12 ms·

I agree, any change will be frowned upon. It just annoys me that I feel like they're drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Apple was the company that dropp

by dimmke 6y ago

I agree, any change will be frowned upon. It just annoys me that I feel like they're drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them. If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wouldn't be spending years tip toeing towards it like people seem to think. Instead, they've rolled back some really unpopular changes like the crappy keyboard in their laptop, they just shipped a new Mac Pro that is clearly designed for professionals. This chip transition will result in Apple's laptops having better battery life, specs and heating than any other laptops available on the market. It won't even be close. Additionally, they're actively trying to bring a huge swath of developers who currently only develop for their mobile devices into developing for the Mac. If they were trying to turn Macs into something for college students to watch Netflix on they wouldn't be doing any of this. It's insane to me that people can see a UI refresh as a sign of doom while ignoring that Apple has actually been investing in the platform quite a bit more than they were a few years ago.

rahkiin 6y ago
I am mostly upset about the low contrast. I hope that gets improved before release. And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.
- the_other 6y ago
  The contrast changes seem varied. For some features they've increased contrast: "windows" are now white with black-ish icons. You can't get a higher contrast ratio. Other features have received the translucency treatment, and seem to have lower contrast. I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.
  - rahkiin 6y ago
    The toolbar used to be grey and is now white like the content. And the contrast of text on the translucent items... But overall the style is very consistent. If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview
- codyb 6y ago
  This is a bit off topic but in regards to contrast, I’ve been using Apple’s Music program lately and I absolutely cannot tell the difference between shuffle/repeat on or off. It is the lowest amount of contrast I have ever seen on a toggled button. I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked. Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting. Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I don't think it's your machine, although I hadn't tested this until now because I almost never use shuffle. :) I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.
    - codyb 6y ago
      That may be a wonderful clue, thank you :-).
    - chongli 6y ago
      Thank you! I just changed my accent colour to green and now it’s easy to tell the difference.
    - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
      Where do you set accent colour?
      - _frog 6y ago
        It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  While not an excuse, the design looks like it has much more contrast than 10.10 - 10.15.
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
I don't see it as a sign of "doom," but rather more regression. It took YEARS for Apple to admit that their keyboards were shit, and they still haven't admitted that the emoji bar on their so-called "pro" computers is an embarrassing and failed gimmick. In fact, they've doubled down on it and now don't offer ANY proper laptop keyboard. But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? Come on. And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work. This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse. I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.
- doot 6y ago
  > Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes: > Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814) > Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years. The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
michaelmrose 6y ago
I still don't understand how anyone with hundreds of billions of dollars ships really crappy anything. Like do hundreds of people just pretend that a crappy keyboard isn't garbage or is it so siloed that most people never get an opportunity to register an opinion?
- bitL 6y ago
  "Hey dev, you don't like that new keyboard pushed by your director/VP? Here's your termination notice!" "We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback." -- Corporation 101
  - donw 6y ago
    This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory. Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate. Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm). And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world. But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle. It's not just management -- it's the company culture. On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc. On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc. I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.
vbezhenar 6y ago
I still don't have any USB-C devices or wireless headphones. May be in 10 years I'll change my opinion, but as for now, I still think that it was wrong to ditch USB-A and headphone jack.

by dimmke 6y ago

rahkiin 6y ago

I am mostly upset about the low contrast. I hope that gets improved before release. And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.

the_other 6y ago
The contrast changes seem varied. For some features they've increased contrast: "windows" are now white with black-ish icons. You can't get a higher contrast ratio. Other features have received the translucency treatment, and seem to have lower contrast. I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.
- rahkiin 6y ago
  The toolbar used to be grey and is now white like the content. And the contrast of text on the translucent items... But overall the style is very consistent. If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview
codyb 6y ago
This is a bit off topic but in regards to contrast, I’ve been using Apple’s Music program lately and I absolutely cannot tell the difference between shuffle/repeat on or off. It is the lowest amount of contrast I have ever seen on a toggled button. I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked. Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting. Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I don't think it's your machine, although I hadn't tested this until now because I almost never use shuffle. :) I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.
  - codyb 6y ago
    That may be a wonderful clue, thank you :-).
  - chongli 6y ago
    Thank you! I just changed my accent colour to green and now it’s easy to tell the difference.
  - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
    Where do you set accent colour?
    - _frog 6y ago
      It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
While not an excuse, the design looks like it has much more contrast than 10.10 - 10.15.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago

I don't see it as a sign of "doom," but rather more regression. It took YEARS for Apple to admit that their keyboards were shit, and they still haven't admitted that the emoji bar on their so-called "pro" computers is an embarrassing and failed gimmick. In fact, they've doubled down on it and now don't offer ANY proper laptop keyboard. But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? Come on. And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work. This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse. I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.

doot 6y ago
> Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes: > Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814) > Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years. The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.
- chrisweekly 6y ago

michaelmrose 6y ago

I still don't understand how anyone with hundreds of billions of dollars ships really crappy anything. Like do hundreds of people just pretend that a crappy keyboard isn't garbage or is it so siloed that most people never get an opportunity to register an opinion?

bitL 6y ago
"Hey dev, you don't like that new keyboard pushed by your director/VP? Here's your termination notice!" "We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback." -- Corporation 101
- donw 6y ago
  This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory. Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate. Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm). And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world. But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle. It's not just management -- it's the company culture. On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc. On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc. I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.

vbezhenar 6y ago

I still don't have any USB-C devices or wireless headphones. May be in 10 years I'll change my opinion, but as for now, I still think that it was wrong to ditch USB-A and headphone jack.