#everyone hated that because it tried to be a mobile UI for desktop

[jeff-from-marketing]

This is a whole ass trend across software in general and it pisses me the fuck off.

Every single music streaming service has gone this route and it's so fucking bad and unusable on desktop, because funnily enough, desktop and mobile have VERY different UI/UX requirements!! Spotify quite literally ported their mobile UI to their desktop app, and I have not stopped bitching about it since because it's just such a massive downgrade in usability.

Look at this shit! Y'see the red circled area? Yeah that's all the actually useful bit of the program. The entire rest of it is so fucking useless. And even this bit is such a fucking pain in the ass to use. It takes three fucking clicks to change between viewing artists I have saved to viewing my playlists. Y'know what previous versions of Spotify let me do? View them both at the same fucking time, because there was actually room for that! Even if you didn't want to do that, look at how much dead fucking space there is! In fact, when you're not filtering by a specific thing, ALL THREE BUTTONS FOR ARTISTS, ALBUMS, AND PLAYLISTS ARE VISIBLE! THEY ALL FIT THERE! But when you go to look through just one of those, the other buttons disappear! WHY!? THERE'S STILL ROOM FOR THEM! YOU'RE JUST GIVING ME MORE CLICKS FOR NO REASON! THIS ISN'T MOBILE, THERE'S ROOM THERE!

Going to another, admittedly a lot more niche thing: let's talk about digital character sheets real quick. Particularly ones that have separate desktop and mobile layouts.

Pathbuilder 2e is, in my eyes, the gold standard of digital character sheets. It's not perfect, but damn it's good.

Now there is still some dead space, and to give it full credit I am running this at a larger resolution with no scaling (1440p display, 100% resolution scale) But everything is sorted neatly, pretty much all the space can be used if it's needed to be used for anything. It's compact, but not claustrophobic.

Compare it to an alternative, Pathfinder Nexus, and problems are immediate:

LOOK AT ALL THAT EMPTY SPACE TO THE SIDES!! Even ignoring the double banner problem for a moment, constricting space even further. This sheet is actively struggling to show even basic information, I have to scroll quite a lot to see all the skills, changing to the spells tab means scrolling a lot just to see even some of the spells, equipment is a mess, etc. All because it's just so squished in and not using ANY of the space to its sides!

The only time it ever uses that dead space is if you click something and it brings up a popup window. Which, btw, Pathbuilder does as well but uses the space more efficiently. You could move so much of the top half of the sheet around, spread it out more, and you would have so much more space to work with. They even have a separate, DIFFERENT, mobile UI! So there's no reason to restrict yourself so much on desktop!

Just continuing the TTRPG information trend for a moment, you can see this is an issue that persists with all of Pathfinder Nexus. Let's compare it to the standard the Pathfinder community is used to: Archives of Nethys.

Again, keep in mind my resolution scaling. But see? All the width is used, they could do more with it (and I'll discuss that in a second) but it's not trying to emulate mobile. They're not unnecessarily restricting their useable space for no reason.

Let's go back to Pathfinder Nexus for a moment to see the same information and- oh god damn it.

Even ignoring the double banner problem again, SO MUCH DEAD SPACE! Whereas AoN manages to fit all 22 classes on one page without having to scroll or anything, Pathfinder Nexus can't even fully fit in six. YOU COULD FIT IN A WHOLE TWO MORE CLASSES ON EACH SIDE PER ROW! Admittedly Nexus does give a brief blurb on each class without having to click or hover over anything, and that is quite nice actually, I actually do wish AoN filled up their space a bit more with stuff like that. So I wouldn't expect 100% parity with AoN just for that alone, but that does not excuse just how much dead space there is. And once again, the mobile layout is different to desktop, there's no reason to constrict yourself like this. The dead space literally isn't being used for anything. You could seven classes in a row with how much dead space there is, and with how many classes Pathfinder has that is actually important.

And in both these Nexus cases, I'm actually giving it a better chance of being good because of the aforementioned resolution scaling. But even when given help, it's still just bad. Because what that resolution scaling ends up doing in these cases is just giving even more dead space.

And the AoN team is a small group of people kept afloat by donations and patreon. Nexus is hosted by Demiplane, which is a much larger team who have a lot more resources at hand. Why is AoN doing this much better??

And now we go full circle back to Tumblr. It's not fucking subtle what they're doing, they're clearly just straight up copying the Twitter UI, without actually thinking it through if that UI was actually any good. Quick tip for, well, anyone really: just because someone is used to something, doesn't inherently make it good. People may be familiar with the Twitter UI, but that doesn't make it a good UI.

Nothing in the new update is an improvement. Some of it is strictly worse than the old UI in fact. But most importantly: STOP TREATING DESKTOP AND MOBILE THE SAME WAY. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME, THEY HAVE DIFFERENT DESIGN NEEDS.

everyone's saying it but yeah the new tumblr desktop layout is complete garbage lmao

yknow what i really can't fucking stand. how every social media now feels like it's designed for mobile first but then subsequently there is NO design for desktop and they just kinda slap a mobile interface onto a widescreen canvas and fill it with a solid color. like why is what feels like 60% of my dashboard just negative space on a 16:9 monitor. the entire thing is so fucking claustrophobic and just bunched together. use the space!!!! why are the timeline switcher tabs at the top of the screen getting cut off!!! you could fit all of them!!!

[thetreetopinn]

I recently bought a new desktop because the old one was showing signs of aging--chugging when trying to complete basic tasks, things like that.

I was looking at pre-built rigs because I didn't want to spend an arm and a leg, this isn't intended to be mega beefy... maybe someday in the future I'll be able to afford to build a custom rig, but not today.

Unfortunately, they all came in one flavor--Windows 11.

I was hoping to avoid this, because from what I've seen... it's... not great.

My experience so far is... it's not great.

Sure there are certain little details they've adjusted that are nice, but it's not enough to make me enjoy the experience overall.

The biggest gripe I have is that the Start Menu is fucking terrible.

Look at this atrocious nightmare.

Sure, you can adjust the settings to move it over to the left, but that doesn't fix most of the problem. This is just... awful. I hate it. And it doesn't give you the option to use a legacy layout, like from 10 or earlier.

Why? Why do they do this? Why does Microsoft keep insisting on making broad, sweeping changes to the UI that nobody fucking asked for, and nobody wants, and nobody likes.

Literally everyone I have asked who has tried this--HAAAAAAAAATES the new start menu.

There are third party apps you can install that REPLACE this eyesore... but that's just it... I SHOULD NOT NEED TO DOWNLOAD A SEPARATE PROGRAM TO FIX YOUR SHIT, WINDOWS.

Honestly... I wouldn't mind if Microsoft was trying this stuff out just to see what sticks... but actually let us pick and choose what layout we want. Like periodically, they come up with a new layout and it comes with the latest update. You can try it if you want, and if you don't like it, you can go back to what you had before. No big deal.

They could even carry a whole package of legacy layouts so you can simulate the start menu from previous version of Windows... but they will never do that. It would be too useful and desirable a feature.

I just... do not understand why companies decide to force these unnecessary and obnoxious UI changes on us. This isn't even the first time Windows has done this. I'm old enough to remember the debacle that Windows 8 caused with the hardcore push to unify the PC and Mobile experience... 'cause that's what we all need... christ almighty.

I'm old enough to remember people bitching about the jump from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Granted, Vista got complaints because of the hardware requirements and how much slower everything seemed to run, not the UI... but all things being equal... Vista's UI isn't my favorite.

It's like the company just... doesn't learn from its mistakes.

Oh right, duh, forgot... it's all about the money. They only care about the money. If they can make it look shiny and new, then some folks will jump on it because shiny and new, and that's big bucks for Microsoft.

Once again, like so many of life's problems, this too is caused by capitalism.