[dailykoder]

The UI in terms of space and usability looks great. Two "modern" things I don't want to miss: Good font rendering and a fast application launcher (mod -> type a few characters -> enter). What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations. Just gimme the damn thing, I don't need those animations. (Yes I know on most plattforms I can disable them, but this often takes quite a few steps)

[abraxas]

Agreed on the animations but that isn't my top of the list because as you observed, those can usually be disabled. The most annoying aspect of modern interfaces is total inconsistency in looks and behaviour across different applications. Even common action icons vary in style, colouring and shape from one application to another. Title bars are hijacked for whatever fanciful ideas the app designers had in mind, scrollbars and other basic widgets are rarely drawn using native desktop components, tab ordering is a dream of the distant past and so on and that's if a given app even responds to the tab key.

[btbuildem]

You would've really hated software in the early 90's -- every single thing had an aesthetic of its own. It was actually quite wonderful, and a lot of style/"personality" embedded in these design choices.

[SirFatty]

Personally, I dislike the flatness. It's hard (at times) to distinguish one from another when multiple windows are open.

[WD-42]

It’s to be expected when almost every app is electron or some web wrapper, that all consistency is lost. The only way to get it back (kinda) is to avoid those apps.

[chairhairair]

This will never happen because:

1. Companies will always want to brand their apps with their particular UI styles.

2. In order to prevent the above, the OS would have to deliberately NOT expose the ability for apps to control their own pixels.

Doing 2 means you are making it impossible to support many application types (photo editors, games, etc.).

NOT doing 2 means that app companies will eventually use the same APIs that the photo editor and game applications use.

[prmoustache]

This is self induced misery.

Nobody forces you to install and use apps made of a different toolkit (or version of said toolkit) from the one shipped with the desktop.

You can use only Cocoa apps on MacosX, qt6 apps on a kde plasma 6, gnome/gtk4 apps on a gnome3 desktop or whatever is the equivalent in the windows 11 world.

[GuB-42]

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.

Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster. For me, it is an impressive technical feat and it took years for Android to catch up (see: "project butter"), and in the end, it was mostly by brute force, i.e. putting ridiculously overpowered hardware in smartphones.

Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.

Why you have latency to hide in the first place is another problem. There may also be some clueless designers who put slow animations for no good reason, maybe because they are just copying Apple, not understanding why Apple did it in the first place.

[cosmic_cheese]

There are also some animations that that have utility beyond eye candy in communicating to the user what’s going on, which is particularly important for non-technical individuals.

For example the animation associated with minimizing windows in most desktop environments makes it crystal clear where your window went after you press the minimize button, even for novices. Removing that animation makes the interaction significantly more confusing.

[bgarbiak]

Well, the iPhones were in fact faster. Faster at playing the animations, at least.

I worked on an app in the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S II era and we wanted to use the same trick on both: smoothly animate the view switch between user interaction event and the API response. It worked super smooth on iPhone, and it was jittery as hell on Android. In the end we left the animation on the former, and move the users straight into the loading screen on the latter.

[zozbot234]

> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens.

Except that most of the time there really isn't any latency to be hidden, the action becomes effectively instant once you remove the animation. Starting a new app (or switching to an app that was evicted from memory) is the main exception and that's quite rare.

[shaftway]

> Remove the animations or make them faster (you can do that sometimes), and the lag may become apparent.

This is my number one trick on Android phones. Enable developer options and change the animation speeds from 1x to 0.5x. It makes your old phone feel new.

[LoganDark]

> Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.

Is that why iOS animations always feel so slow to me? Modern phone hardware can do things so much faster, but the animations are still utterly sluggish in my opinion. Worse, there's no way to speed them up; even with reduced motion, slow movements are simply translated into just-as-slow fades, which are somehow even more obnoxious.

[cyberax]

> Slow animations are a way to hide latency, they are essentially loading screens. Apple is really good at it, or at least it was with the early iPhones, and a reason why iPhones felt so smooth compared to their Android counterparts while not being actually faster.

Now it got flipped. I turned off animations on my Android phone, and it's great. And now every time I have to use iOS (for app development), everything seems to be moving in slow motion.

And you can not turn it off! Apple in their infinite wisdom doesn't provide ways for app developers to disable animated transitions.

[ferguess_k]

My No.1 pet peeve is the scrollbars. Somehow every modern UI designer hates it, and hates it deeply. They always want to get rid of it. And TBH I'd prefer the other way around - how about we get rid of them instead?

[cosmic_cheese]

There’s a similar disdain for menubars which I really can’t understand. The disorderly and abbreviated hamburger menus that most often are used as a replacement are just worse on every single axis except for maybe visual appeal. They throw out what could be the single strain of consistent usability across apps in favor of looking good on a PowerPoint slide and web marketing blurb.

[jimbokun]

Certain long emails I get don’t show the scroll bar at all in iOS Mail, and I get low grade anxiety not knowing how long the email is or how much more is left.

I’m also perplexed why the mail developers would allow such a thing or what kind of bug causes such behavior.

[thewebguyd]

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.

This is what drives me crazy on macOS. Specifically, the animation for switching between virtual desktops. When I hit Ctrl+1/2/3/etc I want it to switch instantly, no animation - not slide into place. It's even unresponsive until the animation finishes.

[airstrike]

I use the Aerospace tiling window manager for macOS just so I can move my apps to different spaces and opt+key move to them. usually vscode in opt+1, firefox in opt+2 and discord in opt+d

[nextos]

I don't use Mac because I prefer Linux tiling WMs, but this is easy to fix?

Most animations can be disabled using the defaults system.

I think the desktop animation option is called workspaces-swoosh-animation-off or similar.

I also recall that Settings > Accessibility has a reduce motion option that disables lots of things.

[ZuLuuuuuu]

I hate the default animation speed of Androids that come with Pixel phones. They are too long and makes it feel like the phone is slow. One of the first things I do after buying a new phone is to half the animation durations using developer settings, and the phone feels much faster.

[ulrikrasmussen]

Agreed! Whenever I use someone's phone I instantly notice how sluggish it feels with animations turned on. If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.

My pet peeve: Animations are a crutch used by designers who think they need them when in fact they should just have improved the UI so users don't get confused about the origin of a popup or window. The only justified use of animations in UIs that make sense is in scrolling, everything else is just adding latency to hide your incompetence.

[zozbot234]

> If I offer to turn them off they often get surprised at how much faster the phone feels after.

If you're using Android there's also a "visible touches" option you can turn on in the Developer settings. It's a big UX enhancement of its own and IMHO should be promoted to the Accessibility settings (together with the options for speeding up or disabling animations).

[pdntspa]

Idunno man, I enjoy the animations. They're a big part of the 'feel' of MacOS. But they could be faster in some cases.

[imiric]

> Good font rendering

A large part of the charm of these 90s UI recreations is precisely the lack of antialiasing and other niceties we expect of modern UIs. There was another project recently on HN that uses modern font rendering with a Windows 9x look, and it's just not the same, IMO. SerenityOS comes closer to what I remember, though it still doesn't quite match the look of MS Sans Serif(?).

[aembleton]

You might need a CRT to properly recreate the look of a 90s UI.

[mardifoufs]

I agree that it is charming when I want to tinker with stuff. But if it's for "real world " usage, I don't think that being charming matters a lot. I mean, it really depends, not everything has to be about "serious" usage but if it's the intended goal then I think that good font rendering is something that still matters a lot.

I still use chrome sometimes for example just because it seems to have a better font rendering (on Linux but also on Windows) than Firefox. It's completely irrational in a way but it does matter sometimes

[immibis]

You can always turn it off. I don't think lack of antialiasing is what gives these UIs their character.

[noja]

The screenshot with the wrong width+height values is not helping appearances.

[cjbgkagh]

AFAIK there was a case being made at the time that the animations were to provide predictability in performance, users get into a bit of a rhythm and it was better to slow everything down a bit to lower the overall variance of response. This made more sense when HDDs were slow.

[mvdtnz]

> What I dislike the most on modern UI, and maybe absolutely hate, are all those super slow animations.

I get it, and I agree. But what I personally hate the most on modern UIs is hiding things. Why aren't my scroll bars visible when I'm not interacting with them (and even when visible, are ridiculously small and low-contrast)? Why does IntelliJ hide the buttons for interacting with tool windows until I mouse over where they should be? Why does MacOS hide my application launcher bar by default? Stop hiding things!