 2 of their bootcamp. :(

It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.

This is something that we have lost completely with the web. Just having OK/Cancel buttons in the same place in the same order in evert dialog box was very important to developers at the time. Now it's all over the place

Actually, it didn't work because I told him to Shift-Tab to go from the starting Tab to the ending Tab in one go, except he had an extra Tab on his computer (I think due to a graphics card) at the end. If I had told him to Tab 5 times instead, it would have worked.

Learning something new requires more effort, because you have to unlearn other things. But it's not even clear what needs to be unlearned. So we founder.

Internally, we feel like we stopped learning. But I'm certain that if you were airdropped into a new domain, you'd be a voracious learner.

It didn't even occur to me that someone who uses a computer all day long would use a touchpad, even though millions of people own one, Apple continues making them bigger, and the only thing "wrong" with them is that _I_ can't figure out how to click things on the first (or 5th) try.

Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button, and sometimes the second extra button selects the highlighted thing. Sometimes up and down arrows increase the selected thing (e.g. volume, brightness) and you need to press one of the extra buttons to stop doing it. Sometimes one of those extra buttons acts as a hotkey that will switch you to a completely different menu, so it will take five minutes to navigate back.

Then sometimes a confirmation windows opens, with two buttons "yes" and "no", one of them is pink and another is light blue, if you press any of the four arrows, the colors switch, and you are free to make your guess whether pressing the extra button will confirm the pink option, confirm the light blue option, take you to a completely different place, or turn off the menu.

That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.

Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.

Warframe is the THE game I can think of doing this most. Even when I learned how it all worked, I needed a bunch of reference tables/posts so I could grind with maximal efficiency!

Nowadays, if a game has "crafting" I am 90% inclined to skip it.

And yeah, they suck a lot[1], but there's a way to fix if you use Homebrew: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57973942/8280773

[1] Performance-wise and also when you take into account that most shell scripts/tutorials on the internet are written with a GNU userland in mind.

Also, Mac is a certified UNIX environment, it is native.

Notably, when you connect a traditional mouse, the scroll bar automatically becomes thicker (easier to click) and always visible, as mice users do have a reason to click/drag the scroll bar. Seems like Apple had this in mind

To me, it looks more related to the recent fashion of "minimal" interfaces. Like material design and ultra-skinny fonts. Could also be related to the "infinite scroll" some sites have. A scroll bar doesn't make much sense for those.

Just a tap, like on a phone, and I've clicked. I do keep the click sound on though, for feedback.

[1] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19830424&id=...

This goes especially for audio.

I’m going to guess that Apple peripherals + Apple OS on Apple hardware is actually hassle-free but then what’s the point of a standard.

I was adding another experience to the pile.

The only problem that is solved is running multiple browsers in VMs in a cloud. Everything else is anyone's guess.

To come up with an automated test for the problem in the OP you have to be a) aware of the problem and b) have a way to test that scrollbars do/don't appear. Good luck with that.

So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I would just sometimes be working and suddenly everything is gone and I had no idea why.

This conversation happened a thousand times: "but you can hit them again and restore what you were doing"... no, I can't, specially if I have pressed a dozen keys since.

I used to buy IBM keyboards from more civilized times, but my dealer disappeared, maybe he was arrested?

So if you accidentally hold the press for a fraction too long you block that number.

And then you wonder why your friend(s) don't love you anymore...

To unblock it, you have to go to the Contacts and dig through options there, the SMS app showed nothing of help. It wasn't obvious that you had it blocked!

Likewise, if you use an underpowered laptop, or one for which Ubuntu doesn't have proper drivers, you're going to have a hard time using Zoom.

I'm not saying that you'll never have issues (which I'm sure holds for MacOS as well), or even that you might not have slightly more issues than on MacOS (see your last paragraph), but things are definitely not as bad as comments online would have you believe, because many of those can be ascribed to issues like I mentioned above.

But I agree that it's a bad feature, and IMO it's a rare miss from the Windows UI team who if nothing else have developed excellent window management.

I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use. I know the testers at our shop do it with an house built framework as well as with commercial ones. On our company's security team, various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools I mentioned, and she said it would take her a few minutes.

These are commodity tools. There is nothing special with any of them.

If you're refering to Minecraft, one of the reasons why Minecraft blew up that much was that it was around at the exact right time in history: when online gaming had become viable and let's-plays were just becoming a thing. Minecraft, as originally intended, is a communal experience where you learn from the friends you're playing with and from sources on the internet. If I had to describe Minecraft in one sentence, it would be "let me show you that cool thing I saw Pewdiepie do last week". The idea has become commonplace in video gaming at this point, but back then it was fairly new.

(That said, opaque game experiences have been successful before, like the original Legend of Zelda. I guess the schoolyard served a similar purpose back then.)

You din't, really. On the third attempt you said "I see our testers doing this all the time - but I don't know what libraries they use" and "various people have scripted UI exploits using selenium or appium. I just asked one of the people familiar with those two tools"

This shows that you started this entire argument with very bad faith. You berated me for not knowing something while you yourself:

- don't do frontend testing using frontend testing tools

- you don't know what tools your testers use

- you assume some capability of some tools only because "you talked to people familiar with them" which further shows that you yourself are not familiar with them.

On the other hand, unlike you, I know what I'm talking about. Granted, I haven't used these tools extensively, but I did use them, and I'm well aware of their limitations.

All you have is, well, empty words.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did not need to ask other people how to solve a problem. That is a silly interpretation of what I wrote. You are willfully pretending ignorance of how to read and have a conversation.

Pontificate: "express one's opinions in a way considered annoyingly pompous and dogmatic." Yes, you really do need to stop pontificating.

I hope you find happiness.