twotavol's comments

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Libui: GUI library in C

Why are you lecturing me on visual impairment and disabilities? At no point did I claim you ignore that user base.

>Many of us may not particularly like touch screens, but an incredible number of computers that run Linux/BSD these days have touch screens. Things should work out of the box for these computers whether or not you want one.

Okay so after all that we get to the root of the issue. Instead of a good traditional desktop experience, you want to provide a mediocre desktop/touch hybrid experience. Instead of doing one thing well, the aim is to do multiple things poorly.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Libui: GUI library in C

>GTK 3 and QML (Qt5) would like to target the same space as web applications. It doesn't make sense. Applications which are written with a web UI in mind will translate very poorly on the desktop, and the opposite is also true.

QML is not targeting the same space as web applications. Its a more flexible and dynamic way of creating user interfaces. Its designed so you can create UIs for kiosks, infotainment systems, mobile applications, games, and desktops all with one toolkit. QML has components specifically for desktop development that have the same look as your traditional forms based widgets.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Libui: GUI library in C

> The "big buttons" are that size because people have all sorts of accessibility needs different from your own

What accessibility needs are you targeting when you make the buttons and titlebars bigger? Why did this change drop suddenly? Was there a cry from the majority of your users that the widgets are too small to use with desktop inputs?

Usually when there are accessibility issues you add options to deal with that, you don't change everything for a relatively tiny percentage of your user base. Would you make all your widgets have max contrast and double the font size by default because it improves accessibility for the visually impaired?

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: LinkedIn just sent me this

Account breaches are so god damn annoying. That coupled with the stupid rules for coming up with passwords (only 6-8 characters, a-z,A-Z,0-9 allowed!) makes it really frustrating to keep track of and manage passwords for sites like this.

Hurry up and solve the user identification problem, HN.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Microsoft Now Treats Closing Windows 10 Upgrade Nag with [X] as “Yes, Upgrade”

Even though it won't happen I sincerely hope this latest round of unintended upgrades causes some severe and costly issues for end users. Microsoft deserves nothing but hate and backlash for trying to push Windows 10 with these incredibly scummy tactics.

If it was truly worth upgrading, they wouldn't need to trick and goad people with 'Free for a limited time!' and dark UI patterns.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Android platform engineer on application architecture

Eschewing the traditional application architecture has made for both a terrible development experience and poor quality applications in general. The application lifecycle is convoluted with even the Android developers joking about how confusing it is. Everything about the model has made it far more difficult to port existing software to, and native development for me personally has been an absolute nightmare. No clean exit strategy for applications, half the methods in the lifecycle don't even get called, etc. I can't imagine the completely naive and oblivious thought process that led to the mess they created. Good thing Android is backed by Google though, so no matter how terrible it is it'll still be popular.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Let’s stop trivializing design work

I can pull open inkscape and make an okay logo for an application in a few hours and have it meet all the criteria listed in that article. Its an icon. You aren't moving heaven and earth, you're just pulling verts around until you make something that people can click on to launch your app. I'm going to repeat an earlier comment I made on this because I've really come to hate the design/UI/UX 'image' in the last few years.

>Design is getting so pretentious and haughty. The icon design evolution video, the article littered with artistic buzzwords, all this song and dance for a circle in a squircle over a gradient. And the Layout, Hyperloop and Boomerang symbols are arguably even more useless and confusing than before.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: GUIs on embedded linux, oh my

Qt is basically unrivaled in this space in my opinion. If you really control your hardware and software, it seems like its easier for you to just comply with the LGPL requirements. You can find some other vendors for similar software with Google but they aren't as 'attractive' and 'responsive'. That being said I think IVI systems will start looking at web rendering soon if they haven't already. If the LGPL is a show stopper for you, you can always give CEF a shot to see if its fast enough (though I've always been confused about CEF because I thought it used WebKit which was LGPL)

Also depending on how complex your UI is going to be you can always take the crazy route and roll your own. If your scope is very specific and limited, it wouldn't be that bad.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: I had to remove ES File Explorer because it's carrying malware

Google doesn't need to do anything. No matter how bad Android gets, you and the general public will lap it up. Where else are you going to go? More on topic I use the File Manager application that came with CyanogenMod. It seems pretty simple, I don't know if it meets your needs or is malware free. These days I assume everything on Android is some form of spyware or malware and so I don't keep any financial or similarly sensitive information on it.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Designing a New Look for Instagram, Inspired by the Community

Design is getting so pretentious and haughty. The icon design evolution video, the article littered with artistic buzzwords, all this song and dance for a circle in a squircle over a gradient. And the Layout, Hyperloop and Boomerang symbols are arguably even more useless and confusing than before.

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Qt Creator 4.0.0 released

>The apps are huge. It's like 50 MB for hello world.

This doesn't sound right. Can someone else verify? I'm pretty sure I've written Android applications in QML that are far smaller. Are you sure these are release binaries?

twotavol | 9 years ago | on: Electron 1.0 is here

Every Electron application I've used has been sluggish and straight up pathetically slow compared to any native counterparts. I think there are two reasons its picking up steam:

* Your can now make your web devs (HTML/CSS/JS etc) do your application development as well

* General popularity of web development is exploding

* There's no comparable free, permissive native framework. The closest thing is Qt and its LGPL. No one wants to touch the GPL.

page 1