There’s the problem. Being “much more similar to modern apps” is a bad thing, not a good one. Modern apps seem designed for touch screens, swiping, and incomplete information.
I can figure Discourse out, and did. But once I got it I could see that it has some issues that I don’t care for even as it bests vBulletin in some ways.
Yes. This exactly. I’m not nearly out of it so much that I don’t know what to do with a “hamburger menu”. But It still makes me laugh a little and still leaves me with the question I had the first time I say one: “Why are they doing this again? What is the horror of writing MENU? Of using words? This is saving time? This is ingenious? OK, Millenial.”
It’s sorta like the developers all being in a clique and thinking, “if you can’t figure out our mysterious runic shibboleths then we don’t want you around anyway!”
Because it takes up too much real estate on your iPhone.
And the first several times I saw that menu it WAS on a cell phone. Yes, the conventions of tiny screens are now being imported to places where people who use giant screens see them.
Yup. From up-thread …
The whole idea is a unified interface, more or less. The thinking is that Discourse is Discourse (or whatever app), regardless of whether you use it on a tablet, phone, PC or whatever.
And unless I totally misunderstand how they do it, having a unified interface is also good from system maintainability and support perspectives. If you have ONE hamburger menu, and everything works the same, it’s easier to maintain the app, and it’s DEFINITELY easier to support it- your support people/documentation/whatever only have to reference THE app, not the PC version, the Android version, the Apple version, etc…
Much as I don’t necessarily like it, PC users with keyboards, mice and large screens are on the wane, and touchscreens are on the rise. And not to bash any particular mobile device producer too much, but they impose a lot of restrictions on their own ecosystem apps that end up being carried into the rest of the app if they make it platform agnostic.
It’s a tradeoff for the developers- they can really dig in to the PC version, which is a rapidly shrinking piece of the pie, or they can make it platform agnostic, and have something that works for everyone, even if it’s not necessarily PC-centric, Apple-centric, etc…
That’s why I expressed surprise upthread that everyone hasn’t seen this sort of thing a zillion times already- most apps and websites do this kind of thing these days for that very reason.
Some platforms actually have nifty tools to enable this sort of unified interface- one that I’m a little familiar with is SAP Fiori for enterprise business applications, for example. It automatically handles the screen display and scaling- the developers make ONE app, and the Fiori platform scales it to the screen and handles what’s displayed on screen, and what’s in menus, etc… So you have a common design/interface “language” that the users know, even if the actual things aren’t always in the same exact place on every platform (they can’t be).
It’s not a “matter of taste” or a way to “shoehorn” mobile device stuff into PC apps- it’s a way to actually provide better software (less bugs, more consistent, better supportability).