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559 points cxr | 4 comments | | HN request time: 1.165s | source
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weinzierl ◴[] No.44477561[source]
I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else.

I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.

IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears.

Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?

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autobodie ◴[] No.44477657[source]
Intellij on Windows also buries the top menus into a hamburger icon and leaves the entire area they occupied empty! Thankfully there is an option to reverse it deep in the settings, but having it be the default is absolutely baffling.
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DidYaWipe ◴[] No.44477724[source]
Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using?

This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.

And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.

And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.

So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.

It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.

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int_19h ◴[] No.44478435[source]
This isn't just a Windows thing. Look at Gnome for another example. macOS of late also likes to take over the title bar for random reasons, although there at least the menu bar is still present regardless.
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DidYaWipe ◴[] No.44479299[source]
I've always considered the Mac's shared menu bar a GUI 1.0 mistake that should have been fixed in the transition to OS X. Forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen, and doesn't switch back to the previous application when you minimize the one you're working with, is dumb.

Windows and Unix GUIs had it right: Put an application's menu where it belongs, on the application's main frame.

But now on Windows... NO menu? Oh wait, no... partial menus buried under hamburger buttons in arbitrary locations, and then others buried under other buttons.

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danaris ◴[] No.44479616[source]
...The Mac menu bar is what it is for a very good reason. Being at the top of the screen makes it an infinitely-tall target.

All you have to do to get to it is move your mouse up until you can't move it up any more.

This remains a very valuable aspect to it no matter what changes in the vogue of UIs have come and gone since.

The fact that you think that you've "minimized the application" when you minimized a window just shows that you are operating on a different (not better, not worse, just different) philosophy of how applications work than the macOS designers are.

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1. gmueckl ◴[] No.44481637[source]
There are videos out there where CHM interviewed Bill Atkinson. One part has him go over old Polaroids of Lisa interface drafts. There, he justifies the menu bar at the top of the screen differently: they couldn't figure out what to do when the menu was too wide.for the window when the user made it narrow.
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2. DidYaWipe ◴[] No.44493273[source]
Huh. I wonder why they thought this was such a big deal. I mean... the user caused the problem, and could easily fix it by enlarging the window. Other windowing GUIs handle this just fine.
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3. gmueckl ◴[] No.44506895[source]
I'm not sure if it was user tested, but IIRC part of the problem was that there was no visual indication that the menu bar is cut off and some of the commands are inaccessible. We need to remember that this was new - they were introducing a GUI to the masses for the first time ever. Everything hat to be extremely clear.
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4. DidYaWipe ◴[] No.44514868{3}[source]
Good point, and surely a valid concern... one that Apple has forgotten in some places today. Look at the utterly useless icon/thumbnail view in Finder: Contents don't wrap within the window. There could be dozens or hundreds of files off-screen in limbo, and you'll never know.

There are, of course, ways to indicate "more controls this way" with an arrow or other affordance when there's a toolbar or menu overflow, though.

Anyway, the point is that by the time OS X came along, other platforms had solved the problems but Apple rejected those widely-accepted solutions.