15.6 still has the far better text box

Accel
  • Edited

It's easy to rag on the new ver 20 UI right now (for good reason - it's really bad) but after reverting to 15.6 let me just list the things I didn't even realize I had missed so badly because the updates that followed it screwed it up so awfully.

In short: look at the text input box, and how they massacred it.

  • The rounded design was pointless, seemingly just to make it look like other messenger apps. Nitpick but the old one looked sleek and nice. A harmless change that nonetheless didn't need to happen.
  • Why have one button to attach media when you can have two? A common rule in hardware design is more moving parts = more parts that will break, and that holds true for software too at times, in this case the two new media attach buttons that appear contextually. Sliding in and out of view, having to sometimes expand them out to just upload a pic adds nothing but inconsistency to what worked really well before.
  • Long pressing the text box now briefly brings up the context ribbon menu, before it forces the keyboard into view, even if you wanted to paste & send quickly and not type anything. On 15.6 the keyboard only pops up after a tap - in other words, only when you definitely wanted it to
  • The incredible unwelcome keyboard popup also seems to come up when attaching an image now. Again, no sense of "paste & send" like I very frequently desire, the new chat box seems to think everything I do demands the keyboard be summoned. I really don't want it to.

I'll be sticking to 15.6 for a long while to come now, auto updates disabled, flexing that android power of being able to roll back in the first place. But while I did that primarily to get rid of the awful new ver 20 UI, the rollback made me realize just how much I missed this old text box - the one that was good at what it did and didn't bug me. So even if they do roll back the new UI changes or somehow make them less annoying in a future update I don't know if I'll want to come back to latest release.

 

People like new features in their apps, but they also hate being forced to break their old habits and relearn how to use things. Cars don't change how their controls are arranged every few months, for the most part gear shifts all stay in the same place and you still use a steering wheel, and the accelerator pedal is to the right of the brake. If you switched any of these things up, nobody would like your car. We could do with more of the same school of thought in modern UI design.

7

Comments

2 comments

Date Votes

Please sign in to leave a comment.