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posted by martyb on Sunday January 09 2022, @04:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the green-with-envy dept.

https://medium.com/@_sdc/how-apple-taught-its-users-to-hate-android-through-subtle-design-cues-518cd7eda80

If you use an iPhone, you might have noticed that SMS conversations (green-bubbles) are harder to read than iMessage conversations (blue bubbles). That's not by accident — in fact, green bubbles weren't always so difficult to read.

You've probably heard of the green and blue text message bubble colors inside the iOS Messages app. On an iPhone, normal SMS text messages are colored green, while iMessage (Apple's iPhone-exclusive chat platform) conversations are colored blue. Many iPhone users shun the "green bubble" due to the fewer features provided by SMS. If you own an iPhone, you may feel the same frustration when trying to read a green-bubble chat, as they often feel harder to read than blue-bubble chats. That's no accident.

To begin, we have to take a trip back to 2011. As you may know, iMessage, along with the signature blue bubble, didn't exist until the release of iOS 5. Before iMessage was introduced, every message in the Messages app was green, as the only messaging supported at the time was SMS. Once they added iMessage to the Messages application on iOS, the blue bubbles came along with it to help differentiate between iMessage and SMS. Given that the Messages app has stuck with the same green bubble/blue bubble differentiation, it may sound like the hatred towards SMS isn't related to the color at all. However, along the way from iOS 5 to now, a tiny design change opened a user-experience chasm between SMS conversations and iMessage ones. This isn't a story about about the green or blue colors themselves — rather, it's a story about contrast, and its astonishing impact on our perceptions.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 09 2022, @08:49AM (2 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Sunday January 09 2022, @08:49AM (#1211218) Journal

    KDE is known for customizability though...? So just turn that feature off.

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @09:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @09:51AM (#1211223)

    Wrong. Really wrong. It USED to be known for its customizability. It's now the Krap Desktop Environment.

    I hate OSX, but my computer will probably be a mac. And my current laptop will be dual boot - FreeBSD and Windows XP.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @06:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09 2022, @06:21PM (#1211279)

    Just a quick information: KDE was quite customizable up to 3.x versions. In the source code side it was a spaghetti, but it was possible to configure UI quite well. One thing which I considered a mystery was the proper parameter string to dcop to make DE do what I wanted.
    In 4.x, they decided to dump most of customizability, and what is more important, configurations from one version does not work i another - like in MATE Desktop when they switched to GTK3. Finally, they made this tablet file manager as the primary one and to make users not go back to the previous one (as I said, hellish spaghetti code with HTML rendering engine in it, but works and can be well customized) they removed the sidebar. Because everyone has 256GB of RAM to make these >60K images fit their thumbnails in!
    So currently you have a choice: Use outdated, but quite fast DE, use a "customizable" DE in which you customize it from source code or use modern DE without customization.
    And all their pushing the problem to someone else. Global keybindings? "That's server's job" - DE devs say. Meanwhile in Wayland... it must be done by the desktop engine or it will not work.