Again. Who cares? They had a weakness in the UI, and they improved it. I guarantee you that your dialog boxes in unix in the 80's were not context sensitive to the content below them, constantly updating their display relative to what is underneath, as the GP widget does. It's actually rather impressive.
That’s why he carefully cherry picked X-Eyes, the only application that bothered to follow something (the mouse cursor) and update itself from that outside information source, back then.
The vast majority of apps were utter crap data entry text boxes that had horrid layouts and couldn’t even handle being used on “the wrong size [resolution] monitors” back then. Garbage.
But of course everything switched to browsers and the inability to properly use the whole screen by developers, continues to this day. LOL.
Someday someone will figure out a dumb terminal actually utilized all available space for data entry better than anything the industry has accomplished in 20 years. Hahaha.
Gimme some more white space around three data entry boxes on my 40” monitor. It looks great!
Anyway. Widgets in the 80s (I noticed the story snuck into the 90s again there, tsk tsk, that’s not what you said originally) were absolutely worthless garbage. Like XEyes. Which was nothing more than a “gee wiz” from the X folks to get people to go “oooh, ahhh, GUI!”
Garmin didn’t make the thing movable because they didn’t think of it, because software engineering has no standards. With only two significant players in EFB/moving map on consumer gadget OSes, they haven’t exactly written a style guide for it. ForeFlight’s stuff was equally bad for a long long time.
But that’s the curse of software engineering. The old people who’d remember to put that feature on the list, retire. The newbies are busier learning the OS and windowing manager du hour this week, than working from any real “building codes” or engineering standards.
That’s why I call it coding and not engineering. Engineers create plans. Coders slap stuff together that looks like a bridge or a house but doesn’t meet code.
The industry still doesn’t have any real engineering discipline. Definitely not in GUIs and UX. The UX movement kinda tried, but it’s pretty lifeless now. Apple has a a desktop app style guide. None for iOS apps.
Not sure a complaint that Garmin left that out is very valid considering the childish nature of the entire software industry still. Unless you’re working big iron in telecom, defense, or certain industries with standards that have to be written to, expect UIs that suck.
Especially in the software rental era where it’s “ship it and we’ll patch daily for mistakes”.
Don’t get me wrong. As a sysadmin, I love crap code. In GUIs I get to memorize bad ones and talk users through their non-intuitive designs for real money. Same with server side stuff. Finding a workaround to some dumb thing a newbie engineer coded until he can send out that magic patch via the Internet or jam it through some nice process like “Agile” a couple weeks from now to production, paid all my bills plus lots more for decades now.
I love bad software.
As far as something not moving on the screen, I would just scroll it right to the edge and then hit it and see if the noob put some code in to at least handle that. Bet it pops up somewhere else than “off screen”. Then just scroll it back. LOL.
If that didn’t work, oh well. GUIs suck. Submit a “ticket” and maybe they’ll write a better one before they crap can the whole code base and start over with more newbies and another windowing framework. Annnnnd... that one will suck again for a while.
Repeat ad nauseaum. Haha. Yay software.
