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Comment by johnwalkr

7 days ago

>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.

And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.

The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.

I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.

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johnwalkr

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malfist  7 days ago

I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.

It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.

Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ii0xb6fcnexdfpdudayj1/2026-02...

  • johnwalkr  4 days ago

    I had a new one yesterday. In Apple Music (iPhone), you can long hold on a song or album and press "add to playlist" and then select the playlist. The next action you probably want to do is long hold on another album and tap "add to playlist". You have to wait 2 seconds to do this because a pop-up that says "x added to playlist" appears in the exact location you need to click on. It not only obscures the area, it prevents a tap from registering.

  • iammattmurphy  7 days ago

    That’s actually unreal. You’d think with all the money they steal from artists they could afford UX that isn’t hilariously bad.