LWN.net Logo

Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark

Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark

Posted Jan 25, 2013 17:18 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark by epa
Parent article: Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark

Skeuomorphic binary sliders suck on touch displays too.


(Log in to post comments)

binary sliders

Posted Jan 25, 2013 18:56 UTC (Fri) by mlinksva (subscriber, #38268) [Link]

I don't understand them on physical devices, let alone on-screen configuration. Or rather, I have to think a few seconds each time I encounter one. Much prefer switches/buttons/checkboxes. But I'm probably missing something important.

(Binary sliders minor complaint; overall good work GNOME people.)

Clasen: GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark

Posted Jan 25, 2013 20:19 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

For extra fun, make the sense of the label the opposite of what normal humans would use to refer to it. A good example is what Amazon did to the Kindle around the time of the Kindle Touch: "Wireless on" suddenly turned into "Airplane mode off", which both needs to be translated even into British English and is also precisely the wrong sense, since nearly all the time when people are turning their wireless off they're doing it to double the battery lifetime of their Kindles and not because they're getting onto an aircraft.

But then it got controlled by a stupid skeuomorphic binary slider, so sliding the slider towards the word 'On' turns the wireless on again (though they call it 'turning airplane mode off'), and sliding it towards the word 'Off' turns the wireless off (though they call it 'turning airplane mode on').

Making simple things complicated...

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds