4 ms·

> cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms This is not a positive. A laptop is not a big iPhone and shouldn't use the same design la

> cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms This is not a positive. A laptop is not a big iPhone and shouldn't use the same design language. One of the worst thing about Windows 10 is its use of huge, touch-friendly interfaces in an OS most commonly used with a keyboard and mouse. MacOS appears to be headed the same way (and it doesn't even support touch screens).

dave5104 6y ago
Maybe I missed it, but did they say they're requiring Mac apps to start standardizing design? If not, then I see no reason why the default OS apps that come pre-installed shouldn't look and feel the same.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > then I see no reason why the default OS apps that come pre-installed shouldn't look and feel the same. The same as each other, or the same as their mobile touchscreen counterparts?
  - dave5104 6y ago
    I'd say both. If I'm a user who's all in on the Apple ecosystem, it seems like a nice plus that the out of the box apps can be expected to look similar and work similarly, whether I'm on my phone or my laptop. There's certainly ways to screw that up, I won't deny that. But I think it's an inherently good direction to aim for. In my mind, that means (1) making sure that functionality is synced whenever possible (the lack of iMessage functionality on macOS after it was enhanced on iOS has bugged me for years), and (2) matching the look and feel to make the macOS version (or iOS version) feel familiar the first time you use the app if you've previously used the alternate platform's equivalent.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I mean I think they should look the same. If you look at iOS and macOS apps side they should look like they belong to the same family of products and use the same design language. But they should behave different to take advantage of different devices strengths and limitations. Spotify does a pretty okay job at this.
hobofan 6y ago
> in an OS most commonly used with a keyboard and mouse In a business setting, sure, but I think you underestimate how much consumers are using touchscreens nowadays, even on their laptops.
WorldMaker 6y ago
Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. The larger the click target the faster and easier it is to click, especially as the distance between the current mouse position and the target increases. It's a huge mouse accessibility win to design touch-first target sizes, and there's decades of UX research on that topic. Just because the mouse is precise enough to do it doesn't mean that users should have to "360 no-scope" all of their apps every day.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to take more actions to accomplish the same task. If I have to dig through a deeper menu structure, or flip back an forth between pages instead of having the information all on-screen at once, that change is touch-friendly but hostile to desktop and many laptop users.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    First of all, if a UI is badly structured and needs a lot of flipping back and forth that isn't touch-friendly either. Good UX design should be about putting everything the user needs at the user's fingertip (literally so in touch-friendly, but figuratively so for mouse and keyboard). Particularly on that subject, density is mostly orthogonal to touch-friendly outside of touch target size, and that's something that Microsoft has been very honest about as a series of lessons learned between Windows 8 and Windows 10. Keep in mind a lot of the density changes in Windows 8 weren't about touch-friendliness, they were about good typography and reading friendly white space. They tried to optimize the basic app templates for comfortable reading patterns as if every app needed to be a well typeset newspaper with good strong margins between columns/articles. On the surface it was a lot of good ideas individually, but the criticisms were valid that it led to some very sparse designs by default and that they made overriding the defaults a little too hard, the defaults a little too hand-holding. For reading-only "information" the density of an app can be the same, touch-friendly or not. It's the control targets that should be adjusted just that little bit bigger. The difference in size between a past mouse-only target and touch-friendly is a lot smaller than people think, people are fairly comfortable at touching some very small targets (have you seen how dense most smartphone apps are today?). Even there too, Microsoft found out and admitted that user comfort for touch-friendly allows for far more density of touch targets than they at first recommended in Windows 8. (There's some interesting debate if those changes in UX Research Study results over the lifetime of Windows 8 and early Windows 10 testing were due to increased user familiarity with touch surfaces over those intervening years or some interesting unanticipated bias in the earlier studies.) The density of the UI should be a factor of the user's ability to focus on said UI more than a "touch-friendly" concern. Even after Microsoft greatly adjusted their design guidelines on density in Windows 10 they keep a lot of their own apps UI at low density not because they "have to" for touch-friendly, but for various concerns like user friendliness, good typography, and analysis paralysis when the user is confronted with too many choices at once.
zapzupnz 6y ago
Fortunately, macOS isn't being made to look like a big iPhone. Nothing in macOS is optimised for touch — all touch targets remain roughly the same size as they've always been with some things being a little bigger, but only for improving visual clarity, not for being easier to touch. Nothing about macOS is being made touch-friendly. Nothing about macOS is being made into an iPhone. If anything, this release makes it easier for iPad apps to become non-touch-friendly by making it easier to bring iPad apps to Catalyst without having to do complete restylings to match other macOS apps. That's the benefit of consistent design language. iPad apps become better macOS apps, not the other way around. The Mac is still a Mac. Desktops are desktops. Laptops are laptops. Separately, in iPad land, tablets are tablets. Nothing about the new design language changes that.

dave5104 6y ago

Maybe I missed it, but did they say they're requiring Mac apps to start standardizing design? If not, then I see no reason why the default OS apps that come pre-installed shouldn't look and feel the same.

wtallis 6y ago
> then I see no reason why the default OS apps that come pre-installed shouldn't look and feel the same. The same as each other, or the same as their mobile touchscreen counterparts?
- dave5104 6y ago
  I'd say both. If I'm a user who's all in on the Apple ecosystem, it seems like a nice plus that the out of the box apps can be expected to look similar and work similarly, whether I'm on my phone or my laptop. There's certainly ways to screw that up, I won't deny that. But I think it's an inherently good direction to aim for. In my mind, that means (1) making sure that functionality is synced whenever possible (the lack of iMessage functionality on macOS after it was enhanced on iOS has bugged me for years), and (2) matching the look and feel to make the macOS version (or iOS version) feel familiar the first time you use the app if you've previously used the alternate platform's equivalent.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I mean I think they should look the same. If you look at iOS and macOS apps side they should look like they belong to the same family of products and use the same design language. But they should behave different to take advantage of different devices strengths and limitations. Spotify does a pretty okay job at this.

hobofan 6y ago

> in an OS most commonly used with a keyboard and mouse In a business setting, sure, but I think you underestimate how much consumers are using touchscreens nowadays, even on their laptops.

WorldMaker 6y ago

Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. The larger the click target the faster and easier it is to click, especially as the distance between the current mouse position and the target increases. It's a huge mouse accessibility win to design touch-first target sizes, and there's decades of UX research on that topic. Just because the mouse is precise enough to do it doesn't mean that users should have to "360 no-scope" all of their apps every day.

wtallis 6y ago
> Per Fitz's Law, touch-friendly is mouse friendly. That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to take more actions to accomplish the same task. If I have to dig through a deeper menu structure, or flip back an forth between pages instead of having the information all on-screen at once, that change is touch-friendly but hostile to desktop and many laptop users.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  First of all, if a UI is badly structured and needs a lot of flipping back and forth that isn't touch-friendly either. Good UX design should be about putting everything the user needs at the user's fingertip (literally so in touch-friendly, but figuratively so for mouse and keyboard). Particularly on that subject, density is mostly orthogonal to touch-friendly outside of touch target size, and that's something that Microsoft has been very honest about as a series of lessons learned between Windows 8 and Windows 10. Keep in mind a lot of the density changes in Windows 8 weren't about touch-friendliness, they were about good typography and reading friendly white space. They tried to optimize the basic app templates for comfortable reading patterns as if every app needed to be a well typeset newspaper with good strong margins between columns/articles. On the surface it was a lot of good ideas individually, but the criticisms were valid that it led to some very sparse designs by default and that they made overriding the defaults a little too hard, the defaults a little too hand-holding. For reading-only "information" the density of an app can be the same, touch-friendly or not. It's the control targets that should be adjusted just that little bit bigger. The difference in size between a past mouse-only target and touch-friendly is a lot smaller than people think, people are fairly comfortable at touching some very small targets (have you seen how dense most smartphone apps are today?). Even there too, Microsoft found out and admitted that user comfort for touch-friendly allows for far more density of touch targets than they at first recommended in Windows 8. (There's some interesting debate if those changes in UX Research Study results over the lifetime of Windows 8 and early Windows 10 testing were due to increased user familiarity with touch surfaces over those intervening years or some interesting unanticipated bias in the earlier studies.) The density of the UI should be a factor of the user's ability to focus on said UI more than a "touch-friendly" concern. Even after Microsoft greatly adjusted their design guidelines on density in Windows 10 they keep a lot of their own apps UI at low density not because they "have to" for touch-friendly, but for various concerns like user friendliness, good typography, and analysis paralysis when the user is confronted with too many choices at once.

zapzupnz 6y ago

Fortunately, macOS isn't being made to look like a big iPhone. Nothing in macOS is optimised for touch — all touch targets remain roughly the same size as they've always been with some things being a little bigger, but only for improving visual clarity, not for being easier to touch. Nothing about macOS is being made touch-friendly. Nothing about macOS is being made into an iPhone. If anything, this release makes it easier for iPad apps to become non-touch-friendly by making it easier to bring iPad apps to Catalyst without having to do complete restylings to match other macOS apps. That's the benefit of consistent design language. iPad apps become better macOS apps, not the other way around. The Mac is still a Mac. Desktops are desktops. Laptops are laptops. Separately, in iPad land, tablets are tablets. Nothing about the new design language changes that.