I always wanted to write down my thoughts as to why I like/dislike certain UX
aspects. In recent years there has been a push for CSD which gives the
applications more control about how they look (so they say) and that this is
the best step for everyone.
This is just my opinion, in a silly quick write up. I am fascinated by
all types of UIs and UX setups. I've worked with the obscure to the not-so
obscure. Maybe I'll change my mind about some of this... but I gave some good
reasons as to why probably not too. Send flame mail to the usual place.
Burger-Menus:
Designed for phones, they have no real place on the Desktop. We have screen
real-estate that needs to be used. It's not just to render fonts bigger.
This doesn't mean we need to waste it on huge tiles (Microsoft) or large white
empty space (Google).
Windows has menu-bars under all of the windows' decoration handlebars.
MacOS has a global menu.
Please use them! That's all I have to say.
CSD vs SSD:
CSD can be achived under SSD. Send a Window Manager notification to disable
the decorations and draw/manage your own controls inside the application.
CSD-only window manages cannot do the opposite. You are forced to implement
your own decorations. There is a freedesktop extension for Wayland etc. to
support SSD but the big players are not implementing it for political (and in
my opinion also financial reasons).
Let's talk about the benefits of using SSD, because it's already clear that
SSD is about choice whereas CSD is quite black&white about it:
- By default, all windows on SSD window managers are the same on all windows.
You can have applications like Steam send hints and manage their own.
- All windows integrate visuall
I always wanted to write down my thoughts as to why I like/dislike certain UX
aspects. In recent years there has been a push for CSD which gives the
applications more control about how they look (so they say) and that this is
the best step for everyone.
Burger-Menus:
Designed for phones, they have no real place on the Desktop. We have screen
real-estate that needs to be used. This doesn't mean we need to waste it on
huge tiles (Microsoft) or large white emptiness (Google).
Windows has menu-bars under all of the windows' decoration handlebars.
MacOS has a global menu.
Please use it!
CSD vs SSD:
CSD can be achived under SSD. Send a Window Manager notification to disable
the decorations and draw/manage your own controls inside the application.
CSD-only window manages cannot do the opposite. You are forced to implement
your own decorations. There is a freedesktop extension for Wayland etc. to
support SSD but the big players are not implementing it for political (and in
my opinion also financial reasons).
Let's talk about the benefits of using SSD, because it's already clear that
SSD is about choice whereas CSD is quite black&white about it:
- By default, all windows have the same decoration.
- All windows integrate visually.
- All windows work functionally the same.
- The window manager is able to override window behaviour in case this is
needed (think of Wine's Virtual Desktop feature, which helps immensely
with making select applications work better in some environments
Now, the shocking (!!!) revelation:
And finally, you know how to drag windows around in SSD.
You know what applications are named - what windows belong to what application.
Yes, this is a real issue... CSD applications can be REALLY ambigous at times.
Some CSD applications don't do anything to tell you what they are and where
you can click&drag to MOVE them around your desktop:
Can you tell me what the name of the application is?
Where do you drag to move it around? Hmm?
At least the environment lets you know the name of the application, but how do you move it? How do you resize this GTK3 application?
On the second image, the window controls are suddenly in the bottom left corner,
like... what?
"No granny, you can't move the window by just dragging a window with your mouse,
you have to hold ALT now so the windows KNOWS to be dragged because there is no
screen estate left to handle that for you!"
"But there is so much empty space my grandson!"
"Shutup. This is good design. These themers and RedHat employees are really,
really smart. They know better than all of us. ALT+Drag is the way to go nanny."
All this thinking about User-Interfaces made me go back to the past
and read about how Windows 95/Chicago's interface was created.
It required a lot - A LOT of interface testing.
A lot of amazing research was done - a lot of the design discoveries have
prevailed to this day.
Here's a link to a good write up
It's like, we had desktop environments mostly figured out.
Now someone comes in and tries to stir things up. _again_.
I hate sounding so conservative, but please tell me the above approach isn't
unnecessarily complex?
Why force everyone to maintain their own window-handling code?
If you're seriously trying to tell me that throwing it all out the window
without having done the same level of research (when clearly most people despise
the changes CSD/GNOME UX brings) then you must be smoking something really
freaking weird.
-- Marco