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The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline

• codeulike 10y ago
  Guidelines from 30 years ago dont necessarily get to remain guidelines. Cos stuff changes. We've been using guis for 20 or 30 years now. We dont need to pretend they have shadows or include a realistic depiction of some related artifact in the icon. People just get it now without all that clutter.
  • Angostura 10y ago
    > People just get it now without all that clutter. That's certainly what the proponents of flat design contend. In terms of measuring usability, I'm not so sure that's true. I've seen people hunting for buttons that didn't quite look like buttons
    • oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
      It's not just the fact that "people can recognise a button even if it's flat" that is the issue (I often hear people making this argument) but that the differentiation between what is a button and what isn't (e.g. what is normal text) is reduced in flat design. It is possible to make 'non-buttons' work as buttons, but only if their function is clearly indicated via other means. This is the beauty of the traditional, three-dimensional, consistently-styled buttons: you get a 'button' by default without having to hint that it's a button using other means.
    • Sylos 10y ago
      The Stock-Android Contacts-app has a pretty big design-flaw like that. When you open up a contact, it shows you a list of the ways that you can talk to this person. So, either call them, write an SMS, write an e-mail etc. And the Call-button is for whatever reason merged with the SMS-button. It's just one big button of which 4/5 is for calling and 1/5 to the right opens up the SMS-app. There is an icon representing SMS in that 1/5 of the button, but nothing indicates that it's a separate button from the 4/5 on the left.
      • tjl 10y ago
        Really? That's odd. The iOS Contacts app merges Facetime and phone calls, but at least that's somewhat reasonable as that's still a call. CallKit in iOS 10 is standardizing it so all VOIP calls will be treated the same as FaceTime and phone calls. iOS Contacts has a set of icons that look like the symbols on the app icons. That makes sense to me.
  • Lio 10y ago
    I get this argument and I appreciate clean flat GUIs but I also feel without the shadows on buttons they've lost a bit of the affordance and visibility that used to be promoted as important when I studied GUI design. The classic example of good interface design, I was taught, was the "call lift or elevator" button. The theory goes that no one needs to be shown how to use a lift twice. You see it once and just know what every other lift button does even if they look slightly different. I realise that that skeuomorphism needn't necessarily map to the computer world but _something_ seems to be forgotten in the current trend for flat, non-skeumorphic designs.
  • leoc 10y ago
    The thing is that aesthetically, the new OS X look is overall closer to the pre-colour MacOS from 30 years ago. That GUI http://www.businessinsider.com/mac-os-i-through-x-2012-7?op=1&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/mac-os-i-through-x-2012-7?op=... is clean, approachable, sometimes funny; but at the same time it's sober, and communicates self-respect and a respect for the user and his/her work on the computer. You can see how even the original System 7 colourisation http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4ffb37e469beddc959000005-1200/mac-os-system-70-1991.jpg http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4ffb37e469beddc9590... hurts that a little ... and then we reach Aqua, which is a fairground attraction in comparison. The new OS X look is an attempt to recapture the restraint of the old Finder in high-res colour. Which is not to say that it doesn't have issues with button visibility, something the old Finder went out of its way to achieve.
  • vacri 10y ago
    There isn't a binary choice between "flat design" and "skeumorphism". You can use lots of different visual cues to indicate things. I loved hearing that Windows 10 was going to go 'authentically digital', but that emotion died when it became apparent that they decided that mean 'flat design'. Just because something is on a computer screen doesn't mean it has to be made of simple single-colour polygons.
• arrrg 10y ago
  It’s not that important a point, but legal pads are a very US phenomena. I’m German and I have never ever seen a yellow pad like that in person. The current notes icon (with white paper) is much more in line with the note pads you would encounter in Germany. Paper people write on to take notes is typically just white. Maybe bound with a spiral on the left or top (and perforated paper to tear off), maybe glued together at the top. Maybe internationalization was a consideration here? Yellow paper doesn’t read as anything recognizable internationally. (Yellow sticky notes are probably internationally known, though.) My overall point would also be that taste colors opinions in this case. Or taste at least leaks into them. I think it’s important to be very careful with that and to try and avoid to let taste color too much of what you think. (My taste is very different from that of the author and as such I think many of his points are just plain wrong-footed. There certainly are some good points in there, but taste plays too much of a role.)
  • realusername 10y ago
    Oh that make sense then ! I never understood why most of the notes apps on my smartphone were yellow and not white, I found it bizarre and assumed it was some kind of fashion, it must be international differences then.
    • pmarreck 10y ago
      for anyone else non-US but curious: Photos of typical yellow pads: https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+legal+pad&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+legal+pad&tbm=isch History of the yellow legal pad: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/scene_snider_mayjun05.msp http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/scene_snide...
      • ludwik 10y ago
        Wow, I've never seen those in real life (I live in Poland). I know most of the results are photos, but I always encountered those in the form of icons, so my brain is still telling me that I'm looking at icons. It's a weird feeling ;)
• abrbhat 10y ago
  The change appears to be a part of the broader trend towards flat design from realistic design in the UI community. A balanced point of view: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/12/infographic-flat-design-vs-skeuomorphism/ http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/12/infographic-flat-des...
  • dingaling 10y ago
    "Flat design versus Skeuomorphism" isn't really a valid comparison; flat design can still use skeuomorphic elements like the infamous floppy-disk icon, just without the subtle hints that the icon is actually a button. Battery status is still shown, generally, through an AA-cell icon, the trash is a dustbin, 'like' is a heart. "Flat design" versus "visual nudging", for want of a better term, is what the debate's really about.
    • vilhelm_s 10y ago
      I think "flat versus skeuomorphism" is the correct opposition, and it's the "Apple Goes Mushy" article which is muddling the terminology by conflating at least three different things. * Skeumorphism is about rendering individual materials. E.g. compare the old and new Safari icons. Both show a blue compass, but the old one is drawn as a realistically rendered 3d-object with perspective and metallic reflections, and the new one is a flat 2d drawing. Similarly, the old design of the maximize/close buttons on windows were rendered skeumorphically, as a some kind of plastic 3d-object, the new ones are 2d. * Then there is the use of visual metaphors versus abstract symbolism. E.g. the old icon for Photos was a picture of a camera and photo, the new one is an abstract symbol (apparently it's supposed to be a stylized sunflower?). * And finally he talks about color choices: the old design used lots of saturated colors, the new one has more desaturated ones with a few saturated accents. All of these can vary independently. A stylized line drawing of a battery is not an instance of skeumorphism, but it is a use of visual metaphor.
• onion2k 10y ago
  I agree with the author that OSX has lost a lot of it's personality, but I don't agree with the notion that this is a bad thing. I don't want my OS to have much of a personality. It's a tool for getting things done. The less I see of the OS the better.
  • gurkendoktor 10y ago
    I agree that OS X should out of your way most of the time, but what about the unboxing experience? Buying or upgrading a Mac used to feel very satisfying because you were welcomed by a cool intro video (10.3 was playing even Röyksopp!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gov-XY7mDPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gov-XY7mDPE Apple still produces videos like these, but only to show them at WWDC and on their website. New users are only greeted by grey/white screens and lots of cloud settings. :|
    • onion2k 10y ago
      Apple should not be designing icons that are optimised for their initial visual impact. In fact, "impact" is not a word you really want to associate with something you use on a daily basis.
    • Decade 10y ago
      I hate having intro videos playing when I set up a new computer. They attract the attention of everybody else in the office, and I have to scramble to mute, then close, them.
• greenimpala 10y ago
  I really agree with this - I thought it was me getting slower but every time I open finder or Dock I have to spend that split second extra effort to discern between the "Applications" folder or "HD" icons etc.
• zelos 10y ago
  The removal of colour from the icons in the Finder sidebar is the change that feels the most clearly anti-usability to me. It clearly makes the items harder to distinguish and has no benefits that I can see apart from fitting in with the flat design concept.
  • wingerlang 10y ago
    That was probably the only thing I agreed with, because I sometimes have to take an extra second to look for what I want there.
• dchest 10y ago
  Above, on the left, you can see the creative, dazzling, H.G.-Wells-spirited Time Machine interface and icon of yesteryear, receding into radiant oblivion (complete with animated stars that drift toward you). Well-crafted, they stirred the right mood. On the right, observe what Apple bulldozed the old Time Machine for: a low-effort cartoony icon in place of the hatch to hyperspace, and a blurred desktop background with flat grey controls in place of a fantastic portal to the past. To me, this "update" to Time Machine stands as one among many sad and uncaring obliterations of the heart Apple used to have. My head was spinning (literally) every time I used old Time Machine, so I'm glad they removed this silly animation.
  • kalleboo 10y ago
    My head wasn't, but the fans in my rMBP sure were. If I stayed in there too long it would start throttling down the CPU due to overheating.
  • 0xffff2 10y ago
    >My head was spinning (literally) What would that even look like? On what access can a human head literally spin?
    • dchest 10y ago
      Ha, got me! By literally, I meant in the medical sense (is it called "vertigo"?), not as an idiom (meaning to confuse or overwhelm).
• oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  It seems as if the web has influenced the latest round of GUI designs, especially the 'flat' design trend which has clearly harmed usability when it comes to things like buttons. This is handled better by Android's material design guidelines, but it's still a regression. The problem with this approach is that the web has no guidelines whatsoever, beyond user-agent defaults. So each and every site does their own thing (whether 'good' or 'bad') and Apple (+ Google, etc.) decides to cherry-pick what is 'popular' or thought to 'look good', seemingly without thinking through the impact on usability. Or, possibly worse, they have considered the usability impact but deem the tradeoff worthwhile.
• rahkiin 10y ago
  The only thing I miss from previous versions, is the stars effect in Time Machine. It was crazy awesome to move through the stars.
• hollander 10y ago
  Many of the icons like Safari and iTunes haven't changed that much, just have progressed with current designs. Take a look at the Mozilla icons, or whatever app you're using like Evernote or LibreOffice. Do they remind me of a webbrowser or Office app? Not really. It's just that they are significantly different from other apps. After one or two times use, I remember what it looks like and that's all you need.
• fredsted 10y ago
  I like the minimalistic UI of El Capitan. It gets out of the way, and puts in focus what I really want to look at: the content, Web pages, my code, my photos. My computer is a tool, it's not an artwork I turn on to look at. Buttons still look pushable, input fields still look editable. The Dock didn't lose any functionality whatsoever by having the 3D effect removed. In my opinion, the El Cap UI requires just as much talent as the overdesigned (but very pretty) icons and graphics from the previous era. I don't miss the brushed metal and pinstripes, though.
  • legulere 10y ago
    > My computer is a tool, it's not an artwork I turn on to look at Things looking better actually has a positive effect on usability.
    • Sean1708 10y ago
      And I would argue that the new flat look looks much better. That's the problem with that statement, there's no universally agreed upon "good" look.
    • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Hmm, not sure on that one. A beautiful interface can be better but I suspect it's better to have an uglier consistent and intuitive interface. I'm a long-term Inkscape user, they recently 'improved' the icons; it all looks wrong (but handsome in a minimalistic, low-visibility of chrome, sort of way) and disturbs my workflow considerably.
      • Silhouette 10y ago
        A beautiful interface can be better but I suspect it's better to have an uglier consistent and intuitive interface. I'm not sure why the parent comment was downvoted. If the above statement was intended to mean that being consistent and intuitive is more important than aesthetics then that is almost certainly true, in my experience designing and testing UIs. Of course, the ideal is to have it all by using the aesthetics to support the functionality. Being attractive and being functional aren't mutually exclusive. This is where, IMHO, a lot of generic minimalist/flat designs following the current trend go wrong: they sacrifice so much detail and so many possible ways to be visually distinctive or interactive that what remains inevitably all looks very similar and loses some of the visual cues that could help to guide the user in how the system works.
• pankajdoharey 10y ago
  I totally agree with the author, in fact much of the hidden functionalities in apps that use to exist is also gone. For instance in earlier versions of previes you could join multiple pdfs into one single pdf by dragging the pdfs into thumbnail preview panel. Now that functionality simply doesn't exist, it seems like they (Apple) have done a rewrite of so many Apps, that they missed out on smaller details.
  • cauterized 10y ago
    This is my biggest frustration with OS X these days. They're working so hard to add marginally useful consumer crap like native maps that the power user functionality that attracted me to the platform in the first place is suffering badly. The mail app in particular has gone from nearly-perfect (for my use case) to unusably broken in a dozen obvious ways.
    • zer0defex 10y ago
      Microsoft has clearly identified this weakness as well. It's no coincidence the bash prompt has suddenly become available in windows...
      • spronkey 10y ago
        Microsoft have many of the same weaknesses though. The new Windows Modern UI apps or whatever they call it now are awful. Mail? Calendar? Wow. Even Outlook Express was better. And the new Settings app? Dear holy deity..
  • kccqzy 10y ago
    Actually you can still combine PDFs that way. I'm running 10.11.6.
• krylon 10y ago
  One thing I really dislike about 10.10 is that "maximizing" a window will - with a few exceptions - switch it to fullscreen. To maximize a window I need to press Alt while clicking the maximize-button. And there is not even an option to switch this behavior. On a small laptop screen this behaviour might be preferable, but on a FullHD display, I find it rather annoying.
  • netheril96 10y ago
    Double click the title bar then. Still, the maximization in macOS is plainly stupid, as it frequently doesn't do the expected maximization.
    • wtbob 10y ago
      > Double click the title bar then. That's hardly discoverable though.
      • 7Z7 10y ago
        In fairness, it's a standard behaviour across several OSes.
        • EdSharkey 10y ago
          Not across applications, sadly... Chrome just likes to stretch the window horizontally a little and then extend the window vertically to the top and bottom of its current display. Hey, Google! When I double click the title bar, it means fill the !@%&%#* display!! Just another reason why I like Firefox.
  • ricksplat 10y ago
    I really liked the old nuanced "full size" behaviour. Unlike Windows "Maximize" it would only increase the window size just enough so that all its contents where visible. This was neat, and elegant, and really showed considered design as well as the OS taking an interest in what was "in" it's windows not just the displayable area of the screen. I thought the Ctrl-F fullscreen behaviour in Lion was perfectly fine. It was slightly dissonant with overall windowing system control but I thought that was fine - going to full-screen seems to me more of a system feature than an window manager feature (it subverts the window manager to a certain extent), but maybe I'm just getting old ...
• CPLX 10y ago
  I'm not sure how to tell this guy, but I'm over 40 years old and I have been using Apple computers literally since elementary school. At a certain point the reference to intuitive design can be to ones own past, if that past has become sufficiently ingrained and intuitive to users. I thought the lament about the photo app dropping the icon that looks like a camera was particularly odd. He seems uninterested in even acknowledging the point that most cameras don't look like that anymore, and there are many (most?) full fledged adults who have never used a camera with a large attached lens. I'd even wonder at this point if there are more people in the world familiar with Apple products than with actual apples that grow on trees, but I digress.
  • gurkendoktor 10y ago
    > the photo app dropping the icon that looks like a camera But the old iPhoto icon was not only showing a camera, it was showing a camera and a photo. The camera is part of the icon because iPhoto/Photos can also be used to import photos from cameras that look exactly like the one in the icon. The old icon really couldn't be more fitting for what the app does. And even if users don't know what a camera is, they can still recognise the other 50% of the icon. Plus, Apple itself still uses the same type of camera in other icons, most notably on the current iOS lock screen, so I don't think anyone is confused by the iconography. Most people never compose a song and yet they know that iTunes' icon is a musical note.
    • CPLX 10y ago
      It's a picture of a physical camera with a big lens, and a physical print of a photo with a white border. Supposedly representing an app that people use to store and organize photos they take with a phone and view on a display screen.
    • redial 10y ago
      > And even if users don't know what a camera is, they can still recognise the other 50% of the icon. Can they? who prints photos anymore?
  • vacri 10y ago
• stupidcar 10y ago
  I see a lot of opinion here, and not a lot of hard evidence. Maybe the changes in OS X, and the move away from skeuomorphism in particular, have hurt its usability, but the way to prove that isn't through emotional op-eds. Get a group of non-Mac users, randomly split them into two groups. Set them a number of basic tasks: writing and sending an email, editing a photo, opening a particular website, etc. Then have one group do it on an older version of OS X, and the other on a new version. Then record how long it takes them, what things they struggle with, etc. Ask them to report their level of frustration and enjoyment. It wouldn't be a perfect experiment, but it would at least produce some concrete data to discuss.
• tim333 10y ago
  I think the greatness of OSXs past UIs is a bit over hyped. I changed from Windows 7 to Mavericks a couple of years ago and still find 7 more intuitive. You can see at a glance which programs are running from the bar in 7 unlike OSX, I still have not figured out the Finder very well and so on. On the other hand OSX seems better engineered in many ways, more stable, faster to respond and so on.
  • gurkendoktor 10y ago
    I think the hype goes back further than that, with OS X 10.5/10.6 vs Windows Vista. Windows 7 really narrowed the gap between Windows and OS X, and at the same time OS X 10.7 took many steps backwards (black & white sidebar icons, no Save As, terrible multi-screen experience).
    • taneq 10y ago
      Snow Leopard and Windows 7 marked the respective pinnacle of each OS to me, UI-wise. Windows 8.1 has some nice incremental touches... If only they'd applied them to Windows 7's basics. I haven't spent much time with newer OSXes, admittedly, and I'm basing most of my opinion here on co-workers' muffled curses.
  • tjl 10y ago
    In the Dock Preferences, click the box "Show indicators for open applications". You should get a black dot under (or to the side) of the app icon. I've used this setting for years.
    • emodendroket 10y ago
      Yeah, but why exactly is it off by default? I can't see the benefit.
      • tjl 10y ago
        Because they don't want people to worry about what is open. That's what I understand is their reasoning. I don't really agree with it, though.
• noir-york 10y ago
  Agreed with the sentiments of the author. While I don't expect an OS to be "beautiful" - attractive would perhaps be the better word, the general grayification and over-simplification has made OSX harder to navigate. Compare it to Atom which I, and I am sure many others here, use every day" syntax highlighting, coloured icons, etc all make navigating code/screen faster.
• 56k 10y ago
  This article doesn't make any sense. The use of metaphors worked when people didn't know what a computer was, and the only way to make its UI make sense was to mimic real-world objects. Now, this is no longer necessary. It's been 40 years. While I agree that new macOS icons aren't great (see the Game Center icon), the old ones were silly. I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts. The old icon for Pages? I don't even know what that is, I'm not into calligraphy. The only thing I'd agree with is hiding UI controls. Apple has been making its apps less usable to make them look pretty, hiding important elements in an attempt to declutter the interface. I hate how Safari hides the full address in the address bar, for instance. Or, how they removed scrollbars and force people to actually scroll every piece of the interface to check if there's something more to see, while before you could tell just by looking at scrollbars. Of course, there are settings to go back to the old behavior for both my examples, so power users are fine, but I fail to see how these moves improve things for regular users. I also disagree that Steve Job's death was detrimental to macOS's UI. He was the one who kept Apple looking outdated with his obsession for skeuomorphism, I'm glad they went for a flatter look right after his death. Of course, everyone's taste is different, but I still think this is a bad article.
  • phoboslab 10y ago
    > I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts. There was a rhetoric not too long ago where OSx fanboys would make fun of Windows' interfaces for still using the disk icon as the "save" button. Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those. Skeuomorphism doesn't make sense anymore when the real world items it's based on are vanishing. Case in point – telling a young kid how to answer a call on the iPhone: press the green banana button.
    • larsiusprime 10y ago
      Speaking of, "In defense of the floppy disk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kylikelQBqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kylikelQBqg Surprising and excellent talk.
• Shengbo 10y ago
  I have to disagree with the author. I understand his frustration with some of the icon choices(Photos, Game center, etc.) but most of the things he's grieving for are just tacky. The leopard pattern on the OSX box and the overly cluttered illustration with the galaxy background, glassy surfaced "X", icons and lens flare would look especially stupid in 2016. I'm glad they removed all the silly shadows, 3d effects and animations and defined more strict UI guidelines. I don't need my OS to look like a Christmas tree.
  • Sean1708 10y ago
    Also note that he's conveniently forgotten to mention Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Dictionary, iTunes, Maps, and others that I can't be arsed to list, all of which have managed to get that flat look style while still being an image of their real-world counterpart.
  • lloeki 10y ago
    Case in point, just below the article you can find this: http://imgur.com/a/iQe0Z http://imgur.com/a/iQe0Z The puzzle background goes contrarian to the text label and makes my eyes/mind jump while trying to read the labels. The first button makes me think of Wikipedia, the second one of Facebook. It's precisely that kind of cognitive dissonance where you read "blue" written in red and get asked to say the color or the word. The last button has embossed text for some reason, possibly in an attempt to make it readable in face of the noisy background, but in turn it makes it stand apart from the other buttons. The whole theme of the design reminds me precisely of the design language of Mac OS X from its origins to Leopard. It's not bad per se, but people don't need as much no-so-subtle hints as before in the UI, which get perceived as distracting noise. It's not zeitgeist anymore.
    • Shengbo 10y ago
      Yea, I didn't wanna be a dick by mentioning it but scrolling down to that after reading the article just confused me even more about what the author would define as "good UI". I count at least 2 unnecessary textures, 4(or 5?) different fonts and a color palette that makes no sense to me. I know some people are enraged about how many "generic 3-column flat UI" websites there are, but give me one of those any time instead of something that can't make a decision over what unnecessary decorations to use around a button that's already cluttered with a background texture and 3d effect.
• pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Anyone link me to Apple's research papers on useability that underpin their design ideals? Or is it just fashion in the face of useability?
  • coldtea 10y ago
    Or they make their own internal testing and don't provide links to their "papers"? How about that?
    • pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Quite possible, do you think they they lead the design primarily with usability or fashion?
      • coldtea 10y ago
        I think they take both into account, as they should. Usability is great and all, but if your products dont sell because they're perceived as unfashionable it's not that good...
• 0942v8653 10y ago
  Note: This is my personal opinion! I recently had to use a computer with OS X Mavericks on it (10.9 I think). I was struck by how beautiful the interface was. I'm having trouble finding a good screenshot illustrating this, but compare http://content.gcflearnfree.org/topics/243/2013_new_desktop.jpg http://content.gcflearnfree.org/topics/243/2013_new_desktop.... http://download.softwsp.com/sites/12/2015/11/os-x-el-capitan-mac-012.jpg http://download.softwsp.com/sites/12/2015/11/os-x-el-capitan... Everything just looks better on Mavericks. The gradients may be over-the-top but they're at least consistent. Transparency on El Capitan is pointless and ugly. Maybe I like the system font a little better. Firefox is also a really good example; it looked great on Mavericks but has not been able to fit in since. Usually, I prefer simple UIs: i3, terminals, etc.. But the look they have done for Yosemite/El Capitan just doesn't work.
  • daenney 10y ago
    Firefox's problem is that it does the whole UI by itself. This basically makes it look out of place anywhere they haven't explicitly put effort into giving it a similar experience. It looks out of place on El Capitan and on macOS Sierra it's downright disturbing. I don't want tab titles in Times New Roman (at least it reminds me of that).
    • Sean1708 10y ago
      > Times New Roman (at least it reminds me of that). Really? The tab titles on my firefox are very clearly a sans-serif font, and don't look at all out of place.
      • daenney 10y ago
        Could be that that got fixed. I don't use Firefox on a daily basis so I tend to be a few builds behind on the beta channel.
    • vacri 10y ago
      No tab titles in TNR in FF here - sanserif (but can't tell a font by sight). No add-ons apart from NoScript and Flashblock.
• dschuetz 10y ago
  I suppose Apple truly intends its MacOS to become more mature and streamlined. I also loved the beauty of Leopard and Lion versions. I don't think that making all icons flat and less colorful makes Apple's products more mature. The decision might have been made as Apple decided to move from glossy devices to mat, so later after that all the icon designs also moved from glossy to flat. It took almost 10 years, btw.
• terda12 10y ago
  OS X looks better than ever. Yeah I agree with Notepad and Photos icons looking not good but everything else is perfect. I'm typing this on an OSX right now and it just looks great. Worst part of the article by far was > OS X packaging, once very elegant and eccentric (and printed on a physical box), has become thoroughly unremarkable. This is 2016, no one uses CD's anymore. And that leopard print box design looks like packaging for some kinky underwear.
  • insulanian 10y ago
    > And that leopard print box design looks like packaging for some kinky underwear. Haha, exactly my thoughts :)
  • 56k 10y ago
    My laptop doesn't even have a CD/DVD tray. I forget last time I've used a CD. The author must be 90 years old.
  • carlosrg 10y ago
    >leopard print box design looks like packaging for some kinky underwear It's funny witnessing how certain people that a couple years ago considered Apple designs the pinnacle of design and far ahead of everything else using the same arguments today that Windows fans used.
    • toxik 10y ago
      Perhaps it was never about the arguments themselves, but rather their veracity.
    • Gracana 10y ago
      I think you're making a big assumption about who is saying what.
      • zer0defex 10y ago
        Absolutely right.
• skrowl 10y ago
  If you think this is a steep decline, wait until they report earnings after this market closes this evening. Another quarter of iPhone sales drops and they're expect to announce iWatch down by over 50% from last year.
  • peyton 10y ago
    Apple doesn't give numbers on Watch sales.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >Another quarter of iPhone sales drops You mean, just a few months before the next model is announced? Who would have thought...
    • skrowl 10y ago
      Year over year sales drop, not quarter over quarter. They sold less this quarter of this year than the same quarter last year.
• pipio21 10y ago
  I disagree. I use mac all day and the icons don't pose a problem to me either to the young people in my family. Really frustrating for me are the changes in Spotlight launcher. It used to be instantaneous search and launch. Now it is painfully slow in all my computers.
  • gurkendoktor 10y ago
    I'm finding that its faster now to pinch with all five fingers on the trackpad and then use find-as-you-type in the Launchpad UI. This works even when Spotlight is busy rebuilding its index for whatever reason.
• rubyfan 10y ago
  Great points here. The iconography is an important element of navigating a system and recent iterations of both macOS and iOS have suffered at the hands of trendy flat design.
• sdkjfwiluf 10y ago
  article misses the point that things change. it's a different world now and the metaphors need to change with it. the desktop is now the computer, so desktop metaphors make no sense. flat design looks clean and quiet, I don't miss the days of skeuomorphism.
• adamlett 10y ago
  There is an old macintosh print ad in the article stating something like: "A computer that everyone can use will get used by everyone". It immediately made me think of iOS. No matter how good you think the UI paradigm of the mac was at its peak, it doesn't compete with iOS in user friendliness. We've all heard stories of or witnessed 2-year olds who can navigate an iPad. That was never the case for a mac. I wonder if some of the changes made to macOS (née OS X), were made because iOS has freed the mac from having to serve complete novices and very casual consumers, and instead focus more on serving a segment of professionals and serious content producers whose needs are different from casual consumers, and may be better served by a more subtle, muted interface.
  • ihuman 10y ago
    > There is an old macintosh print ad in the article stating something like: "A computer that everyone can use will get used by everyone". The one that says "A funny thing happens when you design a computer that everyone can use. Everyone uses it"? That's in the article.
    • adamlett 10y ago
      Yes. As I wrote.
  • pseudalopex 10y ago
    A 2-year-old can navigate an iPad because a touch screen requires less motor control than a mouse. The Norman/Tognazzini article points out the loss of discoverability, feedback, and recovery in iOS. The most pointed criticisms I've seen of Apple's UI changes have been from people who work in visual media. "Serious content producers" use Finder for the same things as the rest of us. The interface isn't consistently more subtle; where color hasn't been removed, it's brighter and more saturated. iOS has moved in a similar direction aesthetically, so it isn't a matter of different interfaces for different audiences.
    • adamlett 10y ago
      A 2-year-old can navigate an iPad because a touch screen requires less motor control than a mouse. That's certainly a large part of it, but I don't see how that detracts from my point. The touch interface is as much software as it is hardware. To the extent that we forget that, it really proves that Apple really nailed the software. Things like flick to scroll and pinch to zoom seem obvious now because they feel so natural, but they are a feature of the software, not the hardware. I also don't agree that the touch interface is the only reason an iOS device is much easier to use. Anecdotally, my father in using his iPhone for the first time feels like he masters a computer. Mind you, this is not someone who is a stranger to computers. He has used a desktop PC for years at his office. The Norman/Tognazzini article points out the loss of discoverability, feedback, and recovery in iOS. I don't know if I've read that particular article, but I've seen similar criticisms before. And I do believe that there is something to them. But I also feel like they are blown out of proportion and/or fail to take into account the constraints of the small size of a phone screen. Not to say that Apple hasn't made outright mistakes, but I do think they get it right far more than they get it wrong. The most pointed criticisms I've seen of Apple's UI changes have been from people who work in visual media That's hard to argue against, since you don't say what specific criticisms they make. The interface isn't consistently more subtle; where color hasn't been removed, it's brighter and more saturated. I probably overstated that particular point. There is certainly lots of evidence these days to suggest that Apple doesn't care all that much about the pro market.
• rekshaw 10y ago
  Currently, on the same front page on HN there is an article: Humans once opposed coffee and refrigeration: why we often hate new stuff. This applies perfectly to you, dear self-righteous blog author.
  • coldtea 10y ago
    By the same logic you can dismiss every critique. Not everything new is an improvement.
    • carlosrg 10y ago
      Every single article on HN with a little of criticism of Apple gets the same kind of responses and becomes basically a giant appeal to novelty fallacy. You're against progress, it's new so it's better, Apple knows best, etc.
    • qmr 10y ago
      Change for change's sake disgusts me. It is rampant in Apple's macos, iOS, as well as Google's Android.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        And yet Apple changes surprisingly little between versions. And usually to assemble piecemeal some functionality related to a long term master-plan (usually of the "All your Apple devices as a digital hub" category).
  • mkagenius 10y ago
    While in case of re-decorating ones own house with a new color/theme always seem better to oneself. Maybe people get bored of looking at the same thing for long time at a stretch and hence anything new looks much better to our brains.
  • puranjay 10y ago
    By mentioning coffee in the same breath, you're implying that coffee is an objectively good idea (it's not). Just because an idea catches on doesn't mean it is good. Case in point: every "viral" music video, 80s hair and nu-metal.
• coldtea 10y ago
  >Buttons across the system now look much less like real buttons. Almost no life-imitating textures survive. OS X, in large part prior to Yosemite, used to crawl with visual metaphors; why has Apple banished so many of the analogies that helped people feel comfortable with the Macintosh in the first place? Because thousands of idiotic designers and tons of media pundits lamented their "anthropomorphic" interfaces and swooned over the abstract UIs of competitors, to the point that it sounded like a real problem...
• sbuk 10y ago
  This essay is nothing more than the authors opinion (which there is nothing wrong with) presented as fact (completely take umbrage with this). Looking at the authors website, the current design of Apple's UI elements are not to their taste. An example would be this; http://www.nicholaswindsorhoward.com/blog-directory/2016/1/23/ios-icons http://www.nicholaswindsorhoward.com/blog-directory/2016/1/2... The odd idea is interesting, but it's massively regressive.
  • barneybooroo 10y ago
    I particularly like that in this case apparently a picture of a sunflower is a perfectly acceptable icon for "Photos"
  • jccalhoun 10y ago
    With a few exceptions he has a serious case of "I like it the way it used to be!"
  • Redoubts 10y ago
    Yeah, his taste reminds me quite a bit of KDE 4.
  • vilhelm_s 10y ago
    Yeah. It's particularly annoying how he notes in passing that since 2013 "almost all software designers, including Apple’s" have started to prefer the flat style, and yet he still presents his own opinion as objectively correct.
• intoverflow2 10y ago
  To understand the photos icon you have to be familiar with iOS 6 to remember the photos icon was a sunflower because the new one is an abstract representation of that flower. Honestly couldn't believe it when they shipped it.
• xaduha 10y ago
  Windows Themes were a step in the right direction, why can't we have that in OS X? Give me that Snow Leopard skin for El Capitan or whatever.
  • cmiller1 10y ago
    Even better was Kaleidoscope on Mac OS 7-9
    • masswerk 10y ago
      Since it's now Mac OS again, I want the Appearance Manager back, too! (Note: In Mac OS 8+ Appearance Manager was the built-in part and Kaleidoscope 2 rather provided a more accessible way of hacking the resources and switching themes.)
  • kps 10y ago
    Eh, give me Snow Leopard functionality and stability, and I'll live with either skin.
• read_it 10y ago
  This 'flat design' ic created by designer who merely know how to create things, and is more easy to create things with one color and flat objects. I don't now why it is so popular
• Sean1708 10y ago
  For reference, here are screenshots of just the stock El Capitan Apps: https://imgur.com/a/uRfvc https://imgur.com/a/uRfvc
• rahoulb 10y ago
  Personally I feel Mac OS's Platinum was the pinnacle of "desktop" user-interface design and OS X/macOS is generally on a path of returning to that look (although not that feel)
• ebbv 10y ago
  Wow this guy really misses the skeumorphic interface and really doesn't like minimalist design. Sheesh. Personally I think OS X has been improving as its gone minimal. I don't like skeumorphic apps. They seem at first glance like they are easier to use, but the analogy actually many times makes they interfaces more misleading for novice users when they can't do everything that they expect they should be able to. The Finder side bar is a perfect example, for me, on how minimizing an interface can make it more clear. The old Finder side bar looks cluttered and noisy and it can be hard to easily understand everything that's going on there. The more minimal one is easier to read. Could it be improved at this point by bringing some color back? Probably. But sometimes you have to go "too far" minimal to then find where you can bring things back in a way that really improves things. The OS X interface was in dire need of a reset like this. If you ask me the main problem with the OS X move towards minimalism is that it's been too slow and didn't go far enough in some areas. I would have preferred that OS X went all the way right off the bat and then we could have already been on the path to bringing some more color and shading back in that will probably happen over the next several years. At least, though, I agree with the author that the Game Center icon is awful.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ethanpil 10y ago
  Very funny to see Apple playing catch up on design to Google in the area of flat style design. Google are the ones who pushed flat design into UI and everyone else is following their lead.
• swingbridge 10y ago
  Meh... Fair point on the icon for the photos app, but other than that the article is grasping at staws
• return0 10y ago
  Ios is just as bad, still need about a minute to figure out how to add a reminder if i can't use siri. icons still dont make sense (serious travesty, my compass icon is actually safari, while my compass app has a cross icon). And the sheer stupidity of flatness everywhere makes it slow to read the interface.
  • vidoc 10y ago
    > icons still dont make sense Couldn't agree more, My last IOS device was the Iphone 3G, so I kind of lost touch with IOS. Recently found myself trying to help my mom print an email on her Ipad, and felt quiet disarmed as none of those icons made any sense at all! Ended up clicking icons to see what happens, one in particular, was apparently deleting messages, and I have yet to understand what the icon symbol was all about :P
    • 7Z7 10y ago
      That's odd, in the latest iOS, all of the options I can see for deleting messages are accessed via the word "Delete"; one of which is on a red background (swipe conversation left). The other two require three steps with clear messaging/iconography: (Edit, select, Delete), or (long-tap message, more..., hit the Trashcan icon or hit "Delete All"). Perhaps it was an older version.
      • shopkins 10y ago
        > swipe conversation left iOS's heavy reliance on this gesture is a great example of how bad it's gotten. Unlike drawers, which usually have some kind of pullable tab, or reorderable items in a list, which have little icons indicating grabbable-ness, there is no visual cue that items can be swiped left. If you've never used iOS before, you have no way to delete important things unless you've been instructed how to from friends or iPhone-using ancestors.
• franze 10y ago
  I'm writing this post form an late 2015 Mac Book Retina (not air, not pro). The mac book stands on a book, a small fan points to it's back so that I can write this. Without this the machine would get to hot, which results into a slower user interaction (think: write a letter, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, letter appears on the screen). On the left hand side a huge adapter (99EUR) is plugged in. It enables me to plug into an USB device and the charger. I do a lot of presentations. so basically the adapter is part of the machine. The color of the keyboard begins slowly to fade. Especially the "S" is now more grey than black. The Max Book is advertised to have a battery lifetime of 8 to 10 hours, I normally get up to 4, sometimes less. It's garbage!
  • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Why on Earth did you buy it knowing it only had one port if you do presentations often?
  • k-mcgrady 10y ago
    Sounds like you simply bought a machine not powerful enough for your needs. I'm using a 2015 MacBook Pro. It's been pretty hot here for the last week (30-33c) and my performance has been good. The MacBook sits flat on a table and hasn't got hot once. Battery lasts about 8 hours for me. I'm typing all day (iOS dev) and none of my keys are fading. I have two USB ports which are in use and all I need. If the machine you're talking about is the new super thin MacBook you just made a bad purchase decision as that machine almost costs as much as mine.
  • Infinitesimus 10y ago
    My general rule of thumb for Macbooks: If you want to do anything other thank browse facebook and write word docs, and want the machine to last you for more than 3 years - get a Pro. Vote with your wallet, if you can replace the Macbook experiment* with a Pro or some other computer, go for it. As it stands, Apple has no incentive to make it better since they have your money anyway unless enough users skip the product * I'm convinced "the new Macbook" was born because someone lost a bet and had to answer "how bad can we make a computer and still make people buy it?"
• dingo_bat 10y ago
  While I personally think the new icons and UI looks better, I agree that everything is too white. I hate white. It wastes power on phone and laptops, and it hurts my eyes. Let's make everything black. A good example is Holo-era Android.
• typpytyper 10y ago
  I'm 100% in agreement with the article. I haven't upgraded from Mavericks for the very reasons he outlined - stark white UIs with no feedback. (Well that and the WIFI issues in Yosemite.) As for skeuomorphism, look no further than the phone icon in iOS - it's a handset from a traditional 80s phone. If Apple designers were to take their flat minimalist mantra to the next level the icon would be a picture of a black rectangle representing an iPhone.
• lacion 10y ago
  and all of this from a site that looks like its still hosted in geocities
• acr25 10y ago
  WYSIWYG has NOTHING to do with UI design. It refers to being able to print a document (fonts, sizes, lines, pictures) in such a way that it precisely resembles what you see in the application's document window.
  • whatever_dude 10y ago
    Yeah, I was also very confused by that. The article made it sound as if the WYSIWYG explanation was a quote from Apple's guidelines, or maybe from XEROX, so I wondered whether I misunderstood WYSIWYG this whole time. Searched, and nope, that whole box is by the article author, not a quote. The author doesn't know what WYSIWYG is and wrote some projected explanation. Very likely he didn't go through the WYSIWYG era; it was a big deal, and wouldn't be that easily misinterpreted.
• everydaypanos 10y ago
  I mainly disagree w/ the points he makes, but the "vampiric" screenshot of the sidebar is very hard to neglect. There is something magical that goes away when you take away all the color and replace all the icons w/ glyphs. Especially on places like the sidebar where you interact w/ it too often and 99% of the time you are scanning/looking for stuff.
• mrcwinn 10y ago
  I agree with the general sentiment that Apple isn't very good at software, but it's worth remembering they are solving not just for the desktop, but for many platforms. I cannot imagine that ugly 2008-era iPhoto icon on my big flat screen. The thought of that rips into the very fiber of my being and makes me question all that I know about life. Put another way: relax. Hope things get better!
• brudgers 10y ago
  To me, if there is a weakness in Apple's interface due to evolution that weakness is in evolving too slowly. The premises for "easy to use" in 1984 are radically different from those of today. The "for who?" and the "for what?" and the "what artifact am I using?" have changed. The last matters. It ain't so much skeuomorphism ain't relevant no more, it's computers are ubiquitous => to the point that the computers we carry in our pockets are taken for granted as computers. Interface designs that draw on folders and writing pads and cameras and folders are headed to the dustbins. The best skeuomorph for X is the thing closest to X itself. I'm not saying that hamburger menus haven't irritated me, only that I know what it means when I see one and how it ought to behave because it skeuomorphs to it's own computer interface => and there it draws on a long self-referential skeuomorphic tradition of the floppy disk "save" icon. To me it seems, the better we make skeuomorphs the further we get from icons and the closer we get to words. Siri, Alexa, Cortana lead the way back from hieroglyphs for middle mangers afraid of catching keyboard cooties. I don't want to say that everyone knows how to use a computer, but it's not 1984 and so many people around the world are comfortable typing to the point that many Africans have mobile payments over SMS. Mobile payments over SMS shows that the efficient skeuomorphism of text. Our phones are/have cameras. "Use camera" pretty much tells the story.
• flohofwoe 10y ago
  The article misses the mark IMHO by focusing on skeuomorphic(sp?) icons. Yes, usability has degraded during the recent 'flat design' craze, but not so much because skeuomorphism was tossed out, but because the many little visual design changes that kill discoverability. The mobile operating systems started this trend where a lot of advanced functionality was hidden behind 'magic' touch and swipe gestures that go way beyond the simple and intuitive tap, zoom and rotate gestures, like 2-, 3- and 4-finger swipes, long and short touches, etc..., important features cannot be visually discovered (how do I close an application again, on iOS, Android and Windows8? how do I flip between applications? how do I take a screenshot?). It's the many small things that kill usability for the sake of visual design: - the famous shift-key on iOS, what the hell were they thinking? - buttons are often indistinguishable from non-interactive label, leading to idiotic trial and error clicking to find out which UI elements do something - scroll-bars that are hidden by default, loosing the information how far I am into a document (OSX) - changing and moving things around just for the sake of confusing existing users, not making anything more intuitive (especially Windows is guilty of this) And so on and on... the icon design is the least of the problems (and every OS worth its salt should allow to replace the icon theme anyway). One important reason I'm going back to the command line more and more is because UIs have become so unusable for anything that goes beyond browsing an image collection. Change itself is only good if it results in improvements, but in the area of UI design, things that have been working just fine for 20 years have been broken for superficial visual effects. It's like 90's web designers took over and are building operating system UIs now (and may be there's a bit of truth in it). It's not like the past was perfect of course, I mean... Alt-F4, Alt-TAB, ... but that was on Windows which was always laughed at for its poor usability (at least from view of AmigaOS and MacOS users).
  • danellis 10y ago
    Also, hiding some menu actions behind an Alt-click, which is terrible for discoverability.
  • josho 10y ago
    I don't like change for the sake of change either, as that is just setting trends to help sell more product (e.g. the bi-annual iPhone case redesign). But, the OS changes you highlighted all have real benefits that move the focus from screen widgets to the actual content. > - buttons are often indistinguishable from non-interactive label, leading to idiotic trial and error clicking to find out which UI elements do something How come everyone understands hyperlinks on the web, but when the OS follows the same pattern you can't figure it out? I know a few apps have gotten this wrong on occasion, but as long as the text for an action is coloured differently than regular text then it's pretty obvious. > scroll-bars that are hidden by default, loosing the information how far I am into a document (OSX) On small screens (remember macbook airs are only 11" screens which I consider small) this saves precious screen space. If you really need to know where you are in a doc, resting your fingers on the trackpad and moving slightly brings the bar back. I thought this was a brilliant design to reduce clutter on the screen, not unlike how our browsers have been reducing their chrome to give the content more room. I'm all for removing clutter from my screen if it helps me focus on the content.
• bitL 10y ago
  I think the main problem with UI is the movement towards scalable graphics fitting all types of displays which unfortunately can't be as complex as raster graphics with the same size constraints. Hence flatness and overly abstract, "simple-gradiented" shapes everywhere. I think once people realize that 8K will be the final resolution of displays, raster will come back as the number of display formats that need to be supported will be limited and graphics could be rescaled on the go. For now we have to suffer through the "modernism" phase of UI design which like in art makes only around 5% of people inspired, rest is underwhelmed; or stick to the last bearable OSes like Win 7, Mavericks, iOS6...
• ommunist 10y ago
  I miss Glass.
• ldom66 10y ago
  From a usability perspective I totally agree with this article. From a design standpoint though, people generally prefer minimalism over realism in UI design. I also much prefer the design of macs today over PCs, even though I prefer Windows for usability. Apple these days is more looks over function, while Steve Jobs thought the other way around was the way to go in my opinion. So there is a decline over what Apple stood for after Jobs.
• misterdata 10y ago
  As people start getting used to computers and digital, virtual concepts (such as scrolling, windowing, buttons), the need for them to reflect tangible, real-world objects diminishes - I think abolishing skeuomorphism is the right way to go.
• swiftisthebest 10y ago
  I agree with literally nothing this dude said. The old mac interface was needlessly complicated and distracting. Simple is better! I don't want to spend time deciphering what some thing is supposed to be. It is a waste of brain cycles. Just give me a memorable glyph that is different enough from the other ones to not be tough to spot, and let me focus on what's important. My work!
• fredfoobar42 10y ago
  There's some good points in the article, in particular the draining of color from the Finder sidebar and a few other glaring usability issues that haven't been addressed. But, man, seriously, the original Time Machine UI was garbage. The Yosemite version is so, so, so, so much better. It's not great, but it's a lot better than what it used to be.
• athenot 10y ago
  While a streamlining of UI elements is not necessarily a bad thing (especially as the meaning of metaphors sink into the general public's consciousness), I have noticed that it takes me longer to find and converge to the right app icons on the dock & app switcher. It seems the general trend regarding logos is "blobs of color in some abstract pattern". And those that still depict some meaning end up blending in, by adopting the same approach of using multiple sturated primary colors. Maybe it's just me but visually, they all register the same in my brain and I need to take a second look to tell them apart. And if I need to take a second look, the whole advantage of an icon vs. a keyword is lost.
• ruffrey 10y ago
  In my opinion, this article focuses on all the wrong things. Things that matter in OSX to me - and why I continue to choose it as my most basic tool for work - are: - exceptional workspaces and swipe navigation - the safety of time machine backups - for the most part things are very fast and the OS gets out of the way of what I am trying to do - I have not wasted any time on hardware/OS compatibility issues - I only reboot every few months, if that - battery life is excellent (os is not a hog) Quite honesty I could give a shit what the icons look like as long as the OS is a reliable and fast tool to do my work. time machine saves your ass, who cares that the icon doesn't meet your tastes.
• tcfunk 10y ago
  For me, the biggest issue with the past 2 or 3 OS X updates hasn't been the interface at all. I can get used to a new interface, that's not a problem. The real problem (imo) is the lack of meaningful updates to the OS. EVERYTHING is an aesthetic change, or some new Siri or iPhone integration. Does anyone actually start an email on their phone and finish it on their desktop? Anyone? Where's updates like better window management? How is it 2016 and I still don't have window tiling on a 4k (5k?) iMac? Apple is busy repainting their bedroom varying shades of grey while Windows puts out integrated linux and bash, improved window snapping, openssh integration, etc.
  • vbezhenar 10y ago
    > The real problem (imo) is the lack of meaningful updates to the OS. > EVERYTHING is an aesthetic change, or some new Siri or iPhone integration. Does anyone actually start an email on their phone and finish it on their desktop? Anyone? I often use icloud tabs. I'm not sure about e-mails, I don't use them, but I could see myself using it feature, as well, if it works. > Where's updates like better window management? How is it 2016 and I still don't have window tiling on a 4k (5k?) iMac? OS X 10.12 has some tiling. > Apple is busy repainting their bedroom varying shades of grey while Windows puts out integrated linux and bash, improved window snapping, openssh integration, etc. Well, it's not like OS X misses bash or openssh. It's Windows who's trying to catch up.
  • makecheck 10y ago
    That may be true of recent OS releases but it would be unfair to exclude what is planned for Sierra. Additions like picture-in-picture look very useful. They definitely are adding more window management: a “guiding” mechanism to let windows glue together pretty easily, and tabbed windows in any application. Even if they didn’t, you can’t blame Apple for not rushing to provide features like tiling, etc. when there are multiple “tiling” and other window-management apps available on the App Store alone for a few bucks or less. Just go get one, and fix your desktop. And remember, features “never used by you” does not equal “never used by anyone”. Can you not imagine someone starting a message on the couch from an iPad, realizing they need to attach a document that’s on a Mac, and wanting to go get it? Continuity is quite valuable, even if it isn’t used all the time.
• jacobmorse 10y ago
  A post about garish design on a garishly designed blog. Appropriate.
• chadlavi 10y ago
  Old Man Yells At Cloud
• wahsd 10y ago
  I'm just more frustrated with how Reminders seems to be so buggy on occasions where changes are simply not accepted. I suspect it's largely related to iCloud and possible sync collisions, but it's really frustrating and there is no clear indication that the changes you made were just simply rejected. Sometimes it's so bad that, e.g., moving a task in a list results in the task with its label being overlayed over another task. It's really bad. The other day I had the worst time trying to get OSX EC to accept changes to a task locally, when they were propagated across devices with apparently no problem. It's just so so buggy. The buggiest Apple software I am aware of.
• kartickv 10y ago
  Since the article spends quite a bit of time talking about icons, let me focus on that, too. I think the old icons had too much detail in them to be visible at typical icon sizes. They ended up looking cluttered and over-designed. The new icons are simpler visually, making them clean and fresh. And they come in brighter, happier colors. I much prefer the look of El Capitan over older OSs.
• rcarmo 10y ago
  I've been using Macs since, well... Forever, and writing about them for over a decade over at http://taoofmac.com http://taoofmac.com I'd say this piece is too opinionated by design - not only does it ignore the almost relentless iterative approach Apple has taken with aesthetics, it reads a lot like linkbait. But hey, that's just my opinion. :)
• gastrointestine 10y ago
  Yeah, they had some amazing meticulous artistry that they use to put into everything. I remember one of my old bosses (who use to work at Apple) talking about a special guy that Steve had, that use to create all the icons. He'd even make all that the imagery of the iphones and stuff on the home and product pages of the website by hand, all vector... But the newer stuff is less busy and way more navigable. Yes, there's less color, and concepts that are sometimes too abstract. But it's all still better for the user, in my opinion... Great, thought provoking article, though.
• jpalomaki 10y ago
  The camera icon is not just a picture of the physical world object. It is pretty universal symbol for taking pictures. When the same symbol is used in so many places, even people who have never used the physical object resembling the icon, will recognize its meaning. In my view the reason behind many of these user interface changes is not really improved usability. The simple reason is that no matter how good interface you design, after some years it just starts to feel old and boring. Old and boring is hard to sell. Fresh and exciting is better. Therefore we keep on changing stuff, even though from pure usability perspective it would be better to stick to the old and boring but familiar. Easy to use systems make happy customers, but they don't necessarily win the customer's heart at that point when the purchase decision is made. Maybe this is one issue for Apple? Maybe the "old Apple" was happy giving out xx% of their sales for a bit of ideological reasons, but the one needs to find growth where it can? One could see this kind of hints in the product lineup. I would say back in the days it was pretty opinionated, now there's 4 different iPad models (and countless variations).
  • josefdlange 10y ago
    This response is probably the most rational one I've seen here. It doesn't dive into a holy war of UI opinions -- it sticks to observations of reality and conclusions drawn from them. Thank you for trying to introduce thoughtful conversation to the embers of a flame war.
  • moridinamael 10y ago
    Yup. This reminds me of the novel The Diamond Age in which the poor tend not to be able to read, but instead navigate the technological world exclusively using pictograms which descended from modern "icon" design. In such a world, if you didn't choose to use an icon of a camera to denote "photo", what the hell else could you possibly use that would make any natural sense?
  • audleman 10y ago
    > Maybe the "old Apple" was happy giving out xx% of their sales for a bit of ideological reasons, but the one needs to find growth where it can? When Apple first put forth their ideology it -was- new and shiny. It worked in their favor. I agree with you that now it's "boring" and "old."
• WayneBro 10y ago
  Here's a much better article on why OS X is an exercise in bad UI design - http://aaronhildebrandt.com/archive/osx-an-exercise-in-bad-ui-design http://aaronhildebrandt.com/archive/osx-an-exercise-in-bad-u...
• jccalhoun 10y ago
  I have a hard time taking design advice from a web site whose design consists of a narrow band of text and 2/3-3/4 empty space.
• api 10y ago
  This is really just a pro-skeumorphism rant. I'm personally not a fan of skeumorphism, especially when taken to extremes like the silly leather calendar in previous OS X versions. The real problem I have with Apple is the abysmal developer service their app stores offer and the technical stagnation of some of their products. They've got plenty of money and should be really really pushing the envelope. Where's my octacore laptop? Where's my really good issue tracker in the app store with 60 minute turnaround?
• zeveb 10y ago
  I think this is just the blah and boring exterior of modern Apple hardware being carried over to the software inside. I remember the beauty of the original iMac (compare the G3 to the current model at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac), or the beautiful clamshell iBook G3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook). Likewise, System 9 was beautiful, and the original OS X was even more so: it looked like candy, translucent and shiny. Now, everyone praises Ives for turning out yet another rectangle with some circles on it. Someone really should buy him a French curve to augment his straightedge and compass … The new macOS looks much the same: flat, boring, staid, plain. Now, I personally don't really mind that (my own WM is dark, muted and mostly invisible), but it seems rather a betrayal of what Apple used to stand for: actual beauty rather than simply the lack of ugliness.
• johnwheeler 10y ago
  I like the new look and feel and where the OS has been going in general.
• dahart 10y ago
  All UI has gone less Skeuomorphic and flatter. Google's doing it and giving "material design" talks at all the major conferences. Just look at their design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Design https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Design Windows embraces flat design way more than Apple does, maybe the author needs to check out an Xbox or use a Surface for a few minutes? Websites everywhere are minimalistic and flat compared to five years ago. This is the current design thinking, the author is stuck in the past. On top of that, this article shows the opposite of what it says it does - it's demonstrating how Apple is doing all these "bad" things less than everyone else.
  • emodendroket 10y ago
    > maybe the author needs to check out an Xbox or use a Surface for a few minutes? Indeed, how could he not have experienced these resoundingly successful designs?
• squozzer 10y ago
  To me, flat design just looks cheap. Maybe texture and shading for icons makes as much sense as tail fins on cars, but even the most strident minimalist designer still wants to convey some sense of quality with the details they choose to keep.
• petilon 10y ago
  Here's another blog that documents the decline of Apple's user interface design: http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ http://uxcritique.tumblr.com/
• rsync 10y ago
  It's worth pointing out that circa July 2016, it is still manageable and reasonable to continue using Snow Leopard. I use it daily on my primary system. Other than the cool "draw my signature on a PDF" feature in Preview that showed up circa Mavericks, there is nothing - not one thing - that I miss by running that older OS. VMWare fusion works great. Current chrome+ublockorigin. Great multi screen support. I don't run any services and keep a strict firewall (and also the ublock Origin) so the lack of recent security updates (combined with the gradual loss of interest in SL from exploit writers) isn't a problem. YMMV.
  • callalex 10y ago
    Do you use a desktop or a laptop? The power saving technology that has been added in later OS versions makes a HUGE difference, even/especially on my older portable macs dating back to 2008
• brandonmenc 10y ago
  It would help if they just started drawing borders around things again.
• S_A_P 10y ago
  I think I would switch to windows if I had to look at a vintage OSX version. I think its great for nostalgia to look back at the evolution of UI and not every change is an improvement, but I find the latest versions of windows/OSX to be perfectly usable and nice to look at. I dont need such literal translations of my icons for them to make sense. This argument is kind of bogus anyway- how many times of looking at an icon and clicking it does it take to remember what goes where?!?! I use the application Reason quite often but that icon offers no clue as to what type of application it is. Flat layouts are easier on the eyes and all the shading gradients and other elements required for "realistic" ui are tiring. Completely disagree with this article here.
• joe_momma 10y ago
  Nail on the head.
• petilon 10y ago
  EVERYTHING beautiful is skeuomorphic. The page turn in iOS 6 iBooks, page curl in maps, cover flow, the shred animation in older versions of Passbook, the date picker in iOS 6, rotating settings gear (when updating iOS 6), the Time Machine interface in older versions of OS X, photo borders and shadows in iWorks documents, etc. This is not surprising, because our sense of beauty comes from the physical world. So what is the problem with skeuomorphism? Tech enthusiasts would like their phones to look like something from the future, not something from the past. But ordinary everyday people prefer for it to look like things they are already familiar with, or can relate to. Tech enthusiasts worry that the skeuomorphism was getting totally out of hand, particularly where the UI metaphor started limiting functionality (e.g. an address database that's limited to what a Rolodex can do, rather than exploiting what is possible with a computer). But this is not really true. For example, iBooks has instant search, something only possible with a computer. Some people point out that many skeuomorphic elements reference things that a large part of Apple's audience hasn't used in a long time, if ever. True, but here's the thing: It doesn't matter whether the user has ever seen a reel-to-reel tape. What matters is whether the visuals depict a physical object that the user can model in his mind. If it is too abstract (that's the opposite of physical) then non-tech-enthusiast users will find it hard to intuit. Some people say skeuomorphism looks tacky. This is partly true. Skeuomorphism is hard to do. When done poorly it does look tacky. But when done well it looks very beautiful. By removing all skeuomorphism Apple is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  • rpgmaker 10y ago
    Honestly, I know things can't stay the same forever, particularly in the design department, but to me Aqua still looks way better than current OSX (granted, I only use OSX very sporadically for educational purposes). I have to admit though that I'm not a huge fan of the flat designs that are currently "in" where you can't easily tell when one UI element ends and the other begins. I don't think that's very easy on the eyes generally but it seems that I'm the only one that sees it that way. Whatever.
    • UIZealot 10y ago
      You are not alone. I also hate flat. And I also think the original Aqua looks best, even today. I'm probably the only person who loves the Aqua pinstripes, which Apple had to tone down gradually and finally completely remove, presummably due to negative user feedbacks.
• EGreg 10y ago
  This would not be the case if Steve Jobs still ran Apple: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=234
• BlakePetersen 10y ago
  The irony here is this design critique takes place on one of the ugliest sites on the internet. Also, everything he points out is to the benefit of a society that's making it's first steps into computing using GUIs. Once you've accomplished that first introduction, you optimize for efficiency. Do you really need to sit there and parse an icon's details every time before you actually click the icon and move on to the actual task you intended to do? I'm sure Apple considers a lot before making design changes, from UX efficiency to cross-platform aesthetic consistency to iPhone battery life (does displaying white icons encourage darker backgrounds which ultimately have more pixels using lower energy to light up or some such nuance?), which this article ignores entirely.
• kstrauser 10y ago
  Skeuomorphic icons are probably OK, but skeumorphic behavior is horrific. Consider the awfulness of the Mountain Lion era address book and calendar that tried to emulate the behavior of physical objects by imitating their limitations. That, for me, was the nadir of OS X usability. It might have been great for someone who'd literally never seen a computer before, but anyone who wanted to navigate a calendar without flipping through months one page at a time had a real fight on their hands. If you want an icon that looks like a physical object, OK. I can probably live with that. But the moment you want to extend that to making the app act like the object its icon represents, you've lost me. Perhaps Ive et al decided that having a realistic Notes icon attached to a non-notebook-like app was more confusing than keeping the old one? That certainly seems justifiable. Also: who cares what the Safari compass looks like? To me, "compass" means "compass". It's never represented a safari to me (not that "safari-the-adventure" represented "Safari-the-browser"). What would that skeumorphic icon be anyway - a rifle? This is what we used to have: http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/30/skeuomorphic-design-or-one-reason-we-can-be-thankful-scott-forstall-is-gone/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/30/skeuomorphic-design-or-one... . I couldn't have been happier when Mavericks ditched all that. It wasn't perfect, to be sure, but it went a long way to restoring artificially-lost usability. The article feels to me as though the author is caught up in nostalgia. That's fine, but not mistake "I liked it that way" for "that way was objectively better".
• Unbeliever69 10y ago
  The abandonment of skeuomorphism was part rebellion and part caving to the ebbs and flows of popular design. When you move away from tactility and recognizability (familiarity), there is a greater burden on the user to interpret the intent of the designer. This is one of the reasons there has been a big surge in the use of animations in UI; because flat designs aren't as effective at communication as recognizable, tactile ones. Younger users of unique UIs and gestures have proven that you can adapt to new visual conventions and forms of interaction. The problem is that this is not Apple's ONLY audience. The Mac has always been attractive to people who want a more approachable, simple, user-friendly, less virus prone computer. This audience is typically less tech savvy and probably not a millennial. I further argue that the visual style of Steve Jobs was more in alignment with the innate desires of this archetype.
• makecheck 10y ago
  The thing that bothers me most about the direction of icons is the sameness of all their shapes, ignoring the rest of their appearance. This is a problem in both the Dock (where it seems everything is a circle nowadays) and in toolbars (where everything has an ugly white rounded-rectangle behind it, and is really tiny). There used to be explicit mention of the importance of varying shapes in toolbars, as part of Apple’s own interface guidelines. At a glance, it’s far easier to find things when there’s a triangle-like icon next to a round icon next to a square icon next to a home-plate-shaped icon, etc. If every icon has the same shape, and has been shrunk into that shape to leave even less space for meaningful details, it‘s almost not worth having an icon at all.
• HoppedUpMenace 10y ago
  The older aesthetics reflected an OS that could get everyone excited about its potential, kind of like back in the day when people would look at the graphics depicted on records, VHS covers, video game boxes, ect... Now, nobody draws quite a connection with that sort of art or media so you have something with no soul that conveys the idea that people are just happy with whatever you give them cause they could care less about people making a connection, just that it works and does, at a minimum, what its supposed to do. A bit off topic... Same idea could be applied to what happened in video games in the past, like Super Mario RPG style transforming into Paper Mario or Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask style being dropped for Wind Waker cartoon like aesthetic, both examples devoid of any human connection built up to that point in previous iterations but it gets the job done as its still the same kind of game.
• Animats 10y ago
  If you give up skeuomorphism, you have no model for icons. You could have every icon be a smartphone, but that won't help. Without some real-world basis, icons are just abstract shapes. Text boxes might be better. At least you don't need an icon dictionary. Everything now has to be mobile-friendly, which means 1) fat fingers, and 2) you can't see the thing you're touching. "Mouse-over" for more info is not meaningful for touchscreens. So icons can't have explanations. Whatever happened to Google's "material design"? Did anything ever use that? Even Google's own web sites didn't use it, although Google had a react.js implementation. Incidentally, don't use a compass icon for anything other than a compass on a device that actually has compass hardware. Maybe the future of icons is corporate logos. That's what favicons are.
  • shopkins 10y ago
    > "Mouse-over" for more info is not meaningful for touchscreens. So icons can't have explanations. One might argue that the icons should explain themselves. > Whatever happened to Google's "material design"? You obviously don't use Android or many of Google's new web sites.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > "Mouse-over" for more info is not meaningful for touchscreens. So icons can't have explanations. I suspect the period of not having a decent UI for surfacing alt-text (on web) or equivalent help for native apps on mobile devices is probably not going to extend long into the future. I don't know what the UI convention will be (gaze tracking? light-touch with pressure sensitive screens? some gesture?). Touch UIs are (despite being ubiquitous with the explosion of the last decade) still relatively immature.
• nickgrosvenor 10y ago
  I don't even fucking understand how to use the music app on my iPhone anymore . So needlessly complicated.
• shanacarp 10y ago
  Do you miss color, or do you miss skeuomorphism? I'm trying to decide
• mark-r 10y ago
  I think people miss the purpose of icons. To be effective, they need to be distinguishable and memorable so that you can find them when needed. If I need to find something that I'm not familiar with, I'm more likely to use a text label to figure it out than to try to guess by the picture. An ideal icon would have a lot in common with an ideal logo. The current trends are somewhat troubling. Removing color makes an icon less distinguishable, and changing icons yearly makes them less memorable. The reason the floppy disk icon is still useful so many years after it stopped being relevant is because it hasn't changed. I do miss the richness of imagery that skeumorphism provided, I find it more visually appealing than the abstract flat look. I realize this is a matter of opinion though. How ironic that as enhanced displays allow for more realistic renditions than ever, the trend is to move away from realism.
• x0 10y ago
  I agree with this so much. Two other things that annoy me about the new OS X design: - Helvetica everywhere. Helvetica, whilst not bad, has somewhat poor readability (not legibility) in body copy. I find it much harder to read than the old Lucida Grande, and it annoys me I can't change it back easily. In fact I jailbroke my iPad just to change the font (to Iowan Old Style, absolutely beautiful serif) - No favicons in Safari. I can't even understand why they would do that, and have absolutely no way to turn them on, for those of us who like to switch tabs without spending 5 seconds reading them all.
• ksec 10y ago
  If Skeuomorphic means trying to mimic things in real world. Then i guess everyone would have a different skeuomorphic perspective. Especially with different age group. Today's Kids dont even know what a Matchstick is. And the likely hood that a Phone will replace 90% of all consumer camera in next decade. Leaving DSLR for Professionals. There isn't cassette, Betamax or Type. And kids born today likely dont know what Floppy or even Optical disk are when they are 20. So it really is a little bit of forward thinking from Apple. Given how a 5 - 7 years old are now using iPad. They have a different group of future loyal users to cater for. Side Note - Tech is good, and it is everywhere. But what happens to good old days when kids were young they go out to do stupid things and have fun in the park. Instead of starring at the iPad screen.
• cyphunk 10y ago
  tldr; this article is arguing for skeuomorphism. Actually I'm not sure this isn't a satire. It made me rotflmao. But also, it's good to see that there are people out there (perhaps many, perhaps most!?) that see the world of good design in complete opposite.
• sevensor 10y ago
  I think the arguments about usability are missing the point. This looks to me like the reemergence of the old debate between baroque (skeuomorphic) and classical (flat) styles, with usability thrown in by both sides as a red herring.