Google Gets Rid Of App Launcher In Chrome 52, Browser's Mac Client Gets Material Design (9to5mac.com) 68
Google has finally removed App Launcher that it bundles with the Chrome browser for Windows and Mac with the release of Chrome v52. The Mac client, in addition, now embraces Google's Material Design approach, and comes with new icons and flatter and transparent interface. 9to5Mac documents more changes on Chrome for Mac and Windows: Besides a new flatter, sharper, and transparent design, Material is also a "huge engineering feat," especially for Chrome OS and Windows. Chrome is "now rendered fully programmatically including iconography, effectively removing the ~1200 png assets we were maintaining before," Google noted. "It also allows us to deliver a better rendering for a wide range of PPI configuration."
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It's all true. There isn't anything money can't fix! Except, perhaps, for the problem of being euthanized for having too much money. Maybe not that. But everything else! Yes.
DPI Scaling (Score:1)
Great, when this comes to Windows it will finally will scale the Chrome window on a high DPI (what Apple calls ''Retina'') display without making the icons get blurry since it's being scaled programmatically instead of just stretching a PNG asset.
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While Nice to see. Still most displays are the standard 70+/- DPI like it has been for the past 20 years.
It isn't too surprising that Google didn't jump to the new display options. Just because the relatively long life of the Standard Display.
drawcurve(). See "vector graphics" (Score:5, Informative)
Try this out for yourself. Get a piece of paper and a pen. Draw a large curve across the paper. You've just executed the programmatic function draw_curve().
Compare that to what it looks like when you enlarge a bitmap which has a few pixels roughly approximating a curve.
> Whether you call it stretching or scaling, you're still enlarging a bitmap
It's NOT enlarging a bitmap (or doesn't have to be). It's *drawing* the object at the appropriate size. The graphics libraries have functions like draw_curve().
Google "vector graphics". Drawing a line at a 20 degree angle does not result in the same pixels as scaling up a smaller bitmap which also approximates a 20 degree line. It is the same at 0, 45, and 90 degrees.
"Removing" png means "getting rid of" (Score:4, Informative)
When the summary says "removing the ~1200 png assets we were maintaining before", that means they got rid of the PNGs. In other words, now they are NOT using png anymore. You fool.
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Don't worry about the mic, sir. I'll take care of that for you.
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They are rendering their icons now, as opposed to scaling a raster graphics image like a PNG. So no, they aren't enlarging an existing bitmap. They are basically generating a new image for that scale programmatically.
An SVG formatted vector graphics is basically the same idea. Scaling those is quite crisp, although I don't think this is actually SVG that they are using since that tends to be best used for line art.
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Why not use OS X's built-in widgets for tabs, arrows, etc.?
Re:New Chrome looks terrible on OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not use OS X's built-in widgets for tabs, arrows, etc.?
Is it more important for your browser to be consistent with the other apps on your desktop, or to be consistent with the browser across different kinds of platforms? The answer won't be the same for everyone, but what we're seeing now is the endpoint of process that Microsoft feared with Netscape back in the 90s: the marginalization of desktop operating systems as platforms.
Back in the 90s if your browser looked dramatically different from the way other Mac apps looked, users would have howled in protest. Now most people would agree that it's more important for a website or app to look consistent across different devices and operating systems. For many users it wouldn't matter very much whether they're using Windows, MacOS or Linux, were it not for the fact they're locked into MS Office.
So there's nothing "wrong" with OSX's built in widget set, except that it serves Google as a browser-centric company better to standardize the experience across host OSs.
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... what we're seeing now is the endpoint of process that Microsoft feared with Netscape back in the 90s: the marginalization of desktop operating systems as platforms.
Microsoft is not quite free from blame though, with their incessant changing of the look and feel, marginalisation of the desktop in favor of phones and tablets, and the dual-metaphor horror that is metro... I'm not saying they should have stuck with a single style, but nowadays there is no consistent language anymore for controls, thanks in no small part to Microsoft messing around with them so much. So yes, applications can now pick their own look and feel. No one is going to notice anymore.
We are spirits (Score:3, Interesting)
in the material world.
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But, we're no longer sprites in a material world. :)
Hipsters must die (Score:5, Interesting)
So you can't see anything, you can't find anything and you can't do anything, except by accident - and only if it's not what you wanted to do.
But fuck all of that, it doesn't look cluttered because everything is within a plain glass squint of mid-grey. Yay! Chocamochackacockasuckalattes all round! WITH SPRINKLES!
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Please kill "material design" and the half-wit that created it. I can't think of a shittier design for a GUI, except maybe one that is completely the same colour (background, foreground, borders, fonts, etc.).
The stupid thing is (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like the designers at these companies are on a power trip, deriving satisfaction from knowing they can force everyone to bend to their will.
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There is absolutely nothing preventing Microsoft / Google / Apple / etc. from letting the user pick how they want their computer desktop to look.
Sure there is. All of the complaints about how it looks like crap with settings X and Y which Google never tested. Or, in the alternative, the additional burden of testing every possible configuration and the engineering effort to fix whatever issues the testing finds (and regression test the fixes, etc. etc. etc.).
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There is absolutely nothing preventing Microsoft / Google / Apple / etc. from letting the user pick how they want their computer desktop to look.
Except for the maintenance and testing of graphics libraries which is difficult enough for a single program but is a mammoth task on an OS level.
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Thanks for that link. Here's an article on this douchebag:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-matias-duarte-design-interview
THIS sort of idiot is the reason so much shitty UI is forced on the public nowadays. He has literally no idea what he is doing, and yet he is in charge of design at Google! WTF?
Has this dickhead ever appeared on stage to field questions from pissed off customers? Is he even interested in what his customers want? Of course not! That would require him to admit he was wrong about someth
Fuck them (Score:1)
Fuck them in their stupid faces for removing the back one page in history shortcut from backspace.
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I agree 110%, but I am still using it.
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It was a *great* idea -- before web pages had forms.
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Ignore this comment. Just testing something.
I'm going to miss it :-( (Score:1)
I think I'm one of the few people who actually used the app launcher. I still use it daily. Hoping someone releases a decent replacement (that is a little faster than the original)
Dumb boast (Score:2, Interesting)
This is dumb. Utterly dumb. What they should have done is used vector assets, such as PDF, or if that's too "non-Google" for them, SVG or anything similar. Coding images doesn't make sense - you have to maintain that code and it's a complex effort for anyone to alter what's rendered. Compare that with simply swapping out a resource created in a vector art program.
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> This is dumb. Utterly dumb.
Only from an engineering point of view. But if you don't like people customizing your application by replacing the images and colors, it suddenly makes sense.
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I assumed they meant they use SVG or some vector format. I would say drawing the icons to scale based on vector data counts as "rendered fully programmatically". A bitmap has to be redrawn or scaled or otherwise processed for different screen sizes and pixel depths. I suppose they could be creating every icon with a graphics context, some complex mathematical formula and a bunch of lineTo, bezierTo, stroke, fill, etc, etc. I'd hate to maintain it though.
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Coding images doesn't make sense - you have to maintain that code and it's a complex effort for anyone to alter what's rendered
Just what do you think vector graphics are if not a set of coded instructions on how to draw on a screen?
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There's still a big difference between encapsulating the graphics commands in a file as written by an illustration app and just writing lines of code to do the same thing.
Of course. (Score:2)
One step forward, one step back... So it's a typical Chrome release, then? :-/
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Wait, which way was forward again?