I Miss Square Checkboxes

Square check boxes were a staple of user interfaces from the start of UI. Over time, they have started to fade away. Have they died forever? This article was incredible.
SOURCES
tonsky.me/blog/checkbox/
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S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏
S/O FlipMedia for the awesome edit 🙏
S/O Mir for the awesome edit 🙏

[@PhilfreezeCH]

Hardware designers spend decades increasing the performance of CPUs as much as possible only for web devs to come and use 3D animations for checkboxes, progress!

[@YTDeletes90PercentOfMyComments]

Im glad. When webdevs finish killing off the web2 internet with gigantic javascript payloads for simple blogs ill have access to endless crazy overspec hardware for cheap.

[@FlorianWendelborn]

Ah, so this is why Web3 leads to GPU shortages! We found the culprit!

[@YTDeletes90PercentOfMyComments]

@@FlorianWendelborn web3 has already collapsed. Web3 is nothing more than billionaires trying to turn the internet into a monopoly game. Web2 is billionaires trying to turn the internet into the NSA's wet dream. Both are bad.

[@FlorianWendelborn]

@@YTDeletes90PercentOfMyComments Calling decentralization "monopoly" is just wrong.

[@zapspeed]

I agree, stop giving people reasons to buy better hardware so we can put those hardware designers out of a job! /j

[@n4bb12]

Form follows function is a declining design principle. People are trying so hard to follow the latest trend and feel like they're special, they forget common sense.

[@levileal4500]

Common sense is the most uncommon of all the senses

[@haraldbackfisch1981]

Form follows function should always be the case... had this discussion with a designer once and was absolurely baffled that there even is a different perspective on this. Like if u dont think about function first then what the hell are you making? Probably nothing that actually has a function and just sth that needs to get sold no matter what... and for that reason those people arent real designers imo, theyre just doodling without real restrictions other than color psychology or sth. But then again, i might just be grumpy, if anyone has a better take i wanna hear it :)

[@simonhartley9158]

I've heard the term affordance used to describe the hints that allow the user to perceive the function. Zero affordances means the user having zero clue. The radio button has always been a convention that you just needed to know and making checkboxes more like them seems insane, since they were never great. A better alternative for me is when they're styled as a set of connected buttons or perhaps just when the entire selected option uses a background color with a border.

[@dixalex02]

It's a disease of self, unfortunately, that we are all plagued by. By our very nature, we seek vanity and glory and to shine above others, no matter the cost. Jeremiah 17:9

[@hungrymusicwolf]

@@levileal4500Even the 6th sense has the decency of showing up one in every few people, but common sense is a professional stealth game player.

[@PMX]

I had a graphic designer who "landed" on my team (some boss wanted to have their name associated with our project and our boss allowed that) whose first design was a screen with four radio buttons. And he put a note below it: users can select more than one. I asked him: why did you make them radio buttons? Blank stare. Why did you make them round instead of square? Blank stare.

[@tonyhakston536]

Continue.

[@imaguyyesmale]

​​@@tonyhakston536but people is rounding squares these days!1!1!1!!1!1! /j

[@realmechaniking]

can this legally be used as justification for murder

[@scbtripwire]

Oof! So much oof!!

[@explosu]

Ok.

[@Stratopeter87]

The main issue I see with breaking UI conventions is that people will unlearn the mental models they have learned and in consequence become more insecure even when dealing with interfaces that follow those conventions. I’m all for creative experiments in UI, but not if it makes users feel like they can’t trust anymore if a checkbox still behave like a checkbox on the next registration form.

[@SandraWantsCoke]

We should make left click uninstall windows and rm -rf your home directory.

[@m4sterred853]

From what I’m seeing on the topic, the other side of this UI design debate is that the distinction was never a strong one to begin with, because at the end of the day, both checkboxes and radio buttons let the user select options. This means that the distinction should be done in the label. Personally, I can agree with that idea, but I still believe that 2 visual cues (that are coherent with each other) are better than 1. That means I’ll still fight for square checkboxes and round radio buttons, but not if a form has misleading labels.

[@__christopher__]

@@m4sterred853 But the difference is that radio buttons at the same time *unselect* other options. That is very different functionality from check boxes, which don't affect anything else when you use them.

[@imaguyyesmale]

​@@SandraWantsCokewhat is the connection to the comment or video again? Edit : Oh I see it now, man I'm feeling so dumb rn...maybe because I am dumb for not connecting the dots earlier

[@hyacinthtiger62]

​@@imaguyyesmaleI don't know, it sounds like they just want every Windows user to accidentally learn the dangers of Linux... 😂

[@binaryguru]

Radio buttons were literally modeled after how radio buttons used to work. The check boxes most likely were modeled after check boxes on forms and ballots. Most ballots would only allow 'X' or checkmarks back in the day. So I think these thing were just convention before computers were a thing.

[@RandomGeometryDashStuff]

I have seen radio with square buttons (only one can be pressed except button that unpresses all (you can also unpress all by pressing any non-pressed button half(ish) deep))

[@jlawton]

Let's not forget scantrons and their bubbly goodness.

[@Aeduo]

@@jlawton The scantrons we had were more like horizontal lines I guess that you'd fill in.

[@king_james_official]

all kinds of registration/voting paper i've seen has square radio selectors

[@PineappleDealer37]

In Poland a V is not a correct way to fill a ballot. For the vote to count the lines are required to cross. So of the most common ways it's to either put an X or pain the whole square black (fully covered square is defined as "Lots of lines crossing one another")

[@Kamiyaa]

I also hate the trend now of making 2FA fields 6 indiviudal textfields. 99% of them are always buggy, can't copy/paste and gets cut off on mobile because of the large amount of space they take up

[@MichelleGenderbendM]

Really though! It's not even more efficient to use six text fields, either. It's more RAM usage on the user end, it's more work to check the full text via JS, and so on. Not to mention that there's some that don't even advance you to the next field when you enter one number. And this is on top of some A11y features being built into text fields, that can be broken by trying to use them like that. If I wanted to make a 2FA code prompt look like it has six text fields, I will do that through CSS on a single text field. In the worst case, it doesn't look exactly like I want. In the best case, it's now a lot easier to maintain.

[@Zeus.2459]

I haven't had any issues with 6 field 2FA and I like how it looks. It also feels more intuitive than just having one long textbox.

[@augustday9483]

This has been a thing for a long time though. I remember installing computer games in the early 2000s, and the CD Key was entered as multiple text boxes. Pretty sure Starcraft and Warcraft 3's installers were like this.

[@MichelleGenderbendM]

@@augustday9483 I don't think CD Keys make for a good comparison here. Because CD Keys were so long, you couldn't remember the whole thing at the same time, and thus couldn't enter it all in one go. Using a "-" to separate them into small parts made it easier to figure out where you need to continue reading, as your head went back and forth between the paper with the key and the computer screen. To explain what I mean, try typing one of those CD Keys out on a computer or phone without the "-"s. Then, go to another device and try to copy what you typed from the screen of the first device. The CD key is too long to remember all in one go, so you'll need to swap back and forth between the two devices - and you'll find that you'll keep losing track of where you were due to not having any "-" to reference where you were. Compare this to a 2FA code, which is fairly short. You can usually remember the whole code and enter it in one go.

[@jpsalis]

don't get me started. That irks me so much

[@jdsmedley]

Round check boxes are a middle finger to accessibility.

[@polocatfan]

how?

[@imaguyyesmale]

​@@polocatfanin the video

[@nullname0]

first world ah problem

[@breadmusic1]

@@polocatfan Because they aren't check boxes, they're check balls

[@imaguyyesmale]

@@breadmusic1 that's...a good one :v

[@AquaQuokka]

Aughhhh I hate square radio buttons and radio buttons with checkmarks.

[@KangJangkrik]

Radio button- with checkmarks‽

[@NewYork81983]

"this is before I was born" well damn, that made me feel extra old lmfao

[@PhilipAlexanderHassialis]

Them younglings will not never know the joy of compiling your first Turbo Pascal 4.0 program.

[@ChamiCh]

I felt that. Unexpected generational damage...

[@AlexanderTBratrich]

Yeah, gave me a slight mid-life crisis

[@andrew.nicholson]

A few days ago I saw a video where someone was talking about Netscape and he said he hadn’t personally used Netscape then added “don’t worry, I’m not THAT old”. And he was a grown man.

[@IceMetalPunk]

I'm only 33, and that hurt me. At this rate, anyone born after me, even by just a few years, talking about tech or music makes me feel elderly.

[@emilydaemon]

sorry but this video just feels like you're reading out a blog post while adding nothing of value to it with your commentary

[@LongSeanSilver]

Yeah this feels like plagiarism lmao

[@emilydaemon]

@@Fire_Axus how

[@Fire_Axus]

they cause us to make bad decisions and look bad

[@crazyjack746]

⁠she’s talking about the video

[@fireskorpion396]

I definitely get what you're saying, but he also said multiple times to check out the persons stuff and just increased the outreach a lot!

[@bielgaucho_real]

When I see people making 3D exploding checkboxes I remember of this quote: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Designers make all sorts of stupid things in name of progress.

[@Caellyan]

and it doesn't even look good if there's more than 1 of those, or your whole ui isn't over the top

[@yeojylesjin]

3D checkboxes where you must rotate to see all the options

[@andresvalenzuela]

Apple devices will need an external square checkbox adapter. Just 99 USD

[@dealloc]

Pretty sure checkboxes comes from paper forms, like ballot boxes, (of which we also derived the name 'form' from). Typically you'd mark a cross (X) in the square boxes. In fact, the Unicode for a square that features a X or check is prefixed with "BALLOT BOX". It was natural that early GUIs, being limited by ASCII, used "X" as the indicator, but still used "checkbox" as the name of the control, of which later it would feature a 'check' mark as GUIs became more graphical. Radio buttons were also likely derived from pre-digital era of car radios, which would sometimes feature buttons that would stay down until another was pressed. Using a circle to indicate its on state is likely derived from paper forms as well, where it was common to fill the circles (like exam tests).

[@Z4KIUS]

I'm pretty sure radio buttons in radios existed before car radios, I remember that gigantic and barely working remnant of PRL my mom had when I was a little kid and how my trying to get all the buttons depressed at the same time surely didn't help it survive

[@NestorCustodio]

Using a circle to denote the "on" state is from the original radio buttons themselves. The buttons would have a clear plastic top, and a small circle inside (painted black on one side and some appropriate color on the other) would mechanically flip around when you pressed it in, to let you know it was engaged. Pressing another button in that same "set" would release the first (flipping its circle back to something you couldn't see) and engage the new one (flipping its circle so that it became "visible"). This is why the radio button "on" position historically is not just a single filled-in circle, but a circle with a small gap and then a smaller circle within that. This exactly replicates the appearance of an old physical *radio* button.

[@dealloc]

@@Z4KIUS Sure, but the digital radio buttons are commonly derived from those kinds of buttons. I didn't say the physical buttons didn't exist before car radios :)

[@dealloc]

@@NestorCustodio That makes sense! Thanks for the explanation.

[@BeyondLegendary]

Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's checkbox design.

[@dijital4801]

lol

[@monad_tcp]

Frontend was a mistake, standard controls and forms of Windows95 was the peak in user interfaces.

[@colbyboucher6391]

Windows95 / 2000 were skeuomorphism at it's peak, IMO. It's minimalist skeuomorphism, a form of minimalism that ensures that you literally cannot accidentally remove function. What you can click on is very clear. Borders are clear. That tiny bit of 3D-ness to make stuff raise out of the UI was eye-catching and it was done in a way that didn't look tacky like it did with early 2000s stuff like WinXP. And I actually like all the grey. Everyone knows pure white sucks on screens (other than e-ink), but dark text on light backgrounds otherwise causes less eyestrain, and making everything a neutral grey was a great compromise.

[@Lippy01]

@@colbyboucher6391 Funny thing is that you could always go back to that design language until windows 8 and onwards. Windows 7 was the last.

[@mjdxp5688]

I miss when everything looked uniform. Back on the Windows Classic era, every application would look fairly similar in appearance, and they would usually obey your chosen theme settings without looking out of place at all. Now, with Windows 11, if you take 20 random Windows apps, they'll all look completely different. Some will look like a 25 year old Windows 98 app, some will look more like the "Metro" appearance Microsoft pushed during Windows 8 and early Windows 10, and 90% of them will just use Electron for no reason. Microsoft just kept adding to and changing Windows' appearance over the years, and now there's no uniformity anywhere in the operating system. If you dare try to change the theme settings via the registry or use the high contrast theme, everything completely falls apart. Nothing looks correct and it's total chaos.

[@olivermharris_]

6:40 first thing that designer did, was make the checkbox into a radio button by making it round.

[@LHCB6]

Thank you for giving an example of how out of touch developers can be with what the end user actually wants or doesn't want. The stuff at the end, you make to impress other developers - like you. You were impressed. You're like "It's so good." And from a development standpoint, it is. But from a "what I want to interact with as a user" standpoint. It's not good. If it has sound, it's actively bad.

[@Qrzychu92]

in my company the designer also redesigned the checkbox. It's still square at least, but now unchecked is a white square. Checked is a white square with a slighly darker gray square inside. Which still looks empty. I have to double click it every time I see it, because I can never tell when it is checked. Great job!

[@e4caspnet]

Radio buttons and check boxes are part of a design paradigm known as digital artefacts and includes things like the floppy disc icon for save, envelope for email and paper dart for Send Email Play, stop and rewind buttons (from your cassette deck/video recorder) and the little curled corner on a digital magazine. They originate (literally) from the buttons on your car radio in the 50s-70s where you could choose a broadcast medium (Short Wave, Longwave, AM, FM) effectively making each option isolated from the others. Checkboxes obviously came from paper based forms, possibly on graph paper where the obvious choice was to just bold out the lines of a square. For me the most annopying thing about checkboxes on forms was that the field only gets passed back to the server as part of the form data if was checked, which was fine if you had static members on your form but if it was dynamically generated then you needed a separate way (hidden fields normally) to identify all the possible checkboxes and cross reference that list with the actual submitted checkboxes - all very annoying! But definately the visual cues of round = choose 1 and square = choose any was a great UX irrespective of how clunky the icons actually were.

[@Awesomeguy5121]

Two years ago I had a losing argument where weeks of a project were lost over this exact design issue. Radios are circles and checkboxes are squares goddamnit, and radios select one while checkboxes select multiple! GD YOU KYLE I knew I was right then and I feel vindicated now

[@ClokworkGremlin]

UI design is a design language. Languages convey ideas between one person (the designer) and another (the user). Languages have to be consistent, or they lose all meaning, and fail at their fundamental purpose.

[@GR20000]

Conventions are conventions not because they are perfect, but because the quality of having information be uniformly and consistently conveyed is an objective positive to the user experience.

[@b33thr33kay]

6:46 Yeah, no, thank you.

[@tedchirvasiu]

3 FPS brought to you by... 3D check-spheres.

[@hiimgood]

Check boxes ❌️ Check balls ✅️ (see what I did here?)

[@anon_y_mousse]

I'll keep using square checkboxes and round radio buttons until the day I die. Personally, in that list of prior examples, I like the Win95/98 era checkboxes the most.

[@trannusaran6164]

0:32 "1994. This is before I was born" oh no I'm an old lady 🫠

[@mahdirostami7034]

4:18 Telegram was the exact moment that brought this subject to my attention. I had to participate in a pole related to my uni classes which should've been multiple choice (based on context) but the icon was circular thus I thought it's a radio button and I can only choose one option.

[@IllidanS4]

Don't forget the "half-full" checkbox with square inside!

[@PhilipAlexanderHassialis]

The fact that people are not aware of the damn CUA - something that even Apple helped design, it baffles me. "Web people want to challenge norms", well, sorry web people, engineers and designers have poured man-years to semi-standardize a design language and user expectations across generations of hardware and software. You will do it like this and like it too.

[@robgrainger5314]

Mac and Windows both had UI design guidelines that went over the differences between different controls and how to style UIs consistently. That's how people knew what to use and how.

[@kurtmueller2089]

I say this as fanatical Linux fanboy: Peak GUI-design was reached with the release of Windows 2000, decades ago.

[@incription]

i LOVE the macos checkboxes and the windows 7 ones are actually my favourite. just so clean

[@albertlagerman]

Yeah, he did the Windows 7 Checkbox dirty. Windows 7 was before high pixel density monitors were common. When it's blown up it looks kinda ugly, but from a regular viewing distance on a regular monitor from the time it looks pretty good.

[@norude]

I HATE the little round checkboxes, you need to press, if you want to select something in the gallery or in the file manager on your phone. I ALWAYS can't hit it the first time around

[@donwinston]

Hmmm. I don't recall ever seeing round check "boxes" or square radio buttons. It is stupid to do anything different. I cannot believe engineers at Apple of all people did that.

[@Z4KIUS]

designers of Apple are well known for making things weird for the sake of being confusing so I'm not surprised

[@herrpez]

To the best of my knowledge they introduced the toggle, which I would argue is the worst "invention" of the past two decades.

[@donwinston]

@@herrpez I miss the old black and white classic Mac "slider" and scroll bars.

[@PhilipAlexanderHassialis]

The funny thing is that this design language is part of CUA. Like the "File" "Edit" "Help -> About" menu entries on top of screen etc. These things work well on a screen and IBM, MS and Apple all adhered to the standard and I think even MS and Apple contributed a bit to it. But "oh no, it's a 3D thing", sweet lord, I just want to see how people will use Vision Pro to work on an actual business application (not the "creative" things, the boring, you know, actual business things that keep the world spinning).

[@TheRenegade...]

​@@PhilipAlexanderHassialisEven worse, there's rumors of redesigning the other Apple OSes to use visionOS's design language

[@Malix_off]

I like conventions

[@TAP7a]

It's nice when information is communicated using agreed symbols

[@TheEvilAdministrator]

You are hereby formally invited to this year's Convention Convention Convention, where we discuss conventions for holding conventions about conventions. We're very conventional - and by convention, we are considered to be a lot of fun at parties. ROFL Mao

[@EHKvlogs]

checkboxes can still be useful, just like in kde plasma 6, they use both toggles and checkboxes, toggles for things that happen immediately and checkboxes for things that require to press 'apply' button after selecting.

[@RAFMnBgaming]

"Adding gamefeel to UI" is why I keep on having to turn UI volume off in new software. They are just horrendous to deal with as someone with ADHD.

[@tomfoolery2913]

Accessibility hell

[@user-xm6sd4iz7f]

I hate it so much that there are no words to describe it.

[@weevilsnitz]

Checkboxes radio buttons and have different uses. Plain and simple. Having the convention that Checkboxes are multiple choice and radio buttons being single choice means nobody is confused. Be predictable here so you can be unique where it actually matters.

[@NickC_222]

This is such a good point. I can't remember what it was, but I just had an experience recently where a form used radio buttons for a checklist where I was supposed to check all that applied. I was certain I had to pick just one, so for like 10 entire minutes I was weighing the pros and cons of each possible selection to figure out which would be the best option to focus on. At the last minute I changed my mind and selected a different option, and to my surprise they both stayed highlighted. Wtf. This is actually, potentially, a real issue. Imagine if a hospital form in an online patient portal was checking for communicable diseases and a patient instinctively thought they could only choose one symptom to focus on. Something could be completely overlooked. Thats just one actual example, but why change checkboxes to a different appearence that already have an established and different purpose, with different and pre-established limitations that are going to confuse people who grew up using boxes vs buttons? This is a frustrating AND needless issue. It's an artificially created but real problem that never had to arise.

[@stephfh]

5:27 the difference between the bottom one's is really marginal. The right one has a slightly more lighting (from the bottom towards the checkmark), while the left one is completely flat.

[@mug6284]

halt, cleaneth thy mouth in shame for windows 7 checkboxes shall not be cursed upon

[@qoombert]

cleaneth is the 3rd person indicative (equivalent to cleans), not the 2nd person imperative which is the form that should be used here.

[@adriangonzalezgomez4632]

I've just heard you say "1994, this is before I was born, I've never used an OS this old" and I you made me realise my first concept of a computer is now archaic and I'm below 30 😅

[@ceigey-au]

It's really messing with my head to hear someone with a moustache talk about mid-90's stuff as if it's ancient history...

[@adriangonzalezgomez4632]

@@ceigey-au Same here

[@JellyMyst]

I miss square anything on the web. I still don't have a round profile picture because I'm hoping for the return of squares.

[@colbyboucher6391]

I have bad news for you, it's a circle. I, on the other hand, am aware of this and have made my PFP a square, chaddest of shapes, despite the circular boundary. The future is now.

[@JellyMyst]

@@colbyboucher6391 Kami-sama, I kneel!

[@imaguyyesmale]

dark mode exists lololool​@@colbyboucher6391

[@MisterSkullium]

The KZbin redux addon has an option for square avatars. The old twitter addon has square avatars

[@imaguyyesmale]

@@colbyboucher6391 d a r k m o d e

[@valseedian]

they were x's first because they were programically drawn and not a glorified texture prerender. my homebrew gui manager still uses xs because i never finished implementing prerendered gfx states for controls

[@pairofrooks]

That turbo Pascal example gave me the feels ❤❤

[@Maddin1313]

"Hey, you know that thing that works? Let's make it bad and not work."

[@rafaelarantes4804]

Check B O X R A D I O button Is it that hard to understand?

[@brockstanford7608]

You're not wrong, but look at car stereo radio buttons, they're rectangles. Most GUI buttons are also rectangles. Check BOX, yeah, there ain't no round boxes, so having radio buttons be different (round) makes sense.

[@EliasWolfy]

I've never stopped to think "Why are the selection boxes square and the radio buttons round?", but it's still funny to see how this is just by chance.

[@nangld]

That is related to the "Eternal September". Back in 80ies and early 90ies the IT field had only high IQ people, but now we have people who in the previous generations wont be allowed even to clean the office.

[@user-nj1qc7uc9c]

i feel like the reason people dont always follow this convention is because (as far as i know) it has been an unspoken rule maybe awareness is all we need to bring back square checkboxes

[@travispulley5288]

0:40 - the original mac experience was pretty amazing. The sound effects, the crisp b/w pixels with dithered graphics, and the special joy of ejecting a (rigid) floppy disk by dragging it to the trashcan! Having a mouse at all was a pretty big deal too.

[@IvyANguyen]

IIRC radio buttons are called such due to old car radios (before the 1980s, I believe) that used those buttons for favourite stations. Back then, only 1 could be depressed at once and would be pushed inwards until you push a different one one, when the original will be released.

[@MatthewDeaners]

To answer the question posed in the video, square checkboxes are because of paper forms, which literally had a square you could check. Radio buttons, of course, are imitating, you guessed it, buttons on (early) radios, which were exclusive. They weren't always round (and were often later rectangular) but that visual distinction was probably made early on to distinguish from checkboxes, as he says.

[@gjermundification]

2:13 50s,60s, or 70s design radio buttons, only one preset channel at the time. Brushed metal: FM or AM, can't go wrong, survived long into the 80s. There should be something on this in the HIT( Human Interface Toolkit paper by Apple )

[@rjhornsby]

Ran into a MSFT UI a few days ago where the form appeared to have unfilled square check boxes that would not select. Very irritating to finally understand it was a bullet/list marker when everything else about the form strongly suggested I needed to mark the box to get what I wanted.

[@buddy.abc123]

1994 was before you were born? 😮 Yo, so I'm fanboying a baby 😅

[@aneeshprasobhan]

i thought the same thing lol, how old is he.

[@blessedpigeon6304]

yall seriously thought this man is 30?

[@arminhaberl9242]

Same

[@necmi030]

LOL SAME

[@aneeshprasobhan]

@@blessedpigeon6304 i think its the moustache

[@theodorealenas3171]

The thing is, I never go to a website ready to be excited, unless it's a site that sells games or something. I usually enter a site focused, grumpy or suspicious. Square checkboxes is a bare minimum. I'd also appreciate minimal menus and the system fonts, because when the fonts load and swap out, I usually think to myself that they looked better before swapping. For real!

[@bonkers_dave]

"Conventions are boring." This explains most of our problems. Generations figure out what works, and then malcontents have to be different. Downhill from there.

[@noa_1104]

But at the same time some conventions were never that good, they only stick around because they existed early and not enough people question them

[@resting_soul]

@@noa_1104this. the middle ground happens to be right this time: _question_ the system, but don't fight it without a _reason._

[@Crow_Rising]

@@resting_soul That's also how science is meant to work. Science is a pursuit of truth, but established science is never absolute. It's meant to be questioned, and is only meant to be held in higher regard when it's harder to debunk. Scientists are meant to be wrong a lot, realize when they are and how through observation and experimentation, and make alterations over time to slowly become less wrong and inch closer to the truth. Seems like these days though, most scientists aren't allowed to be wrong and could lose their funding unless they can convincingly show that they are correct. If they can't, they are discredited.

[@resting_soul]

@@Crow_Rising100% agree

[@emilylefebvre5132]

There’s a balance between the two, the issue now is how everyone sits in a bunch of extremes. Round checkboxes suck, bad change! But it *always* feels like people are either trashing every slight change to their life, whether they’re for the better or not, or blindly accept any change as good change

[@nqnqnq]

i imagine that the person who decided that radio buttons and checkmark boxes should look the same has flies flying around in their cranium

[@ClokworkGremlin]

You're giving them too much credit.

[@BobofWOGGLE]

I never really noticed or thought about the distinction before, but I guess my brain did. Thank you for giving me the words to express my distaste for current UI/UX practices.

[@voidmind]

That was a great article, and I was surprised that it's from the same guy that did Fira Code, the font that made programming ligatures mainstream. I'm using Recursive now, but it was my editor's font for a long time.

[@JustLikeBuildingThings]

This video reminds me of a designer thinking enumeration security was not important over telling the user their username and password is wrong. Sometimes folks just reinvent things to be "different"

[@UltraCenterHQ]

I like how the author was joking around. It actually made the article fun to listen

[@himbothyswaggins]

"This is before I was born" just put in an existential crisis. Thanks a lot Theo!

[@Exilum]

5:25 There is quite a difference between both. With or without "light".

[@BracerJack]

These "new" designs are created by "my day in x tech company" influencers who film themselves going to starbucks to get a difficult to pronounce drink and then look pretty sitting in front of a desk and her task is deciding how round the corner radius of a css round rectangle should be, that is her whole job. What a tough job. These influencer "no real use" devs will be replaced by A.I. soon.

[@Xet_The]

5:28 there's a subtle gradient at the bottom

[@abrahamsimonramirez2933]

still can use a custom div if you really want a workaround I guess 😅

[@user-zm3ys9ym3q]

«Kids these days will use a toggle anyway.» Wait, i thought radio buttons and toggle have different semantics, isn't it? Toggle effect can be applied immediately after toggling, and radio button effect should be applied after some additional confirmation step? Or so i thought.

[@babypinksnail]

I hate how everything is round now... I hope squares make a comeback :(

[@HappyCheeryChap]

These mofoz breaking conventions for no reason need to read the book "Don't make me think".

[@norude]

radio buttons should be round

[@brockstanford7608]

the funny thing is...most physical radio buttons were rectangles.

[@tedchirvasiu]

@@brockstanford7608What is a radio?

[@norude]

​@@brockstanford7608I am not familiar with physical radio buttons How would one even work? And where would such a button be needed?

[@TheColonThree]

​@@norudeFor a radio, that you can press to do actions like play/pause, switch channels, etc.?

[@someidiot4311]

@@TheColonThreeyou cant pause a radio, you can use a knob to switch channels

[@Kfimenenpah]

I always found it super confusing that RadioButtons are called RadioButtons. In my humble beginnings I once even manually programmed my CheckBoxes to behave like RadioButtons, because I could not find a predefined component that would do what I required it to do. Obviously RadioButtons would have something to do with audio.

[@moumous87]

“1994, this was before I was born” 😳 what?!?!?! So Theo is a godd4mn kid?!?!

[@drdca8263]

I was born in 96. I’m 27. When I was born, my parents were... I think younger than I am now? Or, not that much older at least?

[@M3R14M.]

1994 was 30 years ago. Feel old yet?

[@DevMarco-]

That's why I like Flutter as well. It makes it pretty easy to implement your own custom check box or radio button just in case someone forces a new look. Obviously there is a reason this distinction between both elements survived for 40 years after all…

[@willcoder]

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

[@user-ru1xg9ov9y]

Tonsky is amazing. He has created an awesome color theme for vs code and sublime text.

[@zchen27]

Oh no, it's melting! My precious square checkboxes, gone forever! Eeeeaaaaggghhhh!

[@ramsey2155]

I guess this tradition was even in written documents. The same distinction is also followed there. Circles for single choice squares for multichoice.

[@KebabTM]

The left figma "checkbox" was a darker shade of blue as well.

[@unicodefox]

I think that's because one's for light mopde and the other is dark mode

[@maksymiliank5135]

@@unicodefox one is a hover effect. The other is the default

[@randoguy7488]

They're needed for the logic behind Figma prototyping.

[@matrix8934]

Tonsky’s blog is awesome, I highly recommend reading more of his posts

[@cubeheadexists]

thank you unity

[@krccmsitp2884]

IIRC, rectangular check-boxes and round radio-buttons were already used by Xerox/PARC back in the 1970s.

[@AylaCroft]

Omg... did you try reading the blog in dark mode 😂😂😂 my brain broke in the best ways

[@tropictiger2387]

Those exploding check boxes at the end are horrific. Imagine trying to fill in a form while it pretends to be a mobile game.

[@keyboard_g]

How many trillions of dollars were spent trying to reinvent conventions instead of just solving the actual business and educational solutions.

[@UltraCenterHQ]

At first, I was confused, like "Why did they use the letter X as a checkmark? was it because it fits in the box better?" But then I remember that operating systems used to be text based

[@IDKisReal2401]

The Apple Vision round checkboxes is because it's easier to focus on the center of a round icon than a square Still I will miss square checks

[@piano_arts_2007]

5:32 Check Rounds Very suggestive looll

[@NotteShock]

Apple already does the circular checkboxes thing in iOS, Samsung also does that in One UI and I think it’s confusing but sometimes it looks better, just sometimes

[@Gosu9765]

And there are single choice radio buttons (sometimes looking like a checkbox) that should be a checkbox, because they assume an optional toggle - had to restart my company creation because one of those and my ADHD forcing me to click, then read.

[@TheTrueCBaer]

once, on a parcel tracking page, I found a postal number field where you could input the value with the scroll wheel.

[@adamalmighty7]

You are out of your damn mind if you think that Windows 7 checkboxes are ugly. They are amazing.

[@gwened]

If I owned a VisionOS device, I would file a bug report

[@olhoTron]

Wait, you were born after '94... great, now I'm feeling old

[@DevanSabaratnam]

Ah, I remember those grey inset checkboxes aplenty on Windows 3.x, and various DOS frameworks i coded back in the day. And LOL on the antialiasing complaints... On a 640x480 VGA display those were SUPER sharp and hi res! 😅

[@keyboard_g]

Confirming AmigaOS in 1985 had square checkboxes and round radio buttons.

[@matty6598]

Great video

[@vaaaaaas]

Web designers were a mistake.

[@fish3977]

Web was a mistake

[@amansharma2870]

Life was a mistake.

[@sanambirsingh976]

Big Bang was a mistake.

[@sanambirsingh976]

Big bang was a mistake.

[@sanambirsingh976]

Big bang was a mistake.

[@UltraCenterHQ]

1:46 I didn't know those actually had a name and a specific design. I like when the selection is a different color. So it doesn't blend in and you can instantly tell what you enabled

[@idkwhattoputhere1007]

they should create a site with just square check boxes, and when you click them they make like a pencil writing sound

[@Lizard_of_Linux_Lane]

Samasung Notes has square checkboxes. ☑ I imagine you can find a way to use them in Linux distros, and probably some distros that use them by default.