UI Gripes: Season 1

'HID' stands for 'Human Interface Device'. I don't think I have any of those, and if I do, then they're definately broken.

For the past few months I’ve had many great ideas of things to write about. Unfortunately all of them have been too ambitious for me to start or complete. Many of these imaginary blog posts are mega-projects, involving the publishing of small games or the torture of certain friends.

Today instead I’m going to succumb to my tiredness and just complain about other people’s things instead.

GTK save dialogs

My first dive into Linux, using Ubuntu in 2007, burned this image into my mind for all eternity. The non-microsoft save dialog. What was this sacrilege? It was exciting. It was different.

Then I discovered that I couldn’t do any file management from inside of it, like I could do in the Windows one. The best you can do is create a folder — you can’t rename anything, or even right-click a folder and open a proper file manager dialog (to save you from having to navigate there manually anyway). Woe to you every time you save a file or create a folder with the wrong name.

It seems the GNOME world expects you to:

• Not care about your file organisation, or
• Always have a file-browser open next to the software you’re using to fix all of your mistakes in, or
• Be able to structure things perfectly from the get-go and never have to fix stuff.

That’s wonderful if you fit into one of those categories, but why not support humans like me too?

Then GTK3 came along:

Oh dear. Let’s ignore the fact the sidebar needs almost twice as much screen space for the same content.

What matters to me the most is that I can’t navigate anywhere as fast as I could with the gtk2 dialog.

In gtk2: things were very fast and very easy. If I wanted to save to ~/library/uni/ELEC3111/assignment1 I could click on the file list and type:

lib [ENTER] uni [ENTER] ELEC31 [ENTER] ass [ENTER]”

GTK3 decided to get rid of this. “Oh, you’re typing? You must want to search! Pardon me whilst I spend the next minute pounding your HDD, rooting through your entire home directory because you decided to type the word ‘lib’.”

No, I do not want to search. Un-cached search is the worst user interface design ever invented. It’s slow, it’s messy, and it’s only useful for unsorted or lost files, but even then it fails if the user has saved somewhere outside the expected scope. Not to mention now I have to physically look through the search results and find the thing I’m after whilst the results are still streaming in. And when I do find what I’m after: I try to double-click it, only to have another search result shuffle under my mouse in less than a human reaction time. It’s completely useless.

Editorial note: at this point in writing I made the mistake of trying to recreate this particular problem. “Oh, it looks like the search has finished, I guess it’s faster than it used to be and this problem doesn’t exist any more!”

Nope.

I tried to double-click on a folder and a document replaced it just as I was clicking. I’ve now just saved over a file somewhere in my home directory. I didn’t even get an “are you sure?” dialog.

Data loss is the revenge on those who criticise GNOME 3.

There is a work-around : I have to type the path into the filename box at the top, and use TAB instead of [ENTER]. This would all be fine, but I’m used to using the up/down arrow keys to walk through similar-named directories (eg uni course codes such as ELEC3111, ELEC3107, ELEC4122, ELEC3106). This was an amazing time saver in the gtk2 save dialog. All no more.

I wonder how hard it would be to hook in the WINE save dialog instead of the GTK one…

QuiteRSS

Beautiful RSS reader program to use. Has not been updated in a while, probably full of webkit bugs.

Adding new feeds is a breeze: after hitting the ‘add new feed’ button the program even reads your clipboard for a URL, auto-inserts it and immediately starts grabbing details about it (name, icon, etc). Whoever made this has clearly had to use their own program for a while.

Unlike Liferea: this feed reader does not lock up all the time. Unlike Seamonkey/Thunderbird’s RSS reader: you don’t have to do some weird nesting of feeds inside a folder to even view their contents. Sidenote: this made migrating to/from Seamonkey as a feed reader an absolute pain.

Sadly QuiteRSS screws up in one big way: it steals focus. Repeatedly.

Want to middle click a feed entry in QuiteRSS to open it in your external web browser? Ah wonderful, let’s start… WHAT? Why did QuiteRSS steal my focus (and my mouse, unfortunately due to some requirements in my window-manager). Ok then, I’ll just move it over and… AGAIN? WHAT?

Every single feed you open starts a timeline of TWO focus steals over the space of about a second. I basically have to lean back from my keyboard during this time and not touch anything.

These Russians software devs are crazy.

But hey, it looks like work on a new version has started:

The application will be completely rewrited.
UI will be redesigned. Special thanks to Bozhevarsky Dmitry.
Webkit engine of internal browser will be replaced by Chromium.
There will be special release without internal browser.
The appliction release date is undefined.

I hope for the release without the internal browser: Chromium sounds heavy, and the laws of software development state that projects who announce features never get finished :P Good luck Funcy-dcm, I’ll be looking forward to this!

Launching any slow application.

When I start an application that I know is going to take a while (ie more than a couple of seconds) I tend to go back to work on something else on another virtual desktop or another screen. Unfortunately the slowly loading application then likes to appear ontop of what I’m doing (rather than back on the workspace/screen I started it on) and immediately steal keyboard focus.

Problematic example: typing my password into one application, my browser then appears and steals the tail end of it.

Again: we’re in a situation where you have to literally step away from your keyboard and computer to wait for it to do its own thing. Whilst the computer does look and act like it can accept input during this time, it may as well block all input for the use that it is. It’s dangerous to type whilst an application is still loading.

GTK Save dialogs.

What? Again?

Something as venomously evil as gtk-file-chooser requires at least two sections. Literally, the ‘file list’ and the ‘path bar’:

The ‘Save’ button often does not do what you want it to do. Here’s me going crazy using it:

The exact same problem exists with the gtk3 dialog too.

Should I make more videos in future? And what do you hate about your daily UI?