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lateforwork 5 hours ago

This behavior is similar to Windows 11. You have to position the mouse just outside the window. It is non-intuitive and awful.

These are problems humanity solved over 35 years ago (see NeXTSTEP). Why are these designers breaking basic features that worked for over 35 years?

asaddhamani 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.

em500 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.

betaby 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sometimes that's true.

CobrastanJorji 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.

flohofwoe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is all the more bizarre, because historically it was usually Windows which copied MacOS ;)

That the roles got reversed became painfully clear when macOS copied the Windows Vista style popup mess for access permissions.

jeroenhd 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The macOS style popups are arguably worse.

Windows Vista may have been plagued by programs assuming administrator access for everything but at least it isolated the security prompt.

You can verify that you're interacting with a real UAC prompt (by pressing ctrl+alt+delete for instance, which can be configured to he required before approving a prompt).

Any program can replicate the macOS security dialogs. You just have to hope that you can safely enter the password to your account into one, or activate TouchID when prompted.

wk_end 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.

Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.

keyringlight 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.

On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.

1over137 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.

Y_Y 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.

"Socrates", in Plato's Republic

None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.

Maybe it's humanity's way of escaping local minima, or maybe it's an endless curse which every generation must bemoan.

bigstrat2003 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.

I am. If it isn't broke, I don't fix it. And I suspect others are as well. The problem is that too many people are not immune, so it doesn't matter if some are.

rectang 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And the elder generation is always convinced that the young generation is degenerate, incompetent, and destined for ruin.

1over137 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yup! And the cycle continues.

rhet0rica 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.

Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.

ThatMedicIsASpy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the inability to just hold win+mouse1 to move or win+mouse2 to resize is driving me insane compared to KDE