Quote:
Originally Posted by viztastic
I was about to embark on a journey to design my own modern looking/feeling eBook reader/management platform until I ran into Calibre. Calibre seems to have everything from a functionality point of view but the user experience feels dated.
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If modern means like Android, Win10 etc, forget it. So called modern UI are a disastrous UX and throwaway everything learned from 1976 to 2000.
Vista was garbage: Too fancy.
Win10 is garbage: Too flat, by default GUI elements such as scroll bars hide. It's like 1980s Hercules display. Too many elements are vague: is that text, or a link, or status or a button?
Stupid check boxes made to look like slide switches.
Tabs where you can't see which is active.
Lacking lines to group "radio buttons" (that's where only one item can be checked.
No Close button X on windows
"Dated" might apply to newspaper, comic or magazine design, but 25 to 30 year old GUI elements are high productivity and clear. I use a Theme based on Server 2003 GUI on my Linux Mint.
Also anathema, except for a small widgets, are programs that ignore the system GUI and do their own. Nearly twenty years ago I learned who to do Java programs that simply used the current system Theme and looked Native on XP (no matter which theme), Mac, and various Linux desktops on Red Hat and Ubuntu.
Calibre runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Unlike Mac & Windows now, there are a real choice of Desktops and of Themes on them. Linux even has tools to tweak appearance of some applications using QT or other frameworks etc.
So I now hate Thunderbird's horrible flat design and ghastly stock CSS. I use Waterfox Classic with Classic Theme restorer so my web browser matches OS GUI and doesn't look like some badly cloned mobile app.
To me "Modern" = post brutalist. Flat, harder to use. "Dated" = familiar, easy and obvious GUI elements.
A lot of apps and web pages now look like badly designed corporate letter heads for monochrome laser and paper.