7 ms·

I feel that Apple has lost its way with OS design in the past 5 years or so. Not at a macro level, but at a micro, "little things" level. Launch anything Appl

I feel that Apple has lost its way with OS design in the past 5 years or so. Not at a macro level, but at a micro, "little things" level. Launch anything Apple-written these days and you'll get a wizard telling you how to use some new widget - just like any other software by anyone else. I don't think Apple has ever done that before because features were designed so well, you can easily figure it out. Then there are just tons of small decisions that are head scratchers. In iOS 13, they changed when Select/Select All appear, and it's a real pain in the ass. Early versions of iOS didn't have Select/Copy/Paste because the general belief was that they had to get it right the first time. They nailed it, but now they've tweaked it and made it much harder to use.

munk-a 7y ago
I agree with this - I feel like Windows has gotten much better at catering to delivering (or allowing other people to deliver) more targeted UX improvements. Once upon a time Fences was a requirement to be alive - now instant searching in the start menu means I hardly ever see my desktop - similarly universal key combinations (and global key capture) have let things like media keys really take off - being able to pause a video that skipped to the next entry in the playlist without ever backing out of a different fullscreen app is kinda beautiful. Heck, I've got, and regularly use, an iPad and had no idea you could go into split screen mode - the UX is entirely invisible and un-intuitive - especially if you pick up something running older iOS and need to remember how to pull up the carousel.
- gowld 7y ago
  How do you get search to work? For me, Windows Search Indexer just uses 100% CPU forever.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Oh sorry - I almost never use search in the context of documents - I use it for programs I need to pull up. I don't need a document search all that much as I generally store things by project and am only ever working on a modest set of files at a given time. If you're looking for a good finding utility I might suggest grepwin[1] which does a great job finding things fast. 1. https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html
wodenokoto 7y ago
They never nailed copy/paste nor select on any form of iOS. And undo is also terrible.
amiga_500 7y ago
Itunes was utterly terrible. My iphone is terrible. Apple make very, very bad software. And their hardware is overpriced. And they deliberately make people pay more for accessories like their pointless new audio port. Android is superior in every way, except (I'm told) on privacy. I cannot comprehend why anyone buys apple. I have to have apple for my work phone, and I hate it. Just today I was wrestling with their dreadful podcast app to try to figure out how to get it to play the podcasts in the order the episodes are enumerated in, which isn't the default. I still haven't found the 'playlist' part. Find in page on a web page took me ages to find. I cannot select the middle of a word. Their auto-correct corrects words that are nicknames or abbreviations by default to some totally inappropriate word. Their files app truncates the name, so when I download several episodes of a podcast, all of which have the format "long podcast name episode #" all I see is "long podcast name ..." eight times. Moving icons from one virtual page to another is clunky. The equivalent of a drop down where you have some weird rotating drum thing is awkward. Adding a contact from a text from an unknown number was convoluted. There are no timestamps on incoming text messages on the text app. On and on. Every single bit sucks. And no I don't want to hear how I can "just do x,y,z, it's easy". Their software is not intuitive and sucks. Today at least I got the audio jack to stop constantly disconnecting. The problem? Lint in the audio jack. Never had that on the old one but Apple couldn't charge me $10 to connect my existing headphones to their device so I guess it was worth it.
- aksss 7y ago
  > Find in page on a web page First question is where the F is it, second question is why the F did they put it there?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- zarmin 7y ago
  Posts like these are very cathartic to me.
- phren0logy 7y ago
  To offer a counterpoint, I found Android on a tablet to be a UX disaster. To be fair, I last tried it a few years ago, but it REALLY put me off. The iPad has confusing and unnecessary limitations, but Android on a tablet was inscrutable and inconsistent. It gave me so many ways to shoot myself in the foot, and burn up a battery doing nothing at all.
int_19h 7y ago
I think it has been way longer than that, it's just that they were (and many fans still are) in denial for a long time. But there were plenty of things about iOS that were non-intuitive from the get go. Way back when, I got an iPad for my mom. She loved the idea of a device that basically doesn't need support, but it took a while for her to get the hang of it, and her main complaint was that it was "inconsistent and unpredictable". She pretty much had to poke at things to figure out what they do - the opposite of good UX. She's on Android now, and happy as a clam.
chongli 7y ago
Past 5 years? Maybe closer to the past 25 years. Ever since Apple decided OS X would be the successor to classic Mac OS. This is when Apple finally left their incredibly rigorous user interface guidelines behind [1] and made technical considerations (preemptive multitasking, multithreading, and virtual memory) the priority, along with “lickability.” [2] The classic Macs were the last truly easy to use desktop computers. My father and all of my older relatives of his generation had no problems using classic Macs. OS X however? Completely baffled. Might as well have sat them down in front of a terminal connected to an old Unix mainframe. Yeah, it has a lot of superficial similarities to classic Mac OS, but it violates the principle of least surprise far too often to be called easy to use. iOS is easy to use though. Hand an iPad to any of those same relatives and they get along fine. It’s way less powerful though, despite running on a computer several orders of magnitude faster. [1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/macos-x-beta-14.html https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/maco... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/
gowld 7y ago
As soon as they fixed text control, they broke URL handling. Long press on a link? Congrats, now you've got a weird floating popup Safari window with no Close button! Enjoy trying to use the finicky "drag between two invisible targets to open the app switcher" gesture to find and close the unwanted window.

munk-a 7y ago

I agree with this - I feel like Windows has gotten much better at catering to delivering (or allowing other people to deliver) more targeted UX improvements. Once upon a time Fences was a requirement to be alive - now instant searching in the start menu means I hardly ever see my desktop - similarly universal key combinations (and global key capture) have let things like media keys really take off - being able to pause a video that skipped to the next entry in the playlist without ever backing out of a different fullscreen app is kinda beautiful. Heck, I've got, and regularly use, an iPad and had no idea you could go into split screen mode - the UX is entirely invisible and un-intuitive - especially if you pick up something running older iOS and need to remember how to pull up the carousel.

gowld 7y ago
How do you get search to work? For me, Windows Search Indexer just uses 100% CPU forever.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Oh sorry - I almost never use search in the context of documents - I use it for programs I need to pull up. I don't need a document search all that much as I generally store things by project and am only ever working on a modest set of files at a given time. If you're looking for a good finding utility I might suggest grepwin[1] which does a great job finding things fast. 1. https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html https://tools.stefankueng.com/grepWin.html

wodenokoto 7y ago

They never nailed copy/paste nor select on any form of iOS. And undo is also terrible.

amiga_500 7y ago

Itunes was utterly terrible. My iphone is terrible. Apple make very, very bad software. And their hardware is overpriced. And they deliberately make people pay more for accessories like their pointless new audio port. Android is superior in every way, except (I'm told) on privacy. I cannot comprehend why anyone buys apple. I have to have apple for my work phone, and I hate it. Just today I was wrestling with their dreadful podcast app to try to figure out how to get it to play the podcasts in the order the episodes are enumerated in, which isn't the default. I still haven't found the 'playlist' part. Find in page on a web page took me ages to find. I cannot select the middle of a word. Their auto-correct corrects words that are nicknames or abbreviations by default to some totally inappropriate word. Their files app truncates the name, so when I download several episodes of a podcast, all of which have the format "long podcast name episode #" all I see is "long podcast name ..." eight times. Moving icons from one virtual page to another is clunky. The equivalent of a drop down where you have some weird rotating drum thing is awkward. Adding a contact from a text from an unknown number was convoluted. There are no timestamps on incoming text messages on the text app. On and on. Every single bit sucks. And no I don't want to hear how I can "just do x,y,z, it's easy". Their software is not intuitive and sucks. Today at least I got the audio jack to stop constantly disconnecting. The problem? Lint in the audio jack. Never had that on the old one but Apple couldn't charge me $10 to connect my existing headphones to their device so I guess it was worth it.

aksss 7y ago
> Find in page on a web page First question is where the F is it, second question is why the F did they put it there?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
zarmin 7y ago
Posts like these are very cathartic to me.
phren0logy 7y ago
To offer a counterpoint, I found Android on a tablet to be a UX disaster. To be fair, I last tried it a few years ago, but it REALLY put me off. The iPad has confusing and unnecessary limitations, but Android on a tablet was inscrutable and inconsistent. It gave me so many ways to shoot myself in the foot, and burn up a battery doing nothing at all.

int_19h 7y ago

I think it has been way longer than that, it's just that they were (and many fans still are) in denial for a long time. But there were plenty of things about iOS that were non-intuitive from the get go. Way back when, I got an iPad for my mom. She loved the idea of a device that basically doesn't need support, but it took a while for her to get the hang of it, and her main complaint was that it was "inconsistent and unpredictable". She pretty much had to poke at things to figure out what they do - the opposite of good UX. She's on Android now, and happy as a clam.

chongli 7y ago

Past 5 years? Maybe closer to the past 25 years. Ever since Apple decided OS X would be the successor to classic Mac OS. This is when Apple finally left their incredibly rigorous user interface guidelines behind [1] and made technical considerations (preemptive multitasking, multithreading, and virtual memory) the priority, along with “lickability.” [2] The classic Macs were the last truly easy to use desktop computers. My father and all of my older relatives of his generation had no problems using classic Macs. OS X however? Completely baffled. Might as well have sat them down in front of a terminal connected to an old Unix mainframe. Yeah, it has a lot of superficial similarities to classic Mac OS, but it violates the principle of least surprise far too often to be called easy to use. iOS is easy to use though. Hand an iPad to any of those same relatives and they get along fine. It’s way less powerful though, despite running on a computer several orders of magnitude faster. [1] https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/macos-x-beta-14.html https://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/maco... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/lickable-buttons/

gowld 7y ago

As soon as they fixed text control, they broke URL handling. Long press on a link? Congrats, now you've got a weird floating popup Safari window with no Close button! Enjoy trying to use the finicky "drag between two invisible targets to open the app switcher" gesture to find and close the unwanted window.