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Let's not dance around in a circle - Apple started this with their "minimalist design." First on desktop and later with mobile. Fact of life is everyone copies

Let's not dance around in a circle - Apple started this with their "minimalist design." First on desktop and later with mobile. Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. Apple doesn't copy and paste things. They'll think deeply before copying. And will modify things to fit their unique needs and situation. Unfortunately, those who copy Apple switch off their brains and pursue the "looks" ALONE, ignore the "feel" and just mess everything up. The next big culprit is Google's Android with their let's just hide everything - hamburger. Microsoft, the final boss, attempted to beat Apple in design. The result was Metro UI - a beautiful, text heavy, flat, design (they changed the name too many times to keep track off.) Microsoft turned off their brains as well. The result: They hid every thing - scroll bars, status bars and title bars. Wasted valuable screen real estate - empty spaces everywhere. Created a much hated start-screen with scroll bars that moved horizontally instead of vertically. And to make matters worse, moved in the opposite direction of scroll wheel. (Perfect if navigating with a finger but very confusing if using the mouse. It clashed with 20 years of mouse knowledge) That's why people hated Windows 8. Both Apple and Google riffed off Metro design. Google calls theirs material design, don't know what Apple named theirs. If this article was titled, Who Killed Ports, 3.5mm audio jack, repairability, screws, or upgradable ram? The answer would still be Apple. Summary: Prioritizing form over function is cancerous.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. And I really, really wish they'd stop it.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is extremely conservative, with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and ongoing, which is to say, longer than the original interface). It is ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself vastly prefering Linux and the option of selecting a desktop environment. Ironically: Windowmaker, based on the foundations of the OSX Aqua desktop, NextStep. Increasingly it seems that Apple is stuck with implications of design decisions made decades ago which correspond increasinly poorly to current practices. The high cost of cycling between applications in particular. No, I don't want ALL FLIPPING WINDOWS of an app to pop up when I switch between the primary current working windows of two different apps. Or workspace flipping as I switch / open new app windows. Apple's third OS UI, iOS, has a tremendous number of shortcomings. As do virtually all other mobile interfaces. I'm coming to the conclusion that any screen size < 10-15 CM is simply too small to be useful, and prefer a minmum 9-10" (20-25 cm) devices myself.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Yes, in principle. But it becomes less than useful when the common schemas get in my way, which has been an increasing problem over the past few years. The aping of Apple's decisions appears to be a large part of why.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      Agreed. As jwz has noted, UI is different, in that changes to it provide relatively little payback: [I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software. https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o... (HN-safe archive link.) The bulk of present UI/UX metaphors can be traced directly to the Mother of All Demos, now over fifty years old: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY That said: from MoAD onward, the use-case has been of a desktop (or very-desktop-like laptop) system, with keyboard, pointer (mouse, tablet, light pen, etc.), used at something vaguely resembling a desk or table. It's not even the screen size of mobile devices in raw resolution that's so different -- early GUI computers had as little as 640x480 (VGA) resolution or less. The original iPad was 1024x768. But no keyboard, and finger-on-glass manipulation, call for a very different set of control and design considerations. A mouse pointer can have pixel-accuracy control. Fingers cover a probabalistic smear of screen space tens of pixels across and hide the screen elements they're affecting at the same time. (And that's before you introduce such joys as screens repainting and repositioning as / before you complete a touch action.) The real question is how to achieve concensus for new design and to void bad entrenched patterns across a highly fragmented design industry. Ranty flipping blog posts are one possible solution....
      - nine_k 7y ago
        This is "easy" to solve! Come up with a really good UI concept, implement it, and see everybody love it. Avoid patenting it through the nose, and let everyone copy most of it. This is how it will become the standard and win the world adoption. It seems like you'd need millions of R&D budget spent in a large part for public good, or at least to seriously change the market landscape without a guarantee you'll dominate it.
TheKarateKid 7y ago
Apple at least kept the minimal UI design where it belonged -- mobile. They also have a history of getting it right - the sole reason for the iPod and iPhone's success was it's beautifully simplistic design, especially on the software. Microsoft in a panic, went overboard and started the trend that our 26" desktop monitors didn't need much on it. At least they corrected most of the issues by now, but many other companies haven't.
contextfree 7y ago
"That's why people hated Windows 8." However, Windows 8 had an attempted solution for the specific problem called out in the article (the lack of a standard convention for getting an overview and jumping to a section of a long document or content scroll): semantic zoom. You could pinch-zoom out to get an overview of a view and then quickly jump to a specific section. (Scrollbars still existed but were only shown while using a mouse or pen. The mouse had access to the zoomed-out view as well, via a button on the scrollbar.) This was sadly removed in Windows 10 and I really miss it. So, people may have hated it, but it solved the problem the article highlights, which today's "less hated" products don't.

JohnFen 7y ago

> Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. And I really, really wish they'd stop it.

dredmorbius 7y ago
A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is extremely conservative, with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and ongoing, which is to say, longer than the original interface). It is ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself vastly prefering Linux and the option of selecting a desktop environment. Ironically: Windowmaker, based on the foundations of the OSX Aqua desktop, NextStep. Increasingly it seems that Apple is stuck with implications of design decisions made decades ago which correspond increasinly poorly to current practices. The high cost of cycling between applications in particular. No, I don't want ALL FLIPPING WINDOWS of an app to pop up when I switch between the primary current working windows of two different apps. Or workspace flipping as I switch / open new app windows. Apple's third OS UI, iOS, has a tremendous number of shortcomings. As do virtually all other mobile interfaces. I'm coming to the conclusion that any screen size < 10-15 CM is simply too small to be useful, and prefer a minmum 9-10" (20-25 cm) devices myself.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful thing. Yes, in principle. But it becomes less than useful when the common schemas get in my way, which has been an increasing problem over the past few years. The aping of Apple's decisions appears to be a large part of why.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Agreed. As jwz has noted, UI is different, in that changes to it provide relatively little payback: [I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software. https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o... (HN-safe archive link.) The bulk of present UI/UX metaphors can be traced directly to the Mother of All Demos, now over fifty years old: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY That said: from MoAD onward, the use-case has been of a desktop (or very-desktop-like laptop) system, with keyboard, pointer (mouse, tablet, light pen, etc.), used at something vaguely resembling a desk or table. It's not even the screen size of mobile devices in raw resolution that's so different -- early GUI computers had as little as 640x480 (VGA) resolution or less. The original iPad was 1024x768. But no keyboard, and finger-on-glass manipulation, call for a very different set of control and design considerations. A mouse pointer can have pixel-accuracy control. Fingers cover a probabalistic smear of screen space tens of pixels across and hide the screen elements they're affecting at the same time. (And that's before you introduce such joys as screens repainting and repositioning as / before you complete a touch action.) The real question is how to achieve concensus for new design and to void bad entrenched patterns across a highly fragmented design industry. Ranty flipping blog posts are one possible solution....
    - nine_k 7y ago
      This is "easy" to solve! Come up with a really good UI concept, implement it, and see everybody love it. Avoid patenting it through the nose, and let everyone copy most of it. This is how it will become the standard and win the world adoption. It seems like you'd need millions of R&D budget spent in a large part for public good, or at least to seriously change the market landscape without a guarantee you'll dominate it.

TheKarateKid 7y ago

Apple at least kept the minimal UI design where it belonged -- mobile. They also have a history of getting it right - the sole reason for the iPod and iPhone's success was it's beautifully simplistic design, especially on the software. Microsoft in a panic, went overboard and started the trend that our 26" desktop monitors didn't need much on it. At least they corrected most of the issues by now, but many other companies haven't.

contextfree 7y ago

"That's why people hated Windows 8." However, Windows 8 had an attempted solution for the specific problem called out in the article (the lack of a standard convention for getting an overview and jumping to a section of a long document or content scroll): semantic zoom. You could pinch-zoom out to get an overview of a view and then quickly jump to a specific section. (Scrollbars still existed but were only shown while using a mouse or pen. The mouse had access to the zoomed-out view as well, via a button on the scrollbar.) This was sadly removed in Windows 10 and I really miss it. So, people may have hated it, but it solved the problem the article highlights, which today's "less hated" products don't.