12 ms·

A visual comparison of macOS Catalina and Big Sur

104 points by Kaibeezy 6y ago

Kaibeezy 6y ago
The general reaction I'm hearing about the UI changes is "barf". I'm not a Mac user though. Is it that bad?
- emeraldd 6y ago
  It's very jarring to say the least. My first impression playing with Big Sur under parallels was that everything on screen seemed to take up too much space. The corner radius change in particular is enough to really bug me. Though I did get used to it pretty quickly. I'm going to wait a while before upgrading a machine I regularly use.
- tpush 6y ago
  I (a Mac user) really like it, for what it’s worth.
  - globuous 6y ago
    Me too, can't wait to upgrade in a few months once it's stabilized !
  - matwood 6y ago
    Same. I like that it feels familiar when moving between my iPhone, iPad and macOS. It has some quirks, like all the UIs before it, but there isn't anything I'm going to rage over. Change is always hard though. Some people will like it and some will hate it.
- xrisk 6y ago
  Lots of wasted space everywhere, for no good reason. And degraded usability in so many places. Look at the Mail app for example, you could previously view “inboxes” at the top of the app (useful because you could then resize the app to take up far lesser horizontal space); and now you can’t – just because, … no reason really?
  - xrisk 6y ago
    TLDR: please don’t try to merge mobile and computer UIs, it makes for the worst of both worlds.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      GNOME 3 has done a fine job of tweaking their UI for touch usability, and more recently for small screens - it's already quite usable on tablet hardware.
  - sbuk 6y ago
    The minute I see "wasted space", I shudder. White space or negative space is important for usability. Not sure what your example is describing.
    - xrisk 6y ago
      > White space or negative space is important for usability Sure, I don’t deny it. However, just adding a ton of space doesn’t make a design good. Especially when you actively harm functionality while doing that. From my limited experience doing design, I’ve realized that good contrast and active visual demarcations go a long way towards that goal (both things which the new UI is sorely missing). See the old Mail UI: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/mac_apps/Mail/macos-catalina-mail-inbox-multi-account.jpg https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... Notice the breadcrumbs that you could use to conveniently use as favorite inboxes. Those are gone now, which means that you have to keep the left sidebar always exposed (thus taking up significantly more horizontal space). This was what I think is really good design, thoughtful and non-intrusive. Not everyone is working on large screens. Adding a ton of padding to all UI elements doesn’t improve usability in the slightest, regardless of what you might say.
      - sbuk 6y ago
        Ah, the favourites bar... View > Show Favourites Bar
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I think it's too early to say. I want to live with it for a few weeks/months then make up my mind.
- whynotminot 6y ago
  Just updated this morning. First impression is very positive. I like it! Feels very airy and fresh. Now, my opinion might change come Monday morning when I actually do some real work. But at first blush I'm enjoying the new feel.
  - tzs 6y ago
    Does many third party programs seem faster than before to you? Firefox seems noticeably faster to me. By "noticeably" I mean that when I started doing normal browsing after upgrading, not looking for or expecting any performance improvement, I found myself thinking "how did clicking that link display the new page so fast?". Excel also seems a little snappier. I've got a spreadsheet that has a few worksheets, and one in particular seemed slow to switch to. It's responding quite a bit faster now.
- apetrovic 6y ago
  No, it's not. But a) for some reason, most vocal people are the one doesn't like any change at all (how many times we see posts and coments glorifying Windows 2000 ui as a pinnacle of UI design?) and b) this site become a copy of slashdot from the start of the century, just with reversed roles of Apple and Micro$$oft - it's just fashionable to dump at anything Apple related. Not that Big Sur doesn't have it design problems (at least from the screenshots from the first beta onward, I didn't tried it yet). And to be honest, even without Jony Ive, my impression is that designers still more care how the product will look on screenshots than in real use. But it's hardly just an unusable piece of shit that majority of comments here implies.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    People have advanced. Now Windows XP is the new pinnacle of design.
  - tmotwu 6y ago
    That's untrue..? Windows 10 gets the most flack out of any operating system for its UI direction. Truth is, design will always be a personal choice - some lean towards pragmatism over aesthetic and others lean the other way. Some people will like it, some people won't. People are noticing Apple is choosing to go down Microsoft's and Google's direction in UI design with flat, big wasted lettering space, and contrasty icons. It's fair to complain about that as Windows users have for years.
  - Xenoamorphous 6y ago
    Anyone who has rolled out a new version of an application or even a completely new app replacing an old one knows that in general people are reluctant to change. And the more reluctant they are, the more vocal they are about it.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    I liked Win 7 the most although XP wasn't bad, but I hate flat design with a lot of white space. I am using a computer, not a phone so I can click on small icons with a mouse. I assumed Big Sur was designed that way because Apple would finally merge iPads with Airs and get MacOs with a touch screen, which would have made the tradeof make sense. Alas, not so.
- bengale 6y ago
  Nah I work with a lot of Mac users and I’ve not heard any complaints yet. This is just the internet effect I think, people like to complain about things.
- kgin 6y ago
  This is always true, every time, 100%. The UIs that people here are wishing hadn't changed were absolutely hated when they were announced. In a few months we'll be able to have a more measured discussion about the good and the bad, but this reaction now is par for the course. Every UI change I've ever gone through has sounded exactly like this on internet forums when it happened.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qz2 6y ago
Whoever stole all the title bars on operating systems recently needs to be shot for crimes against humanity. There’s nothing to get hold of any more.
- charrondev 6y ago
  Very happy to have them gone myself. Somehow I don’t have any difficulty grabbing a part of the app and moving it.
  - qz2 6y ago
    Most of the time yes. But each time you have to reason about where you can grab a piece of it because there is now no one place to do so. Note I’m a Gnome user mostly now which is a fine example of how stupid this is.
    - charrondev 6y ago
      Are there any apps that you are aware of that don’t let you grab the area next to “stoplights”. That seems to be the “one place to grab it” all the time.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      GNOME is easy because you can always grab on the window title area in the headerbar, which is reasonably intuitive. Yes, most headerbars include extra widgets but there's always a clear visual separation between those and the actual title.
- tokamak-teapot 6y ago
  I recently started using this to make it possible to move windows without having to reach for the title bar: https://deniz.co/penc/ https://deniz.co/penc/ And there's also this: https://hookshot.app/ https://hookshot.app/
- seanalltogether 6y ago
  It seems to be based around the fallacy that since they aren't needed in a mobile app, then surely they must not be needed in a desktop app.
olivierestsage 6y ago
> The biggest news in Notes is that after years, the Skeuomorphic paper texture has finally been retired! When reading things like this, I am always left wondering what was wrong with Skeumorphism in the first place. Is it as cynical as it seems, which that an arbitrary element of the UI was designated for elimination so that triumphant but meaningless changes could be introduced into wave after wave of new products? (I am aware that I am likely the one who is out of touch, not Apple.)
- qz2 6y ago
  It was inconsistently awful mostly. Now we have replaced it with consistently awful. So the net gain is zero. I miss the bit between the two fads. Really people need to just stop fucking around with user interfaces and breaking our workflows. The finest example recently being alt+tab broken in Windows 10 20H2
  - Kaibeezy 6y ago
    "stop ... breaking our workflows" Thank you from the sales side for a utility with a "retro" UI.
  - polytely 6y ago
    At least in the skeuo era you could tell where the buttons were.
- lou1306 6y ago
  Well, Apple made some horrible, horrible skeuomorphic UIs back in the day (See [0] for a very ancient example; or any stitched-leather UI from an iPhone before iOS 7). Having said that, I could really use a little bit of skeuo these days. Buttons that look like buttons, sliders that resemble sliders, and the like. [0]: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.html http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.html
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    I don’t understand the seemingly-universal hate for the stitched leather. It at least shows some personality and effort compared to just empty whitespace everywhere.
syx 6y ago
I've been a Mac user for 10 years and ever since Yosemite was released it looks like there was a downfall in both icon and UI design. Now with Big Sur a deal breaker for me has been the redesign of the menu bar. There's so much wasted space, menu bar is too much transparent with less contrast and the widgets are completely useless. The whole thing looks like a bad attempt at standardizing macos with the rest of the ipad/iphone echo system.
- makecheck 6y ago
  I would just prefer a screen-size-dependent menu bar. It would be actually nice to have large menus on huge screens but they should waste little space on a small laptop. Oddly they “sort of” had this in very early scaling experiments, back in the days before Retina where Quartz Debug could scale to many sizes (1.5x, etc.). When those modes were enabled, the menu bar and menus had nicely scaled-up sizes and fonts. Not sure why they never enabled that.
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  I agree and with the other privacy issues, I'll be staying on Mojave forever and moving to another OS. Back to Linux and WindowMaker I guess! It's like a snow blindness UI or staring at a white screen or seasonal affectedness disorder light all day.
a012 6y ago
My thought be like the next OS or the version after it would be much more like iPad UI.
xrisk 6y ago
A Spotlight change that really irks me: I have to tap Enter before I can look at the results preview. Why would you actively degrade usability?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  That absolutely broke the use case of Spotlight as a quick, always-on calculator or unit converter. Absolutely infuriating.
  - jen20 6y ago
    This rung _so_ untrue that I just went and tested it on three different macs running various combinations of Big Sur beta and shipped, since I use Alfred and disable Spotlight's UI. And predictably, it's simply not true. If you open the spotlight window and type "5+5", 10 appears immediately as the first result line. If you type "85lbs in kg" the first line immediately reveals it to be 38.56kg. In fact, I didn't even need to type the "in kg", since it did that by default. So what precise regression are you talking about here?
    - xrisk 6y ago
      It doesn’t show up on the right pane in a split (as it used to pre-Big Sur) This difference is more noticeable when I’m looking up a word in the dictionary, looking up a contact etc, or searching for an email/file. Why do I have to press another key?!
      - jen20 6y ago
        This part is understandable - I was replying directly to the use case of being broken as a calculator or unit converter.
  - FabHK 6y ago
    Pet peeve about using spotlight as a currency converter btw: It can do popular currencies ("100 EUR in USD", CAD, JPY, GBP) and some minor ones (HKD, THB, SEK, NOK, HRK), but try lesser known ones (GEL, COP, PHP, KES), and it doesn't work. Wonder where that list resides, and whether one could extend it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
everdrive 6y ago
I really wish UIs were frozen, unless a particular feature required their modification. Having to learn slightly different UI placements and behaviors is a total waste of memory.
- gregoriol 6y ago
  It's not very nice to be forced to learn new things, but by looking to the past afterwards you often feel the improvements
  - danieldk 6y ago
    Do you? I think it often feels old, because we associate it with a certain time period. But is what we currently have for desktops so much better than e.g. Windows 2000? At least it was easy to recognize interactive UI elements and there was not so much wasted space. (I don’t think Big Sur is a regression compared to Catalina though.)
  - everdrive 6y ago
    A number of things are steps back. Scrollbars used to be easier to click, and would always tell you when you were somewhat far down a document. Now they disappear when you're not using them. Since we have SO MUCH more screen real estate these days, I don't even buy it as a practical measure. I believe this style is meant to reduce visual clutter from an aesthetic point of view, but not actually to improve the usage of the computer.
    - 72deluxe 6y ago
      Agreed, it forces you to flail around the UI to make elements appear before you can use them. Combined with my MacBook's TouchBar that goes to sleep if you're thinking and not using the keyboard constantly whilst debugging, it drives me insane as you have to press a key to wake it up for no purpose, look down, find F6 or whatever for continue/step over because there's no physical keys and it's like pressing a ruler, and then flail around to get the scrollbars to appear. It's such a regression in usability. Imagine if they did this in cars - simply wave your arms around for the steering wheel to appear when you need it!
ubercow13 6y ago
Something about the spacing and colours kind of reminds me of KDE Plasma. For example the first comparison of the about box [1]. The use of white for the titlebar looks jarring against a grey window background, almost like it's a mistake. The different shades make it still look layered in the Z direction but I can't decide whether the titlebar is in front or behind the window contents and it's kind of uncomfortable? And the text in the buttons isn't centered correctly. This one is even worse [2], the padding towards the left of the window is generally twice that of elements towards the right of the window, and what is up with that 'save' button.. Overall it looks like they stole the excessive titlebar size of GNOME 3 and the bad spacing/padding/alignments of plasma. [1] https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/general/about-macos-macos-catalina-big-sur-comparison.png https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/gen... [2] https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/finder/4-finder-search-macos-catalina-big-sur-comparison.png https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/fin...
- kace91 6y ago
  It looks extremely linux-y to me, and not in a good way. The system preferences menu is a good example...the icons are each doing its own thing, and they even seem to be from different eras. Some of them are the usual apple style, some others look like they're from windows vista or just have an unidentifiable style. I feel like I'm using linux with one of those wannabe OSX themes, rather than the original macos.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  I think there actually is a logic to the padding: on the left side, the left padding equals the top padding. On the right side, the right padding equals the top padding. The top padding differs between the two sides, hence the difference.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    I guess there is a certain logic, but I still think it looks unbalanced. And look at the spacing/padding of each button in the white header. Two buttons with lots of padding, an ugly truncated title (despite removing the separate titlebar, the header is overall taller than the previous one and there is now no room for the title because the space it used has been traded for whitespace), the four evenly spaced buttons, then one button with irregular spacing that doesn't match any of the others, and then another button that is too close to the search box and looks like it's vertically aligned slighly lower compared to the others. Just looks like a mess to me.
st1x7 6y ago
I'm not a designer so I might be missing some of the terminology here but I really dislike the move towards "buttons that don't look like buttons". Have a look at the old and new Notes app for example. In the old one it's very clear just visually where on the screen you can click to make an action like creating a new note or changing the font. In the new design all those actions just float in the top ribbon without any separation from the background or from each other. Seems worse to me.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Good point. In non-flat widget themes. the distinction between an "active" widget you can interact with and a background element is given precisely by the 3D look of active widgets. This is a simple and intuitive approach, whereas "flat" themes offer no real alternative.
  - paleogizmo 6y ago
    I keep hearing this point brought up, but I haven't seen a good case for flat widget elements being confusing. In this very form I'm typing in, all the clickable elements (hyperlinks and submit button) are flat, but different styles immediately distinguish them from non-clickable elements, even if these styles vary between web pages and browsers. It's never been the case that GUIs consistently used 3D appearances to denote clickable widgets. 3D elements add a lot of visual clutter for complicated interfaces, which is why those "flat UI sucks" posts only show <10 GUI elements side-by-side. Google "Word 95" and "Word 98," both have a flat menu bar, though Word 98 has the addition of flat toolbars which helps readability.
    - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
      When it’s common enough that a menu bar and toolbar are part of applications, the user knows that the elements within are clickable. When you have clickable elements in places where they might not be expected to be clickable, that’s when it gets confusing.
- hugi 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
butz 6y ago
It is just like latest Adwaita theme update, but in reverse.
moepstar 6y ago
What really irks me so far is the redesigned Mail.app. Why is Spam now a separate Folder for each account? It certainly is not for the Inbox, those are still unified. Also, what is it with centering all the icons? I can modify and rearrange all the icons but the left-most "filter" icon insists on staying there? Why? :(
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  Click the “+” symbol next to favourites and you can add back the unified Spam & Bin folders. But I agree with your sentiment what a weird regression to make. Just annoy your users for what purpose?
  - moepstar 6y ago
    Ok, wow - that'd be the last place i'd have looked at (not that i noticed you'd get a + sign once you hover over the top-most entry). Thank you! Now, if only i could get rid of that darn filter icon...
tobr 6y ago
It’s kind of incredible that the Stickies app is still there, unchanged, with the same miniature Mac OS classic windows. And it still showcases the ability to “include graphics” with a pixelated icon of what could very well be a Macintosh 128K, complete with the colored Apple logo and a floppy drive.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I think the Stickies app is intentionally left unchanged as a nod to the classic era of Mac OS. Similar to how the Dashboard (now gone) came with a sliding puzzle widget.
  - tobr 6y ago
    I think that would be a generous way to put it, since it’s been around virtually unchanged since the classic days. The OS X version was ported over before OS X got the Aqua design overhaul, so it looked right at home in the beginning with the Platinum-style windows. You can even see the exact same icon being used to tout the graphics support in screenshots from DP2: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2 Edit: I think the comment I replied to was edited? My response doesn’t quite make sense anymore.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      (I think I did some writing fixup on my comment after posting, sorry about that! I certainly didn’t mean to snub you and I think your comment slots in fine!)
    - 72deluxe 6y ago
      Those screenshots look infinitely more usable than the modern UIs, I have to say. And window shading will always be missed!
- perardi 6y ago
  It’s a little weird, isn’t it? They would have gone to the effort to compile it for 64-bit, at the very least. (I’ve not dug around in the app bundle, maybe it’s just the simplest possible Cocoa app, and it’s a trivial “just click the architecture button” compile thing.) My pet theory: someone high up at Apple still uses this. I actually do know someone at work who still uses this.
haunter 6y ago
https://i.imgur.com/2x1rocW.png https://i.imgur.com/2x1rocW.png In the next version the whole Notes app will be just one single white blank space. Icons will only show up if you hover over them. Hire me Apple!
lux 6y ago
One thing that strikes me from seeing all the discussion around the new macOS UI changes is that Windows 10 still falls back to far older UIs as soon as you get a few levels deep. I switch between them frequently for work and don't mind using either OS, but it blows me away how much more surface-level the Windows UI changes have been and how low the expectations are on Microsoft compared to Apple.
flohofwoe 6y ago
One somewhat baffling design decision which isn't apparent in the screenshots is that some confirmation dialog boxes have the buttons stacked vertically (I'm seeing this in Xcode for instance). This makes a lot of sense on mobile phones (where the display is usually in portrait orientation and vertically stacked buttons are easier to reach with the thumb), but it doesn't make much sense on a big landscape display. Some dialog boxes use a horizontal button arrangement though, so I guess the vertical arrangement is not hardwired (the "randomness" is puzzling though). Other then that the new design has surprisingly quickly grown on me, even though I'm a bit of a "flat UI luddite".
1ark 6y ago
Everyday I find more things to do inside Emacs and stay there. macOS seems to be catching up on the difficult learning curve because you have to learn the hard way what you can or cannot click on. At least in Emacs its consistent because I know I shouldn't mouse around.
crazygringo 6y ago
Having used Big Sur for ~12 hours now, most of the changes feel fine. BUT the one really irking me is the huge horizontal space in the menu bar now. It's not so bad with the text menus, but all my installed utilities on the right side are "double-spaced". In fact, several of them have disappeared because they don't fit anymore (until I switch to an app with fewer text menus). What the hell, Apple? At a minimum you could reduce the spacing if things don't fit, rather than just hiding them.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  You may want to look at Bartender[1]. You most likely don’t actually use some or even many of those menu icons very often. You can hide the ones that are just clutter in a secondary menu/bar. I originally got it to keep the icons I do care about visible on a laptop screen, but I still use it even on my huge 4K@1x screen to hide distractions. [1]: https://www.macbartender.com/ https://www.macbartender.com/
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Thanks, I've experimented with that in the past. In my case I actually do use all the icons. ;) I do a lot of audiovisual work so they're utilities for setting color temperature, webcam settings, CPU usage, and the like, along with my VPN and file sync. The new Control Center at least makes it possible to free up the space previously used by the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth icons though.
  - sbuk 6y ago
    I've not tried it with Big Sur yet, but Hidden[1] is a really nice free and open source alternative. [1]: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
spurgu 6y ago
My first thought when I see each of these "improvements" is: Why? This along with everything else going on recently I will most likely be switching back to Linux when 2015 MBP's aren't available anymore.
- g42gregory 6y ago
  I am considering switching to Linux, but I really think that MacOS websites rendering in the browser (any browser) is far superior to that of Ubuntu. Does anybody know why MacOS renders websites better than Ubuntu? Is there any way to fix it?
kevincox 6y ago
Honestly I think it looks good over all. One complaint is really that on the light theme the top toolbar of a lot of windows (Like finder) seems to have low contrast and distinction between the buttons. Luckily I used the dark theme anyways and while there weren't many screenshots it looked fine.
sesuximo 6y ago
Sad to see the pretty nature go away
drevil-v2 6y ago
So much f*ing empty padding/whitespace. Safari’s minimalist UI was tight and perfect. Took up minimum space and let you get on with it. Absolutely no one said what would be great is if we could have Padding += 20 and nothing else changed. Job done boys. Commit to master and let’s hit the pub.
- tgv 6y ago
  Well, they did speed it up, or so they claim. OTOH, the Finder windows look tidier, at least in the article's screen shots.
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    ...until you add in the path bar, multiple tabs, etc. It only looks minimal with the minimum amount of UI features enabled. IMHO it looked way more cluttered than the current version with anything besides the basic, minimal set of things happening.
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    what metics did they speed up? Page paint time (and even load time) will be lower when more of the window is consumed by browser chrome, leaving less for the page itself.
TravelPiglet 6y ago
Feels like the second phase of moving away from the metal grey UIs. I like the split of the title bar with a left navigation column. The title bar is a bit too big and hopefully the vertical padding is reduced a bit in the next release.
neverartful 6y ago
I had been debating whether to replace my 2013 MB Pro with another Mac or go with a ThinkPad. After seeing the UI comparison of Catalina and Big Sur, the decision is easy. My next laptop will be a ThinkPad. I switched to Mac around 2001 when OS X was first released. I made the switch so that I could run OS X. I have witnessed a continual decline in it. I stopped my OS upgrades with Mojave because I didn't want to lose the ability to run Adobe PhotoShop CS4 and Microsoft Office 2011 (both 32-bit). I can't stand washed-out (overly white) UIs. Add a bunch of unused real-estate and it's especially maddening. Throw in cartoonish icons and coloring and I'm out of here. The dumbing down of the OS has crossed my level of tolerance. If it were possible to run alternate OSs on M1, I'd seriously consider it. I'm done with OSX/macOS.
perardi 6y ago
I am becoming at curmudgeon at my advanced age of 37, and I feel like macOS, for keyboard-and-mouse usage, hasn’t really improved since Mac OS 10.6. Now, it sure has on a laptop; the touch gestures are nice for switching between desktops, for example. But for a desktop, or laptop acting as a desktop? Meh.
dr_win 6y ago
Under BigSur > System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency Thank me later.
dancemethis 6y ago
Hopefully their next version comes quick, imagine using "sur" instead of "sul".
harrygeez 6y ago
They had near perfect desktop UI, and they just had to butcher it. Last thing I want is for my desktop computer to look like a touchscreen interface
egypturnash 6y ago
I’m less convinced that the Notification Center is easier to use though. Now it has no background, there is less to separate a list of notifications from my messy desktop! Looking at the photos, holy shit, the new Notification Center aesthetic is basically... Dashboard widgets. Which I find hilarious given that one of the reasons I haven’t left Mojave for Catalina is that Catalina finally killed off the Dashboard. I expect that in two or three years, the Notification Center will be able to fill the whole screen instead of being an awkward phone-width column at the side, and it will be hailed as new and innovative. Or at least I hope so because that is about when I expect to finally leave Mojave because I’m buying a new computer.
stinos 6y ago
Looks like some icons objectively became harder to recognize: there used to be icons with a special shape which makes them stand out, the new ones are all square using color as filler. The brain's visual system uses both color and shape for decoding, now part of that is gone. They do look more uniform though, but I'm not sure if that is better. After all if you present a collection of buttons the end result should be the user finds the one needed as quickly as possible.
mmis1000 6y ago
The most worst thing I noticed is. Who on the earth think it is a good idea to make enabled and disabled button on menubar both gray but in different lightness? I did not noticed that two of the button on the menu bar in icloud example was disabled until I saw the other image. Do that ever pass the a11y test?

104 points by Kaibeezy 6y ago

Kaibeezy 6y ago

The general reaction I'm hearing about the UI changes is "barf". I'm not a Mac user though. Is it that bad?

emeraldd 6y ago
It's very jarring to say the least. My first impression playing with Big Sur under parallels was that everything on screen seemed to take up too much space. The corner radius change in particular is enough to really bug me. Though I did get used to it pretty quickly. I'm going to wait a while before upgrading a machine I regularly use.
tpush 6y ago
I (a Mac user) really like it, for what it’s worth.
- globuous 6y ago
  Me too, can't wait to upgrade in a few months once it's stabilized !
- matwood 6y ago
  Same. I like that it feels familiar when moving between my iPhone, iPad and macOS. It has some quirks, like all the UIs before it, but there isn't anything I'm going to rage over. Change is always hard though. Some people will like it and some will hate it.
xrisk 6y ago
Lots of wasted space everywhere, for no good reason. And degraded usability in so many places. Look at the Mail app for example, you could previously view “inboxes” at the top of the app (useful because you could then resize the app to take up far lesser horizontal space); and now you can’t – just because, … no reason really?
- xrisk 6y ago
  TLDR: please don’t try to merge mobile and computer UIs, it makes for the worst of both worlds.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    GNOME 3 has done a fine job of tweaking their UI for touch usability, and more recently for small screens - it's already quite usable on tablet hardware.
- sbuk 6y ago
  The minute I see "wasted space", I shudder. White space or negative space is important for usability. Not sure what your example is describing.
  - xrisk 6y ago
    > White space or negative space is important for usability Sure, I don’t deny it. However, just adding a ton of space doesn’t make a design good. Especially when you actively harm functionality while doing that. From my limited experience doing design, I’ve realized that good contrast and active visual demarcations go a long way towards that goal (both things which the new UI is sorely missing). See the old Mail UI: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/mac_apps/Mail/macos-catalina-mail-inbox-multi-account.jpg https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... Notice the breadcrumbs that you could use to conveniently use as favorite inboxes. Those are gone now, which means that you have to keep the left sidebar always exposed (thus taking up significantly more horizontal space). This was what I think is really good design, thoughtful and non-intrusive. Not everyone is working on large screens. Adding a ton of padding to all UI elements doesn’t improve usability in the slightest, regardless of what you might say.
    - sbuk 6y ago
      Ah, the favourites bar... View > Show Favourites Bar
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I think it's too early to say. I want to live with it for a few weeks/months then make up my mind.
whynotminot 6y ago
Just updated this morning. First impression is very positive. I like it! Feels very airy and fresh. Now, my opinion might change come Monday morning when I actually do some real work. But at first blush I'm enjoying the new feel.
- tzs 6y ago
  Does many third party programs seem faster than before to you? Firefox seems noticeably faster to me. By "noticeably" I mean that when I started doing normal browsing after upgrading, not looking for or expecting any performance improvement, I found myself thinking "how did clicking that link display the new page so fast?". Excel also seems a little snappier. I've got a spreadsheet that has a few worksheets, and one in particular seemed slow to switch to. It's responding quite a bit faster now.
apetrovic 6y ago
No, it's not. But a) for some reason, most vocal people are the one doesn't like any change at all (how many times we see posts and coments glorifying Windows 2000 ui as a pinnacle of UI design?) and b) this site become a copy of slashdot from the start of the century, just with reversed roles of Apple and Micro$$oft - it's just fashionable to dump at anything Apple related. Not that Big Sur doesn't have it design problems (at least from the screenshots from the first beta onward, I didn't tried it yet). And to be honest, even without Jony Ive, my impression is that designers still more care how the product will look on screenshots than in real use. But it's hardly just an unusable piece of shit that majority of comments here implies.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  People have advanced. Now Windows XP is the new pinnacle of design.
- tmotwu 6y ago
  That's untrue..? Windows 10 gets the most flack out of any operating system for its UI direction. Truth is, design will always be a personal choice - some lean towards pragmatism over aesthetic and others lean the other way. Some people will like it, some people won't. People are noticing Apple is choosing to go down Microsoft's and Google's direction in UI design with flat, big wasted lettering space, and contrasty icons. It's fair to complain about that as Windows users have for years.
- Xenoamorphous 6y ago
  Anyone who has rolled out a new version of an application or even a completely new app replacing an old one knows that in general people are reluctant to change. And the more reluctant they are, the more vocal they are about it.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I liked Win 7 the most although XP wasn't bad, but I hate flat design with a lot of white space. I am using a computer, not a phone so I can click on small icons with a mouse. I assumed Big Sur was designed that way because Apple would finally merge iPads with Airs and get MacOs with a touch screen, which would have made the tradeof make sense. Alas, not so.
bengale 6y ago
Nah I work with a lot of Mac users and I’ve not heard any complaints yet. This is just the internet effect I think, people like to complain about things.
kgin 6y ago
This is always true, every time, 100%. The UIs that people here are wishing hadn't changed were absolutely hated when they were announced. In a few months we'll be able to have a more measured discussion about the good and the bad, but this reaction now is par for the course. Every UI change I've ever gone through has sounded exactly like this on internet forums when it happened.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

qz2 6y ago

Whoever stole all the title bars on operating systems recently needs to be shot for crimes against humanity. There’s nothing to get hold of any more.

charrondev 6y ago
Very happy to have them gone myself. Somehow I don’t have any difficulty grabbing a part of the app and moving it.
- qz2 6y ago
  Most of the time yes. But each time you have to reason about where you can grab a piece of it because there is now no one place to do so. Note I’m a Gnome user mostly now which is a fine example of how stupid this is.
  - charrondev 6y ago
    Are there any apps that you are aware of that don’t let you grab the area next to “stoplights”. That seems to be the “one place to grab it” all the time.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    GNOME is easy because you can always grab on the window title area in the headerbar, which is reasonably intuitive. Yes, most headerbars include extra widgets but there's always a clear visual separation between those and the actual title.
tokamak-teapot 6y ago
I recently started using this to make it possible to move windows without having to reach for the title bar: https://deniz.co/penc/ https://deniz.co/penc/ And there's also this: https://hookshot.app/ https://hookshot.app/
seanalltogether 6y ago
It seems to be based around the fallacy that since they aren't needed in a mobile app, then surely they must not be needed in a desktop app.

olivierestsage 6y ago

> The biggest news in Notes is that after years, the Skeuomorphic paper texture has finally been retired! When reading things like this, I am always left wondering what was wrong with Skeumorphism in the first place. Is it as cynical as it seems, which that an arbitrary element of the UI was designated for elimination so that triumphant but meaningless changes could be introduced into wave after wave of new products? (I am aware that I am likely the one who is out of touch, not Apple.)

qz2 6y ago
It was inconsistently awful mostly. Now we have replaced it with consistently awful. So the net gain is zero. I miss the bit between the two fads. Really people need to just stop fucking around with user interfaces and breaking our workflows. The finest example recently being alt+tab broken in Windows 10 20H2
- Kaibeezy 6y ago
  "stop ... breaking our workflows" Thank you from the sales side for a utility with a "retro" UI.
- polytely 6y ago
  At least in the skeuo era you could tell where the buttons were.
lou1306 6y ago
Well, Apple made some horrible, horrible skeuomorphic UIs back in the day (See [0] for a very ancient example; or any stitched-leather UI from an iPhone before iOS 7). Having said that, I could really use a little bit of skeuo these days. Buttons that look like buttons, sliders that resemble sliders, and the like. [0]: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.html http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.html
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I don’t understand the seemingly-universal hate for the stitched leather. It at least shows some personality and effort compared to just empty whitespace everywhere.

syx 6y ago

I've been a Mac user for 10 years and ever since Yosemite was released it looks like there was a downfall in both icon and UI design. Now with Big Sur a deal breaker for me has been the redesign of the menu bar. There's so much wasted space, menu bar is too much transparent with less contrast and the widgets are completely useless. The whole thing looks like a bad attempt at standardizing macos with the rest of the ipad/iphone echo system.

makecheck 6y ago
I would just prefer a screen-size-dependent menu bar. It would be actually nice to have large menus on huge screens but they should waste little space on a small laptop. Oddly they “sort of” had this in very early scaling experiments, back in the days before Retina where Quartz Debug could scale to many sizes (1.5x, etc.). When those modes were enabled, the menu bar and menus had nicely scaled-up sizes and fonts. Not sure why they never enabled that.
72deluxe 6y ago
I agree and with the other privacy issues, I'll be staying on Mojave forever and moving to another OS. Back to Linux and WindowMaker I guess! It's like a snow blindness UI or staring at a white screen or seasonal affectedness disorder light all day.

a012 6y ago

My thought be like the next OS or the version after it would be much more like iPad UI.

xrisk 6y ago

A Spotlight change that really irks me: I have to tap Enter before I can look at the results preview. Why would you actively degrade usability?

Nextgrid 6y ago
That absolutely broke the use case of Spotlight as a quick, always-on calculator or unit converter. Absolutely infuriating.
- jen20 6y ago
  This rung _so_ untrue that I just went and tested it on three different macs running various combinations of Big Sur beta and shipped, since I use Alfred and disable Spotlight's UI. And predictably, it's simply not true. If you open the spotlight window and type "5+5", 10 appears immediately as the first result line. If you type "85lbs in kg" the first line immediately reveals it to be 38.56kg. In fact, I didn't even need to type the "in kg", since it did that by default. So what precise regression are you talking about here?
  - xrisk 6y ago
    It doesn’t show up on the right pane in a split (as it used to pre-Big Sur) This difference is more noticeable when I’m looking up a word in the dictionary, looking up a contact etc, or searching for an email/file. Why do I have to press another key?!
    - jen20 6y ago
      This part is understandable - I was replying directly to the use case of being broken as a calculator or unit converter.
- FabHK 6y ago
  Pet peeve about using spotlight as a currency converter btw: It can do popular currencies ("100 EUR in USD", CAD, JPY, GBP) and some minor ones (HKD, THB, SEK, NOK, HRK), but try lesser known ones (GEL, COP, PHP, KES), and it doesn't work. Wonder where that list resides, and whether one could extend it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

everdrive 6y ago

I really wish UIs were frozen, unless a particular feature required their modification. Having to learn slightly different UI placements and behaviors is a total waste of memory.

gregoriol 6y ago
It's not very nice to be forced to learn new things, but by looking to the past afterwards you often feel the improvements
- danieldk 6y ago
  Do you? I think it often feels old, because we associate it with a certain time period. But is what we currently have for desktops so much better than e.g. Windows 2000? At least it was easy to recognize interactive UI elements and there was not so much wasted space. (I don’t think Big Sur is a regression compared to Catalina though.)
- everdrive 6y ago
  A number of things are steps back. Scrollbars used to be easier to click, and would always tell you when you were somewhat far down a document. Now they disappear when you're not using them. Since we have SO MUCH more screen real estate these days, I don't even buy it as a practical measure. I believe this style is meant to reduce visual clutter from an aesthetic point of view, but not actually to improve the usage of the computer.
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    Agreed, it forces you to flail around the UI to make elements appear before you can use them. Combined with my MacBook's TouchBar that goes to sleep if you're thinking and not using the keyboard constantly whilst debugging, it drives me insane as you have to press a key to wake it up for no purpose, look down, find F6 or whatever for continue/step over because there's no physical keys and it's like pressing a ruler, and then flail around to get the scrollbars to appear. It's such a regression in usability. Imagine if they did this in cars - simply wave your arms around for the steering wheel to appear when you need it!

ubercow13 6y ago

Something about the spacing and colours kind of reminds me of KDE Plasma. For example the first comparison of the about box [1]. The use of white for the titlebar looks jarring against a grey window background, almost like it's a mistake. The different shades make it still look layered in the Z direction but I can't decide whether the titlebar is in front or behind the window contents and it's kind of uncomfortable? And the text in the buttons isn't centered correctly. This one is even worse [2], the padding towards the left of the window is generally twice that of elements towards the right of the window, and what is up with that 'save' button.. Overall it looks like they stole the excessive titlebar size of GNOME 3 and the bad spacing/padding/alignments of plasma. [1] https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/general/about-macos-macos-catalina-big-sur-comparison.png https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/gen... [2] https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/finder/4-finder-search-macos-catalina-big-sur-comparison.png https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/assets/img/macos-new-ui/fin...

kace91 6y ago
It looks extremely linux-y to me, and not in a good way. The system preferences menu is a good example...the icons are each doing its own thing, and they even seem to be from different eras. Some of them are the usual apple style, some others look like they're from windows vista or just have an unidentifiable style. I feel like I'm using linux with one of those wannabe OSX themes, rather than the original macos.
bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
I think there actually is a logic to the padding: on the left side, the left padding equals the top padding. On the right side, the right padding equals the top padding. The top padding differs between the two sides, hence the difference.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  I guess there is a certain logic, but I still think it looks unbalanced. And look at the spacing/padding of each button in the white header. Two buttons with lots of padding, an ugly truncated title (despite removing the separate titlebar, the header is overall taller than the previous one and there is now no room for the title because the space it used has been traded for whitespace), the four evenly spaced buttons, then one button with irregular spacing that doesn't match any of the others, and then another button that is too close to the search box and looks like it's vertically aligned slighly lower compared to the others. Just looks like a mess to me.

st1x7 6y ago

I'm not a designer so I might be missing some of the terminology here but I really dislike the move towards "buttons that don't look like buttons". Have a look at the old and new Notes app for example. In the old one it's very clear just visually where on the screen you can click to make an action like creating a new note or changing the font. In the new design all those actions just float in the top ribbon without any separation from the background or from each other. Seems worse to me.

zozbot234 6y ago
Good point. In non-flat widget themes. the distinction between an "active" widget you can interact with and a background element is given precisely by the 3D look of active widgets. This is a simple and intuitive approach, whereas "flat" themes offer no real alternative.
- paleogizmo 6y ago
  I keep hearing this point brought up, but I haven't seen a good case for flat widget elements being confusing. In this very form I'm typing in, all the clickable elements (hyperlinks and submit button) are flat, but different styles immediately distinguish them from non-clickable elements, even if these styles vary between web pages and browsers. It's never been the case that GUIs consistently used 3D appearances to denote clickable widgets. 3D elements add a lot of visual clutter for complicated interfaces, which is why those "flat UI sucks" posts only show <10 GUI elements side-by-side. Google "Word 95" and "Word 98," both have a flat menu bar, though Word 98 has the addition of flat toolbars which helps readability.
  - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
    When it’s common enough that a menu bar and toolbar are part of applications, the user knows that the elements within are clickable. When you have clickable elements in places where they might not be expected to be clickable, that’s when it gets confusing.
hugi 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

butz 6y ago

It is just like latest Adwaita theme update, but in reverse.

moepstar 6y ago

What really irks me so far is the redesigned Mail.app. Why is Spam now a separate Folder for each account? It certainly is not for the Inbox, those are still unified. Also, what is it with centering all the icons? I can modify and rearrange all the icons but the left-most "filter" icon insists on staying there? Why? :(

drevil-v2 6y ago
Click the “+” symbol next to favourites and you can add back the unified Spam & Bin folders. But I agree with your sentiment what a weird regression to make. Just annoy your users for what purpose?
- moepstar 6y ago
  Ok, wow - that'd be the last place i'd have looked at (not that i noticed you'd get a + sign once you hover over the top-most entry). Thank you! Now, if only i could get rid of that darn filter icon...

tobr 6y ago

It’s kind of incredible that the Stickies app is still there, unchanged, with the same miniature Mac OS classic windows. And it still showcases the ability to “include graphics” with a pixelated icon of what could very well be a Macintosh 128K, complete with the colored Apple logo and a floppy drive.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I think the Stickies app is intentionally left unchanged as a nod to the classic era of Mac OS. Similar to how the Dashboard (now gone) came with a sliding puzzle widget.
- tobr 6y ago
  I think that would be a generous way to put it, since it’s been around virtually unchanged since the classic days. The OS X version was ported over before OS X got the Aqua design overhaul, so it looked right at home in the beginning with the Platinum-style windows. You can even see the exact same icon being used to tout the graphics support in screenshots from DP2: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2 Edit: I think the comment I replied to was edited? My response doesn’t quite make sense anymore.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    (I think I did some writing fixup on my comment after posting, sorry about that! I certainly didn’t mean to snub you and I think your comment slots in fine!)
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    Those screenshots look infinitely more usable than the modern UIs, I have to say. And window shading will always be missed!
perardi 6y ago
It’s a little weird, isn’t it? They would have gone to the effort to compile it for 64-bit, at the very least. (I’ve not dug around in the app bundle, maybe it’s just the simplest possible Cocoa app, and it’s a trivial “just click the architecture button” compile thing.) My pet theory: someone high up at Apple still uses this. I actually do know someone at work who still uses this.

haunter 6y ago

https://i.imgur.com/2x1rocW.png https://i.imgur.com/2x1rocW.png In the next version the whole Notes app will be just one single white blank space. Icons will only show up if you hover over them. Hire me Apple!

lux 6y ago

One thing that strikes me from seeing all the discussion around the new macOS UI changes is that Windows 10 still falls back to far older UIs as soon as you get a few levels deep. I switch between them frequently for work and don't mind using either OS, but it blows me away how much more surface-level the Windows UI changes have been and how low the expectations are on Microsoft compared to Apple.

flohofwoe 6y ago

One somewhat baffling design decision which isn't apparent in the screenshots is that some confirmation dialog boxes have the buttons stacked vertically (I'm seeing this in Xcode for instance). This makes a lot of sense on mobile phones (where the display is usually in portrait orientation and vertically stacked buttons are easier to reach with the thumb), but it doesn't make much sense on a big landscape display. Some dialog boxes use a horizontal button arrangement though, so I guess the vertical arrangement is not hardwired (the "randomness" is puzzling though). Other then that the new design has surprisingly quickly grown on me, even though I'm a bit of a "flat UI luddite".

1ark 6y ago

Everyday I find more things to do inside Emacs and stay there. macOS seems to be catching up on the difficult learning curve because you have to learn the hard way what you can or cannot click on. At least in Emacs its consistent because I know I shouldn't mouse around.

crazygringo 6y ago

Having used Big Sur for ~12 hours now, most of the changes feel fine. BUT the one really irking me is the huge horizontal space in the menu bar now. It's not so bad with the text menus, but all my installed utilities on the right side are "double-spaced". In fact, several of them have disappeared because they don't fit anymore (until I switch to an app with fewer text menus). What the hell, Apple? At a minimum you could reduce the spacing if things don't fit, rather than just hiding them.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
You may want to look at Bartender[1]. You most likely don’t actually use some or even many of those menu icons very often. You can hide the ones that are just clutter in a secondary menu/bar. I originally got it to keep the icons I do care about visible on a laptop screen, but I still use it even on my huge 4K@1x screen to hide distractions. [1]: https://www.macbartender.com/ https://www.macbartender.com/
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Thanks, I've experimented with that in the past. In my case I actually do use all the icons. ;) I do a lot of audiovisual work so they're utilities for setting color temperature, webcam settings, CPU usage, and the like, along with my VPN and file sync. The new Control Center at least makes it possible to free up the space previously used by the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth icons though.
- sbuk 6y ago
  I've not tried it with Big Sur yet, but Hidden[1] is a really nice free and open source alternative. [1]: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

spurgu 6y ago

My first thought when I see each of these "improvements" is: Why? This along with everything else going on recently I will most likely be switching back to Linux when 2015 MBP's aren't available anymore.

g42gregory 6y ago
I am considering switching to Linux, but I really think that MacOS websites rendering in the browser (any browser) is far superior to that of Ubuntu. Does anybody know why MacOS renders websites better than Ubuntu? Is there any way to fix it?

kevincox 6y ago

Honestly I think it looks good over all. One complaint is really that on the light theme the top toolbar of a lot of windows (Like finder) seems to have low contrast and distinction between the buttons. Luckily I used the dark theme anyways and while there weren't many screenshots it looked fine.

sesuximo 6y ago

Sad to see the pretty nature go away

drevil-v2 6y ago

So much f*ing empty padding/whitespace. Safari’s minimalist UI was tight and perfect. Took up minimum space and let you get on with it. Absolutely no one said what would be great is if we could have Padding += 20 and nothing else changed. Job done boys. Commit to master and let’s hit the pub.

tgv 6y ago
Well, they did speed it up, or so they claim. OTOH, the Finder windows look tidier, at least in the article's screen shots.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  ...until you add in the path bar, multiple tabs, etc. It only looks minimal with the minimum amount of UI features enabled. IMHO it looked way more cluttered than the current version with anything besides the basic, minimal set of things happening.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  what metics did they speed up? Page paint time (and even load time) will be lower when more of the window is consumed by browser chrome, leaving less for the page itself.

TravelPiglet 6y ago

Feels like the second phase of moving away from the metal grey UIs. I like the split of the title bar with a left navigation column. The title bar is a bit too big and hopefully the vertical padding is reduced a bit in the next release.

neverartful 6y ago

I had been debating whether to replace my 2013 MB Pro with another Mac or go with a ThinkPad. After seeing the UI comparison of Catalina and Big Sur, the decision is easy. My next laptop will be a ThinkPad. I switched to Mac around 2001 when OS X was first released. I made the switch so that I could run OS X. I have witnessed a continual decline in it. I stopped my OS upgrades with Mojave because I didn't want to lose the ability to run Adobe PhotoShop CS4 and Microsoft Office 2011 (both 32-bit). I can't stand washed-out (overly white) UIs. Add a bunch of unused real-estate and it's especially maddening. Throw in cartoonish icons and coloring and I'm out of here. The dumbing down of the OS has crossed my level of tolerance. If it were possible to run alternate OSs on M1, I'd seriously consider it. I'm done with OSX/macOS.

perardi 6y ago

I am becoming at curmudgeon at my advanced age of 37, and I feel like macOS, for keyboard-and-mouse usage, hasn’t really improved since Mac OS 10.6. Now, it sure has on a laptop; the touch gestures are nice for switching between desktops, for example. But for a desktop, or laptop acting as a desktop? Meh.

dr_win 6y ago

Under BigSur > System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency Thank me later.

dancemethis 6y ago

Hopefully their next version comes quick, imagine using "sur" instead of "sul".

harrygeez 6y ago

They had near perfect desktop UI, and they just had to butcher it. Last thing I want is for my desktop computer to look like a touchscreen interface

egypturnash 6y ago

I’m less convinced that the Notification Center is easier to use though. Now it has no background, there is less to separate a list of notifications from my messy desktop! Looking at the photos, holy shit, the new Notification Center aesthetic is basically... Dashboard widgets. Which I find hilarious given that one of the reasons I haven’t left Mojave for Catalina is that Catalina finally killed off the Dashboard. I expect that in two or three years, the Notification Center will be able to fill the whole screen instead of being an awkward phone-width column at the side, and it will be hailed as new and innovative. Or at least I hope so because that is about when I expect to finally leave Mojave because I’m buying a new computer.

stinos 6y ago

Looks like some icons objectively became harder to recognize: there used to be icons with a special shape which makes them stand out, the new ones are all square using color as filler. The brain's visual system uses both color and shape for decoding, now part of that is gone. They do look more uniform though, but I'm not sure if that is better. After all if you present a collection of buttons the end result should be the user finds the one needed as quickly as possible.

mmis1000 6y ago

The most worst thing I noticed is. Who on the earth think it is a good idea to make enabled and disabled button on menubar both gray but in different lightness? I did not noticed that two of the button on the menu bar in icloud example was disabled until I saw the other image. Do that ever pass the a11y test?