Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

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IGNORE ME
Woah Dangsaurus
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed May 13, 2015 1:18 pm

They also like to gloat about how easy it is to fuck up your hosts file.

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Thad
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 08, 2015 2:52 am

Perfect Viewer is a program for reading CBR/CBZ/etc. files on Android.

It laughs in the face of your ridiculous notions of discoverability.

It DOES have an option, that is relatively easy to find in recent versions, to show two pages of a comic at once, which is nice, especially if you're reading a comic that has some two-page splashes going on.

It's even got a feature -- though poorly-named -- that will show one page if the device is in portrait mode and switch to two pages if it's in landscape, which is just brilliant.

But its default behavior -- and the menu to fix this is not one of those things that's easy to find -- is to simulate a fucking crease between the two pages with shitty shadow and pinching effects.

WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER WANT THIS?

WHY DOES IT EXIST?

WHY IS IT ON BY DEFAULT?

WHY IS THE OPTION TO TURN IT OFF NOT RIGHT NEXT TO THE OPTION TO VIEW TWO PAGES AT ONCE?

I just. Don't. Understand.

And the thing is, I DO understand deliberately simulating an inferior medium for purposes of fidelity -- I use CRT emulation in my emulators, and I vastly prefer comic book reprints that are scanned from newsprint to ones that are recolored, or that use the original colors on glossy paper.

But there's nothing to like about intentionally obscuring the fucking center of a comic book image.

First of all, that's NOT an experience you get in reading most original (American) comic books, because most comics are originally printed as stapled pamphlets and don't crease in the center in the first goddamn place. Second, it's not an experience that's desirable in hardcovers and paperbacks; there's been no end of people complaining about DC's binding process in its hardcover reprints for this exact reason. When you come across a two-page spread and you can't read the middle, you try like hell to get it as flat as you can so you DON'T get that effect.

I just don't understand any aspect of this decision. Unless, of course, the Perfect Viewer devs actually hate their users. In which case a lot of things start to make a lot more sense.

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zaratustra
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby zaratustra » Mon Jun 08, 2015 6:07 am

Image

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 08, 2015 2:01 pm

I used to have a coffee maker whose clock was designed to look like an old analog clock face with an hour and minute hand. Just fucking baffling.

I also used to have a VCR with a remote that used a scroll wheel for navigating menus and such. That part's not so bad. What was fucking dumb was that you could ONLY use the wheel to enter dates, times, and channels into the timer, instead of the ten fucking numbered buttons that are smack-dab in the middle of the thing because IT'S A GODDAMN TV REMOTE.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:54 pm

So uh apparently Chrome does not have an option to automatically open a file when you download it?

Even though this is an incredibly obvious and common feature, and has been a feature request since goddamn 2008?

And the feature request threads are full of smug asshole commenters explaining that well it ALWAYS downloads the file anyway; all the "Open" feature on other browsers does is save the file to a temporary directory, run it, and then delete it.

Well NO FUCKING SHIT that's what the "Open" feature does; THAT IS THE FEATURE I AM FUCKING ASKING FOR. So that I do not have to manually execute and then manually delete every goddamn file that I download just to open once.

Jesus fuck. The "I don't use that feature, ergo it's not important" mindset is fucking obnoxious enough without being willfully goddamn stupid and pretending not to even understand the utility of the feature.

tl;dr I tried Chrome for a few days and now I am switching back to Firefox.

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Silversong
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Silversong » Wed Jun 17, 2015 2:07 pm

I had that exact same experience with Chrome. IT at work strongly encourages everyone to use Chrome, but I use that feature every single day, as people are constantly emailing me things that I only need to look at once. It took a couple days to realize Chrome just couldn't do it, I assumed I just couldn't find the option.

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Sharkey
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Sharkey » Wed Jun 17, 2015 5:04 pm

zaratustra wrote:Image


My phone is in a case that looks like a tiny leather book, I use a jury-rigged rotary phone to dial skype, and I soldered together a row of shift switches and feather contacts to use my typewriter as a USB keyboard, so...

fucking ouch.

In my defense, each of those things is actually functional. I think there's something elegant about taking hardware with a feeling of permanence and solidity and making it actually useful again. Also, I'm fucking old, so I'm entitled to like shit I actually grew up using.
Image

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Sat Jun 20, 2015 4:26 pm

Okay, you know what, Wordpress?

I already don't fucking like you inserting paragraph tags into the middle of my shit.

But how fucking hard is it to not insert them in the middle of a goddamn <script> block?

And you know what else, popular Wordpress plugin? How fucking hard is it to respect the remove_filter() function if I've set it in my functions.php?

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sei
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby sei » Sat Jun 20, 2015 7:29 pm

Thad wrote:Okay, you know what, Wordpress?

I already don't motherfucking like you inserting paragraph tags into the middle of my santorum.

But how motherfucking hard is it to not insert them in the middle of a goddamn <script> block?

And you know what else, popular Wordpress plugin? How motherfucking hard is it to respect the remove_filter() function if I've set it in my functions.php?


Familiar song. Yes. Fuck wpautop.
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Mongrel
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jun 23, 2015 12:04 pm

So I JUST NOW discovered, after like.. 4? years on Win7, that if you boot the thing with a USB stick in one of your USB slots (nothing special just random document/image files), Windows 7 will... fail to boot entirely. Is this the 90's?

I'm not sure if that makes me the incredibly stupid one, or Microsoft, but I am posting in this thread.
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Rico
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Rico » Tue Jun 23, 2015 12:37 pm

That sounds like it might be a motherboard boot setting, I leave USB drives plugged in all the time.

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Grath
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Grath » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:11 pm

Mongrel wrote:So I JUST NOW discovered, after like.. 4? years on Win7, that if you boot the thing with a USB stick in one of your USB slots (nothing special just random document/image files), Windows 7 will... fail to boot entirely. Is this the 90's?

I'm not sure if that makes me the incredibly stupid one, or Microsoft, but I am posting in this thread.

That sounds like your BIOS is set to try to boot from USB drives before it tries to boot from the harddrive.

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Mongrel
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:23 pm

That would make a little more sense. Though not sure why the BIOS wouldn't just move to the next media if no operating system was found to boot from.
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Classic
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Classic » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:25 pm

...
You think your drive doesn't have data where boot points to?

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Classic
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Classic » Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:27 pm

Mongrel wrote:So I JUST NOW discovered, after like.. 4? years on Win7, that if you boot the thing with a USB stick in one of your USB slots (nothing special just random document/image files), Windows 7 will... fail to boot entirely. Is this the 90's?

I'm not sure if that makes me the incredibly stupid one, or Microsoft, but I am posting in this thread.

Had this but it was a wake-from-sleep fail.
That machine is scrapped now, but I'm curious if it was set to check USB volumes first too.

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Thad
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Sat Jun 27, 2015 4:47 pm

Monitors that automatically switch to a different input when they lose the video signal.

This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea, until you actually connect two computers to the same monitor, and then every time one of them reboots or goes to screensaver you have to fucking manually switch back to it. Often several times, if you don't time it exactly right.

Which isn't so bad when it's a one-button switch. But on my monitor it's two fucking menus deep.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Sun Jul 05, 2015 1:54 am

While most of the shitty "let's make everything on the desktop look like it does on a phone" trend has, fortunately, started to cool since Windows 8, there are a few vestiges of it stell creeping around.

One that's consistently infuriating is razor-thin scrollbars. Look, motherfucker, maybe I'm not scrolling with my damn fingers. Maybe I'm not using my scroll wheel. Maybe I'm looking at a huge page or list with a lot of information, and a wheel scroll is too slow and a finger scroll is too imprecise, and so I want to just click and drag the scrollbar, like I've been comfortably doing since goddamn 1989.

Xubuntu's default theme does some bullshit now where if you hover a scrollbar, the actual click-and-draggable UI element hovers to the right of the scrollbar, and is still too small to reliably hit. Fortunately, there are other themes you can select, but each has its own various UI problems. (I really want to punch whoever decided it would be fine for the titlebar of the active window to be the same fucking color as the titlebar of inactive windows. Except it might have been Steve Jobs, and he's dead.)

Witcher 3's settings menus do a particularly terrible variation on this. Not only do they have the thinnest fucking scrollbar I have ever seen, making it virtually impossible to click and drag, but for some inexplicable reason when you scroll using the wheel, it moves the mouse pointer too. So it is literally impossible to continuously scroll through an entire menu, because eventually your mouse pointer moves outside the menu and the wheel stops scrolling.

(This is probably less of a problem for people who don't spend two fucking weeks trying to tweak all their graphics settings before figuring out their CPU is actually overheating, but still.)

Also I've found that Windows 10's minimize icon is invisible when viewed on a TV screen from across the room. Fortunately it's got a pretty sizable hitbox, but it's still jarring to have to click blindy to the left of the maximize button. This is another one of those things where making the entire titlebar the same color is a bad idea; Apple's got the right idea with the red-yellow-green coloration. MS has the close button turn red on hover, at least, which is a good start, but the minimize button really should be something more than just a two-pixel-high line near the righthand side of the titlebar.

(Also, I fucking miss titlebars in my browsers. In what conceivable fucking way am I better served by having a bunch of tabs that are too narrow for me to actually read them than by, say, a titlebar that allows me to figure out at a glance whether I'm using Firefox or Chrome?)

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Sun Oct 11, 2015 12:51 am

Man, fuck this shit where the Play Store only works if you're accepting scripts from Google Analytics.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 14, 2015 9:38 pm

It's bad enough that Nintendo won't let you reset your fucking password from a web browser (at least, not that I could find) and makes you tap the whole damn ordeal into your 3DS with a damn stylus.

It will ALSO happily let you choose a 20-character password without fucking telling you that the eShop won't take anything longer than 16.

I know that Nintendo does not know how to Internet, but even given that fact I'm baffled that the system settings use a completely different interface to enter your password than the eShop does. It's kind of amazing.

I'll give MS one thing, when you change your Live password, they fucking tell you that anything over 16 characters won't work on an Xbox 360.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design

Postby Mazian » Mon Nov 02, 2015 2:45 am

Tidying up some screenshots, I ran across this keeper from my credit union. (It's a little better nowadays.)

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