The Windows style for bars (both title and status) is way too large. Ditto for the task bar.
It's no wonder people are tempted to not use status bars, and shove as much as possible at the title. If applications could exploit the task bar, they would too.
(Anyway, you don't need an entire bar for system interaction. But applications aren't designed in a way that allows this.)
The older I get, the more I respect bigger user interface elements and text.
It's not even failing eyesight either; I'm still in my mid 30s and have great eyesight and dexterity. I've come to respect bigger interface elements because they are quicker to work with.
I don't have to peck for a title bar if it's there, big and empty in front of me. I don't have to hunt for a scroll bar that hides itself and reveals a 1px wide sliver if I hover over it just right, if the scroll bar is big and always visible. I don't have to aim my mouse like I'm playing a fucking sniper in a fucking FPS if the buttons are clearly texted, colored, bordered, and large.
Being able to /just fucking use the interface/ with broad motions is a fucking godsend. The trend of minimalism, hide-everything, gray-on-white interfaces gets in my way and wastes my time and nerves.
Unfortunately, the designers all seem to have 72" 8K professionally color-calibrated monitors and a $1000 mouse, and think if it works for them that's good enough.
I saw the start of this in the mid-2000s when the web trend was for grey-on-grey 8px fonts. I went to the designer and asked what the heck he was thinking and he showed me his screen; and yeah it was kinda legible there. Still bad design.
Nowadays the trends are flat UI where you don't even know what's clickable/actionable, hidden things that only appear when you mouseover them, and on touchscreens, secret functions that only trigger if you swipe in just the right way with just the right number of fingers in just the right pattern.
Design has just been getting progressively worse and worse ever since 2000/Windows XP.
> Unfortunately, the designers all seem to have 72" 8K professionally color-calibrated monitors and a $1000 mouse, and think if it works for them that's good enough.
Years ago I came across a project developing software for use by soldiers (maps, messaging, that sort of thing). The devs made really tiny icons for the various map symbols. One day an actual soldier came in with a ruggedised terminal and asked the devs to demo the software on it, using combat gloves. Needless to say it was unusable and there was a great gnashing of teeth.
The same project also gave rise to the best bit of user feedback I've ever seen. At an exercise where the software was being trialled, the commanding officer asked one of the soldiers what he thought of the software. He replied (in a northern English accent) "The fucking thing is fucking fucked, sir", and the trial was cancelled about ten minutes later.
The larger the elements that you don't use all the time, the smaller all the other ones have to be.
If you have large high resolution screens, you won't miss the space, but you can't blame people for optimizing their own applications for the screens most people use.
You're telling me I can't afford an 8 pixel wide scroll bar on a fucking 1920 pixels wide monitor?
Meanwhile nearly every article nowadays has a useless header image that takes up the entire screen, pushing the content out of view until scrolled down.
Give me nice and thick title bars and window borders, give me wide scroll bars, give me ginormous buttons with proper borders and textual descriptors. Minimalism is nonsense if critical contextual information is denied.
> If you have large high resolution screens, you won't miss the space, but you can't blame people for optimizing their own applications for the screens most people use.
Have you seen the new Microsoft calculator ? (i.e. calc.exe).
It seems to be designed to be operated by spear throwers from 100 foots away.
It's not, or at least it wasn't prior to ~Win8 or so. Yet monitor resolutions have steadily increased, so perhaps it's a reasonable on with a huge monitor.
Anyway, you don't need an entire bar for system interaction
Having to click on a tiny area to move a window, instead of a relatively wide rectangle, is a huge regression.
It's no wonder people are tempted to not use status bars, and shove as much as possible at the title. If applications could exploit the task bar, they would too.
(Anyway, you don't need an entire bar for system interaction. But applications aren't designed in a way that allows this.)