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Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 1:51 pm

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Redocbew
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 1:58 pm

I'm not a great UI designer myself, but at least I know I'm bad at it.

Seriously, what the hell.
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Glorious
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 1:59 pm

I like the slider idea lol
 
biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:08 pm

I like the simplicity of this one.
Image
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In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:09 pm

Redocbew wrote:
Seriously, what the hell.

I'd bet money that the team lead said something along the lines of "Make sure you use drop-downs wherever possible, to make the forms easier to use", and some n00b developer on the team took it a little too literally.
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Redocbew
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:12 pm

Yeah that sounds about right, and if it looks like that on the outside I really don't want to know what the internals of it all look like.
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biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:13 pm

Does it really NEED drop downs though? Seems over complicated for no intended purpose.
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:15 pm

biffzinker wrote:
Does it really NEED drop downs though? Seems over complicated for no intended purpose.

That's kind of the whole point. Drop-downs should only be used where they actually make the user's life easier.
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Topinio
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:20 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I'd bet money that the team lead said something along the lines of "Make sure you use drop-downs wherever possible, to make the forms easier to use", and some n00b developer on the team took it a little too literally.

I'd take that bet and put my money on either a PHB or the client being the source for that idea/instruction, malicious compliance FTW :evil:
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cphite
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:25 pm

I don't have video or anything but years ago one of our developers, in a response to being told his interfaces were "too simplistic" designed one that emulated Doom engine... you had to enter a four digit PIN by walking through numbered doors. If you got it wrong you died and had to start over.

It was gloriously stupid :D
 
localhostrulez
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:27 pm

Yeah, that's like sliding, sliding, sliding to select the date/time on iOS. Guys, wouldn't a numberpad have been easier?
 
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:31 pm

localhostrulez wrote:
Yeah, that's like sliding, sliding, sliding to select the date/time on iOS. Guys, wouldn't a numberpad have been easier?


omg those "wheels" they have are so so so so so so bad. I know they don't wanna take up the whole screen with a long list but the scrolling wheels are just awful.
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:33 pm

cphite wrote:
I don't have video or anything but years ago one of our developers, in a response to being told his interfaces were "too simplistic" designed one that emulated Doom engine... you had to enter a four digit PIN by walking through numbered doors. If you got it wrong you died and had to start over.

It was gloriously stupid :D

I love it!
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DreadCthulhu
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 7:54 am

DancinJack wrote:
localhostrulez wrote:
Yeah, that's like sliding, sliding, sliding to select the date/time on iOS. Guys, wouldn't a numberpad have been easier?


omg those "wheels" they have are so so so so so so bad. I know they don't wanna take up the whole screen with a long list but the scrolling wheels are just awful.


Android used to use a perfectly sensible numberpad to enter minute & hours for alarms, but with lollipop switched to this stupid clock shaped timepicker that is stupid. Not as bad as the iOS timepicker, but still a definite regression. Thankfully I found a third-party alarm app that has a normal numberpad.

Anyways, drop boxes are great when you have a few choices (i.e. gender - all you need is male, female, and mayonnaise) or when something can be ambiguous - like US states & territories, a site may ship to Puerto Rico but not the Virgin Islands, for example, so those make sense for a drop box.
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Dposcorp
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 8:44 am

I have never done any coding, but I got that right away, and loved all the follow up.

Nice post JBI
 
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 10:14 am

Image

This one got me. :lol:
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 11:11 am

cphite wrote:
I don't have video or anything but years ago one of our developers, in a response to being told his interfaces were "too simplistic" designed one that emulated Doom engine... you had to enter a four digit PIN by walking through numbered doors. If you got it wrong you died and had to start over.

It was gloriously stupid :D


That's totally like PSDoom!

For those who haven't heard of it:
The Doom process manager (PSDoom) is a modification of the game Doom that displays representations of the processes running on a machine. Rather than using standard text-mode UNIX tools to view and manipulate processes, one surveys and shoots at a room full of bloodthirsty mutants, as shown in Figure 1. When a user starts PSDoom, currently running processes are instantiated as ``process monsters'' in a single room in a ``dungeon.'' These monsters have their associated process' name and id printed on them. The program periodically polls the operating system to add newly-created processes to the game. The user may choose to view the processes from a balcony above the room, as shown in Figure 2, or to enter the room to interact with them. If the user inflicts a wound upon a process monster, the corresponding process' priority is lowered to give it fewer CPU cycles. When the monster accumulates enough damage and is killed, the associated process is also killed.


Image

And for added hilarity:
PSDoom inherits the rest of its behavior from the original Doom, and play is not noticeably affected. Monsters attempt to attack the player and each other. The hostility of the monsters and the user's limited ammunition are disincentives to attack them. Conflict among process monsters could help regulate heavily-utilized systems by making crowded rooms have higher mortality rates. Killing random processes on an extremely loaded system is not an uncommon operating system strategy. When the user is ``killed,'' he or she will be healed and placed at the entrance of the dungeon with a pistol and a modest amount of ammunition.


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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 11:12 am

Obviously the best UI is the one that doesn't render properly on IE11 and Firefox, and then telling the users to switch to Chrome.
 
localhostrulez
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:23 pm

No, just, no. Yet another case of "Gee, we spent more time implementing the feature, *AND* we got a worse result! Yipee!".

Instead of letting me use the keyboard to type it in that much faster...
Image
Last edited by localhostrulez on Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:32 pm

HP-12C:

5.271991 - Enter
4.192016 - g > ΔDYS
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:40 pm

That calculator takes up to much screen space, reminds me cellphones/phones made for seniors.
Image
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
localhostrulez
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:50 pm

Yeah, my grandma has one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Snapfon-Senior-Un ... 005CWSF3U/

Mom tried to text her while on a trip (since calling between different time zones/a bit late is kinda annoying), and it was super hard for her to even see the texts (don't even try to reply from that thing). And the antennas suck on it. (Why the hell did we buy that thing? Oh yeah, it's really difficult to find an unlocked dumbphone with a warranty in this country.)

I swear, my Lumia 520 would probably be a better phone for her. The contacts list is usable, I can always pin only the phone app to the home screen, SMS is actually usable, it hasn't glitched on me like Android tends to (although I haven't used it much either), and we can ignore the apps quite easily. Battery life is pretty good, and replacement batteries are really cheap (Nokia used that battery for lots of models over the years). I got it for $20 a while back to play with, and AT&T unlocked it when I asked a while later even though I've never actually activated it or purchased any kind of service through them. Shoot, maybe I will give that to her, since I never use it anyway (it can't run Spotify with any decent level of performance, which was my sole reason for buying it), and have too much junk as it is...

Edit: Note, the laptop is set at 125% scaling, so it's not as bad as it looks. Still too big though. The same goes for the Intel graphics panel, which *demands* 1024x768 minimum window size or so these days...

Edit edit: Apparently AT&T unlocks gophones even if you've never had any service with them (so why lock them at all?). Shoot, maybe I should get one of these for dad's parents as well (who also have one of those really crappy senior phones)...
 
biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:59 pm

Wasn't picking on the older generation in case someone gets the wrong idea. I'm happier with the old calculator even though the reason for making the modern/metro calculator large was for touch screen friendliness.

The Snapfon ezTWO you linked to doesn't seem as bad as some I seen.
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 7:05 pm

Who doesn't want this, and no waiting for it to load.
Image
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
localhostrulez
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Wed Apr 20, 2016 7:47 pm

Thing is, it's *really* difficult to deal with contacts on those phones. I get it, most people have their grandkids (that would mean me) figure it out or don't use that feature at all, but still...

As for the calculator - honestly, those modern/universal/willyastoprenamingthiseverydamnedgenerationguys apps load pretty fast for me in 10. Not like the days of 8, where they were really slow to load for no apparent reason. I still wish the calculator were more like a basic TI-30X, where I can actually type in a full equation with parenthesis (I usually use LO calc for this stuff). Might be worth noting that you *can* make the Win10 calculator smaller (unlike, say, the Intel video panel that demands half your screen at a minimum).
 
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Thu Apr 21, 2016 12:12 am

biffzinker wrote:
Who doesn't want this, and no waiting for it to load.
Image

My current desktop calculator app of choice is SpeedCrunch:
Image
You get a scrollable history of your calculations, and you can instantly paste anything from the history (not just results, but expressions too!) into the current calculation just by clicking on them.

It launches fast enough that by the time I have lifted my fingers from hitting the global hotkey (I have it programmed to Meta-Alt-C), the window is already open... so effectively instantaneous, from my perspective. Even on systems that are still using a mechanical HDD as the system drive.

And yes, localhostrulez, it understands parentheses. :wink:
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biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Thu Apr 21, 2016 12:48 am

For you jbi! :)
Image
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Thu Apr 21, 2016 12:53 am

Is this what you were talking about earlier localhostrulez?
Image
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.
 
localhostrulez
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Thu Apr 21, 2016 1:11 am

Well, that older calculator was better with dates (i.e. you can actually use the keyboard to type them in), for one... Actually, maybe I'll install that on my laptop, which I finally upgraded to 10 (battery life + Intel CPPC support + touchpad scrolling + dpi scaling is improved over 7, and generally mobile stuff/not applicable to my desktop, so the desktop will probably stay on 7 for now). I know people packaged it up for 10, and it worked well when I last tried it.

Although this reminds me, let's go install Python and use that for math... (and YES, they FINALLY figured out how to use the Program Files folder by default rather than the root of the drive on Windows - only 2 decades after everyone else)
 
biffzinker
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Re: Brain-dead UIs

Thu Apr 21, 2016 1:32 am

localhostrulez wrote:
I know people packaged it up for 10, and it worked well when I last tried it.

Here's the old calculator: Winaero - Download Old Calculator for Windows 10 from Windows 7 or Windows 8
Author Microsoft
Description Get the old Calculator app from Windows 8 or Windows 7 in Windows 10. It is the genuine classic Calculator app extracted from Windows 8.1, with full localization support. It will be always in your OS language. It supports both Windows 10 x86 and Windows 10 x64.
It would take you 2,363 continuous hours or 98 days,11 hours, and 35 minutes of gameplay to complete your Steam library.
In this time you could travel to Venus one time.

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