I think modern UI is becoming over simplistic - it's no longer obvious what is meant to be interacted with [2]. Humans usually have a good grasp of depth and things pretending to have depth.

I imagine OSX will eventually go the way of iOS and Android with a flat UI, where it's not obvious at all how you're supposed to interact with it. Apple products have been getting harder to use for a long time, with features such as the insane four/five finger scroll on an iPad to change apps, close windows, etc [3].

And don't even get me started with the Apple Newton [4].

[1] https://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/30000/30671/winamp...

[2] https://www.soft32.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/WIndo...

[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/2975857/ios/6-only-for-ipad...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

Winamp on the other hand, I can't name a single application that does what it does better today. Also, barely any media player today looks native either.

I'm talking UI, not functionality. Functionality wise - I am just as in love with the old WinAmp. And regarding UI, it was awesome that people could re-skin it!

>Also, barely any media player today looks native either.

Of course, but some do a better job than others I think. I think VLC appears more native anyway (it uses native menus and dialogue for menus).

Do you actually believe it's a good idea, or that there is any possible justification, for VLC to NOT use a native user interface, and instead draw the user interface INTO the video at video resolution, and rotating it with the video, but not rotating the mouse events (so it is absolutely UNUSABLE under rotation or reflection, and extremely hard to use even unrotated because the re-invented ugly non-standard sliders in a stupid way that flaunts Fitts' Law for no good reason), and using giant jaggy pixels and a terrible blocky font and short upper case labels so it's not too enormous for low resolution vidoes, is better than drawing a native user interface at full screen resolution with a decent full resolution anti-aliased font in the overlay that is actually usable at any video resolution, scale, rotation or reflection?

Please stare into these screen snapshots for a few minutes and reflect on what I said, and then go run the latest version of VLC, and prove to yourself that it's still just as bad as I described before replying, because it is.

https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV

"VLC ZOOM HIDE" indeed. Look closely at the "V": It's five pixels wide, and it's so jaggy it looks like a step ladder with only 3 steps.

VLC has a lot of features that often are rather tangential to a media player and it can sometimes act as a frontend for ffmpeg (especially the stream/convert tools). The fact that basic features, power user features and plain gimmicky crap (like the puzzle mode) are lumped in all together in one application without organization, rhyme, reason, or separation almost automatically makes for atrocious UI. With some features being added by someone who felt the need for it or needed an exercise in programming doesn't help. VLC is a kitchen sink of vaguely media-related stuff and the UI does little to hide this.

One point where I'm split on is single-key hotkeys. For years it was trivial to crash VLC simply by starting to type (something that happened to me regularly when I forgot that my IM application didn't have the focus, but rather VLC). If it didn't crash, you now had the video horizontally mirrored, in greyscale, with subtitles in Ancient Sumerian and video, audio, and subtitles were all a second out of sync to each other. Good luck figuring out how to revert that. Having hotkeys only be F keys and Ctrl+something at least has the benefit that you can't mess up things accidentally, at the expense of needing chords to interact with the application via keyboard (I'd say Windows Media Player's Ctrl+P for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on which button had the focus was just as bad, but at least you couldn't crash it by typing into the wrong window by accident. As is YouTube for requiring K for Play/Pause with Space only working intermittently, depending on where the focus is ...).

VLC is quite bad in comparison I think, but it is hard to compare the two.

https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV

That's right: the mouse target is the outlined region whose width (and thus usability) diminishes to zero towards one end. It's the most Fitts' Law Hostile user interface I've ever seen, AND it rotates sideways and upside down with the video, AND the mouse tracking doesn't work at all in 3 out of 4 rotations (or reflection), only when it's non-rotated and non-reflected: they didn't bother to transform the mouse event coordinates, just the video-resolution user interface drawing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Don't even get me started about "interlaying" the user interface INTO the video, so it looks jaggy with unreadable text, instead of "overlaying" the user interface at full screen resolution. Just look at those blocky letters "VLC ZOOM HIDE", and the ferocious jaggies on the diminishing zoom slider curve!

It's not even worth fixing any of those particular bugs in the zoom interface, because the entire concept of "interlaying" the user interface into the video is fatally flawed.

All that code needs to be printed out and burned, and VLC's entire user interface needs to be completely rearchitected from scratch by designers who know and respect Fitts' Law, so it works consistently across all platforms at all resolutions and rotations (and doesn't suck, while they're at it).

But that's not what the VLC developers want to acknowledge or work on. They're more interested in supporting the latest fashionable Anime format.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html

>FOR ANIME FANS

>New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.

But nothing for us "usability fans".

I would also hazard a guess the mobile user is larger than the anime user base, and they're just as concerned with usability as the desktop users.

Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who believe that VLC needs to focus on anime more than usability?

Is it just you who feels this way, or can you point me towards some evidence of that, please? Because if you read the VLC bug reports and discussion group, and even this thread, you can see that there are a lot of people who agree with me that VLC needs to focus more on usability. Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?

Either the Anime audience is better at filing bugs and chasing the up, or the developers favoured those tasks for some reason. Perhaps the UI guy is really slow or just missing entirely.

>Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?

There aren't any. It's clearly not a trade-off on developer time. For an open source project, people work on what interests them the most.

Specifically in regards to "anime fetish" - who actually cares? What difference does it make if it is an Anime crowd, people who like watching 8k raw footage, people who want to watch 3D films or whatever. What does the specific reason for a video format being worked on bring to the table, other than the fact you clearly don't like it?

And it's not a matter of anime fans being better at filing bugs. As I said, I filed some very detailed bugs, with step-by-step instructions to prove there was a problem, and they were flippantly dismissed and ignored.

At least Apple had the decency to acknowledge the universally held opinion that the QuickTime 4.0 player SUCKED, and they fixed.

- Full-screen VLC fast-forward skips forward in the video by a few seconds.

- Windowed VLC fast-forward skips the entire video.

I never understood why that became a dirty word in user interface design.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a calendar to look like a calendar. If someone comes up with a different paradigm that is better, then by all means do it, and let people decide if it's good.

But ever since skeuomorphism became an anti-buzz word, interfaces have been designed to be different just to be different, not to be better.

> Unfortunately, the apologists fail to recognize that there are two likely consequences of this approach: (1) the user is unable to transfer his or her existing knowledge of computer interaction, and (2) the software becomes needlessly subject to the limitations of the physical device.

I remember the bad old days where the Mac calendar would only let you flip between pages, because that's how real calendars worked. All your contacts were grouped by first letter, because Rolodex. It was a death by a million cuts where nothing worked as well as it could have because it had to exactly emulate the crummy real world thing it looked like. No thanks - that's the aspect of skeuomorphism that gave it such a horrible reputation.

If you want to make my calendar look like it has leather trim, fine. So be it. Just don't make it act like an old-fashioned desk calendar instead of the special purpose database it really is.

what's worse, i don't think there is a reasonable solution for this problem. popularity of free software is just too alluring to the users, and asking for monetary compensation instantly reduces the user base.

example: linux and openssl. large corporations benefit from running open source software. do they compensate the authors?

- plays videos - is free

Funny thing is, in the anime/tokusatsu fansubbing community, VLC has a really, really bad reputation because it does everything just a little bit wrong. Many of the more respectable fansubbing groups have big warnings in their FAQs saying "don't use VLC", typically in bold and all caps (the usual recommendation is to use CCCP on Windows and mpv on Linux and Mac). Their support for chapters in MKV containers has been hideously broken for a long time, and they have an NIH syndrome where they implement their own versions of things that are provided by open-source libraries that everyone else uses, which causes all kinds of slight incompatibilities.

Because I'm a user interface programmer who could actually do that work, I also have a lot of other pressing things to do with my time, and wouldn't want to waste it if there was no chance of the developers accepting my changes or even acknowledging that there was a problem.

If they brush off my bug report, I thought, then they probably won't accept my changes.

But that's exactly what they did, which proved to me it wasn't worth my time.

The developers also ignored and argued against many other valid bug reports and complaints on the discussion board. Their attitude came through quite clearly and consistently, and my experience wasn't unusual.

If you disagree that it's not worth the time, then by all means you should get started downloading the source code, reading it to understand how it works, submitting bug reports on any problems you find, getting up to speed so you're qualified to make changes in the proper way that the developers will accept, fix the bug I described, test it on all platforms, and submit a pull request.