9 ms·

Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation

87 points by naetius 5y ago

OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
>But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It seems it's a trend to make everything require more clicks for 'cleanliness'. In the end, it just makes everything frustrating. You end up having to add search to make anything usable. Windows 10 and Android settings are both great examples of this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  "More clicks for cleanliness" nails it exactly. Namecheap's old UI was perfect, info dense, you could do everything. Now they try and hide everything useful from me in the name of looking like every other hipster inspired UI. It's not bad enough I've bothered moving off of them but I've stopped using Namecheap for new names simply because of how much I hate their new UI. All they had to do was literally nothing and I'd still be a happy customer.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  It's a reaction to the Word-like screen-filling toolboxes of the late 90's. And while the toolbox not taking your entire screen would be a real improvement, what we got was a smaller set of larger buttons with plenty of negative space to make them look nice, taking approximately the same area as before, but with added clicks and discoverability problems. Eventually the problem did go away because of larger monitors in a higher resolution. But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Oh, and count me as another previous Namecheap customer that isn't anymore mostly because of their interface. "Mostly" because I had one domain that needed DNSSEC when they didn't support it, and that's what started my migration, but what made me move everything was the interface.
  - eitland 5y ago
    > But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Some of us would like to get our toolbars back.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Well, that part was sarcastic... The new space wasting interfaces are worse in many ways, and better in none. The old ugly interfaces were perfectly good for simple software. We could use something better on the more complex kinds of software, but what he have today isn't.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Well said. The #1 rule I used to follow is I am on this control what can I do here and is it clear. The #2 rule is What is my next step from step #1 and is it easy to find where I currently am. Break either of those and the GUI will be confusing. Disappearing controls makes you think something is wrong. I would typically go with disabled and a clear indicator of the something else needing to be filled out. If that was not achievable a tooltip on the disabled control to tell the user what to do. The way to achieve it is to pretend you are on 2 hours of sleep and not very computer savvy. Now you can go too far and make the whole thing a busy mess and then it is unclear where to even begin. A good rule of thumb with that is left to right top to bottom, keep scrolling to a minimum. Most people get that. One I was using just yesterday was jumping around in the page and the 'finish' control was in the top left and scrolled off the page.
smoldesu 5y ago
It's pretty ironic to review Jobs' goals to "Make the next great personal computer operating system", since they precisely highlight some of the biggest issues with MacOS today. Apple is no longer shipping a "single OS", they're maintaining a series of progressive LTS releases that seems to be a middle-ground nobody can appreciate. MacOS's metaphorical "plumbing" is far from state-of-the-art, too: the networking APIs are continuing to be gimped, while the userspace continues to be overhauled in confusing, highly abstracted ways. Oh, and killer graphics? MacOS has the least-supported, most esoteric graphics interface available today. I've heard people say that it's easier to write graphics code for the Nintendo Switch, because at least that doesn't force you to use Metal. All for all, I wholeheartedly agree with what's being said here. After Mojave was released, I get the feeling that Apple started to panic, and began some unnecessary design regressions that really drove people like me away. They started gutting 32-bit apps and libraries, bloating one of the most space-efficient UIs on the market, and undoing a lot of the personalization options that I loved MacOS for. One day, I hope that Apple can put this all aside and make a genuinely great computer. They're holding a lot of the cards, but I still can't recommend the M1 to others yet, much less integrate it into my own professional workflow.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Apple is still killing it in the hardware space, but I think the writing was on the wall for Apple software when Forstall was forced out.
  - handrous 5y ago
    ... oh damn, that does match up to when I felt iOS abruptly lost its way and headed down the road to becoming a complicated, full, multitasking GUI OS, rather than a light & simple thing-becomer.
thom 5y ago
Ironically, the thing that first got me really into Linux (which I consider a functional and pragmatic system at its core) was having lots of window managers, some of which did frivolous things like having waves lapping on my desktop. I think there are worse things than operating systems looking pretty. Your computer might be a tool, mine’s the spaceship I spend most of my life inside.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Your computer might be a tool, mine’s the spaceship I spend most of my life inside. If that's the case, then OS developers should spend less time making it fit some designer's aesthetic of beauty and instead make it super mailable, so users can make it look pleasing to them instead. Not surprisingly, 90s OS did that better too.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    I'm reminded that Windows 3.1 had dark mode in the early 1990s, and not simply inverting colors. Theming was so easy compared to today that it's embarrassing.
    - mst 5y ago
      Heck, the main reason I originally figured out how to root my high school's 3.1 setup was so I could enable the "black leather jacket" theme.
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    But the designers really, really want that aesthetic: https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
    - cocoafleck 5y ago
      I felt a bit queasy reading that.
    - eitland 5y ago
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
At work I mostly use Linux and at home mostly a 2017 Macbook Air. I do have a Windows PC that I put together in ~2012. I recently used the PC again because there was some Windows only software I needed to use and it was shocking going from Mac to that. Windows gets a lot of shit, but it felt way more responsive than Mac. I think due to the lack of animations on everything. The author of the article is on to something with regards to Apple focusing on what demos well rather than what is good to use.
seumars 5y ago
> Now you have overpaid “““designers””” that need to show “““impact””” every year, so they have to reinvent the wheel over and over. This is such an ignorant and oversimplified argument. The only reason one could assume that it’s the designers at Apple who “need to show impact” instead of PR project management shenanigans is if you’ve never worked with design at a large scale. I’m pretty sure some random designer at Apple has already redesigned something like Mission Control (which has been pretty much unchanged in the last few OS iterations) but it just isn’t the right time to launch said upgrade so it just sits on the back burner for years.
- ajconway 5y ago
  As a software engineer, who hasn't felt like "I definitely know how to make everything better by rewriting the whole thing!"? UI/UX designers feel the same way. It's never the answer, but it's not the end of the world if someone does it; after some time and feedback the product becomes useable again.
hota_mazi 5y ago
Bit odd to see the author of this article seems to be so vested in all things Apple and he still spells macOS incorrectly. Anyway: > First, we’re going to have a single OS strategy at Apple. We’re not going to have a dual or a triple or a quadruple OS strategy like some others. We’re going to have one OS, and that’s very important to us. And twenty years later, Apple still doesn't have a single OS.
- etchalon 5y ago
  Jobs was specifically targeting Microsoft there. Back then, Microsoft had two distinct operating systems … Windows 2000 (based on the NT kernel) and Windows ME (based on Windows 9x and MS-DOS). Windows 2000 was the "professional" operating system and ME was the "home" version. PLUS there were multiple versions of each of those. There were actually rumors and concerns that, moving forward, Apple would do the same with the NeXT stuff. Because they did do the same with the NeXT stuff. For a year, Apple had Mac OS 9 (Classic) and Mac OS X Server (which was based on NeXTStep). Amazingly, saying, "We're just gonna ship one thing to everyone, and change the features depending on the distribution" was actually novel. That same basic strategy persists today, since macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS are all ostensibly the same operating system with different interfaces.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    >That same basic strategy persists today, since macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS are all ostensibly the same operating system with different interfaces. That seems a stretch, MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS seems like the Windows ME, Windows 2000 problem but 100 times worse. For instance my mother searches for a covid tracking/checkin app on the iPad app store because she only has an iPad and it isn't even there despite running fine on iOS, it's just the developer is expected to put in the extra work to specifically support iPads so they never bother. Maybe there is some secret option somewhere to show iPhone apps but she certainly can't find it, or even begin to understand why my Dads iPhone can have the app but not her iPad.
    - etchalon 5y ago
amelius 5y ago
It's like fashion. When is skeuomorphism coming back?
makecheck 5y ago
To be blunt, while the macOS 11 UI is not all bad, it contains very serious design mistakes, ruining things that everyone has no choice but to use (like notifications and alerts). Somehow Apple doesn’t get how terrible this trend is, and that it is damaging their entire brand. I can only assume the hierarchy at Apple is broken to the point where the people in charge are either unreachable, or unresponding to feedback, while having entirely too much control. And as far as dumbed-down tools, it really feels like literally no one inside Apple even uses their tools (or they have access to better stuff and don’t care). For instance, “Console” - once the simplest imaginable concept with an implementation that everyone would expect - is now a pointless mess. An app that should have obvious behavior and usability is now just confusing every time I open it, leaving me feeling defeated because I cannot even find what I need. They messed it up and moved on, like many other things.
- gknoy 5y ago
  > macOS ... contains very serious design mistakes Would you be willing to elaborate, or link to articles supporting this? I'm sure that they have them, but since I swap between windows and mac daily I might just not be noticing them.
  - makecheck 5y ago
    For notifications, here[1] is a pretty good overview of the problem. A collection of comments on reformatted alert messages: [2]. Comment on icons, translucency and other quirks: [3]. [1] https://tyler.io/240-invisible-pixels/ https://tyler.io/240-invisible-pixels/ [2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/03/big-surs-narrow-alerts/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/03/big-surs-narrow-alerts/ [3] https://medium.com/macoclock/why-apple-has-broken-some-basic-design-principles-in-the-new-macos-release-419cf74af099 https://medium.com/macoclock/why-apple-has-broken-some-basic... Not to mention posts on Reddit, Twitter, blogs, etc. about lots of these UI quirks.
    - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
      > Worse, though, Big Sur hides the (X) until you mouse over the literal bounds of the banner - not even the area where the hidden (X) will appear is initially valid. I so intensely hate this design trend of hiding UI elements until you move the mouse cursor into a “magic” area that makes them appear. I work a lot with tools and websites that do this and it’s simply maddening.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> "Is this really bad UI, or is it just you who are averse to change?" It doesn't matter! The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they are used by humans. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a constantly-changing interface is also a bad interface. When you change something—be it a GUI or an API—you need to take into account not just whether the change is better, but also whether it's worth the very high inherent cost of change. I don't think the modern tech industry does this anywhere near enough.
- loopz 5y ago
  This is exactly right. Producers get hyper-optimized on change, while users want either no change, or obvious improvements. Majority of incentives and goals of producers rarely align with every individual user. In this regard, I find Linux XWindows and WMs to strike a good balance. It allows me to choose Xfce, or even i3. It gets most of the bad bits about modern computing (notifications, desktop sounds, panels, popups, windows-fiddling, desktop icons, shortcuts, ads, whatever will they come up with next), to just go away and not torment me anymore.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  I'm very glad to see this line of reasoning being the top comment. A change in UI must generally be so good, as to completely overshadow the costs of change. Hence, most changes will NOT pass that high bar, and are thus bad changes. Unless some UI/UX feature you're considering received overwhelming support from your users (both regular and power-users), it's probably not worth doing and you should be directing your efforts anywhere else.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they are used by humans. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a constantly-changing interface is also a bad interface. The trouble with that epistemology is that it makes it impossible to discern (or at least pointless to discuss) any qualities of a user interface except how popular the interface is or how much humans enjoy using the interface. > When you change something—be it a GUI or an API—you need to take into account not just whether the change is better, but also whether it's worth the very high inherent cost of change. This sounds dangerously close to the awful epistemology that is the precautionary principle. Both are saying that if there is some proposal for which we don't have any good knowledge about its potential downsides, we ought to reject the proposal. Your variation seems to be that we should assign the proposal some baseline cost (and thus reject the proposal unless we have knowledge that the benefit exceeds the cost). I simply don't think there is any way of establishing that baseline cost.
peatmoss 5y ago
I feel like Apple has generally done a good job containing churn to the superficial parts of the OS. That said, I wish the Linux/BSD mindshare had chosen to invest its desktop efforts into creating a rock solid OpenStep implementation. Had GNUStep or something like it been able to marshal the resources that have been poured into multiple rewrites of Gnome & KDE, I think we’d have the basis for the low-churn system we wish Apple had provided us. Maybe if someone like this had come along 20 years ago things would be different https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
webmobdev 5y ago
My friend was trying to pitch anal sex to me, and one of the things he said was - "Well, the anus might adjust and accommodate to you inserting stuff in it, but it doesn't mean it likes things shoved into it." That's exactly how I feel about the crappy design changes that Windows and macOS have been increasingly forcing on us. We get used to it not because we like it, but often because there is no other way. As a long time Windows user migrant to macOS, I find this more true of macOS now (it really pisses me off that you still can't maximise a window consistently on macOS). Both get a lot of things right, but I feel Windows UI still has an edge (if you choose to ignore Windows 8). (For the Apple lovers - I say this confidently after I deliberately chose not to customize macOS to be like Windows And really embraced the whole "Apple way of doing things" to really experience if it is better. I can honestly say no, it isn't.) But just as the Americans stubbornly decided to drive on the right when the the rest of the world drove on the left, Windows and macOS too deliberately choose different UI paradigm and approach more for business reasons than functional ones. It's often irritating because sometimes it feels as if the changes in UI are just a way to try to differentiate the products without any improvement in usability - it took me nearly a year and half to get as comfortable with macOS as I was with Windows. But I still feel Windows UI is more productive, and less irritating, than macOS. (The only thing I like on the macOS desktop environment is the unified Menubar on top and Spotlight.)
- willyt 5y ago
  Option click plus window button in top left of window to maximise without going into full screen. Everywhere except Britain and Japan drives on the right.
  - Someone 5y ago
    We’re way of from the subject at hand, but driving at the left is not that rare. A couple of former British colonies drive at the left, too (e.g. Australia, India, and South Africa) plus a few countries such as Indonesia, Suriname and Thailand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic) I guess that’s 15% to 20% of the world’s population.
etchalon 5y ago
I do not understand what this author is talking about. Apple has always been focused on superficial interface changes. Every single release of OS X has had minor, sometimes major, revisions to the interface. Remember when Sheets were gonna be a thing? And Drawers? And Metal (the UI, not the GL)? Show me an OS release and I'll show you things Apple moved around. Go back further, and you'll see it's always been the case. System 7 was a massive change from System 6. Mac OS 8 was a HUGE departure from System 7. Mac OS 9 had substation changes from Mac OS 8. This whole "remember the good ole days when nothing changed?" schtick people pull to make bad points is insanely frustrating if you actually pay attention to things as they change.

87 points by naetius 5y ago

>But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It seems it's a trend to make everything require more clicks for 'cleanliness'. In the end, it just makes everything frustrating. You end up having to add search to make anything usable. Windows 10 and Android settings are both great examples of this.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blacktriangle 5y ago
"More clicks for cleanliness" nails it exactly. Namecheap's old UI was perfect, info dense, you could do everything. Now they try and hide everything useful from me in the name of looking like every other hipster inspired UI. It's not bad enough I've bothered moving off of them but I've stopped using Namecheap for new names simply because of how much I hate their new UI. All they had to do was literally nothing and I'd still be a happy customer.
marcosdumay 5y ago
It's a reaction to the Word-like screen-filling toolboxes of the late 90's. And while the toolbox not taking your entire screen would be a real improvement, what we got was a smaller set of larger buttons with plenty of negative space to make them look nice, taking approximately the same area as before, but with added clicks and discoverability problems. Eventually the problem did go away because of larger monitors in a higher resolution. But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Oh, and count me as another previous Namecheap customer that isn't anymore mostly because of their interface. "Mostly" because I had one domain that needed DNSSEC when they didn't support it, and that's what started my migration, but what made me move everything was the interface.
- eitland 5y ago
  > But well, nobody would ever think about going back into those ugly interfaces! Some of us would like to get our toolbars back.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Well, that part was sarcastic... The new space wasting interfaces are worse in many ways, and better in none. The old ugly interfaces were perfectly good for simple software. We could use something better on the more complex kinds of software, but what he have today isn't.
sumtechguy 5y ago
Well said. The #1 rule I used to follow is I am on this control what can I do here and is it clear. The #2 rule is What is my next step from step #1 and is it easy to find where I currently am. Break either of those and the GUI will be confusing. Disappearing controls makes you think something is wrong. I would typically go with disabled and a clear indicator of the something else needing to be filled out. If that was not achievable a tooltip on the disabled control to tell the user what to do. The way to achieve it is to pretend you are on 2 hours of sleep and not very computer savvy. Now you can go too far and make the whole thing a busy mess and then it is unclear where to even begin. A good rule of thumb with that is left to right top to bottom, keep scrolling to a minimum. Most people get that. One I was using just yesterday was jumping around in the page and the 'finish' control was in the top left and scrolled off the page.

smoldesu 5y ago

It's pretty ironic to review Jobs' goals to "Make the next great personal computer operating system", since they precisely highlight some of the biggest issues with MacOS today. Apple is no longer shipping a "single OS", they're maintaining a series of progressive LTS releases that seems to be a middle-ground nobody can appreciate. MacOS's metaphorical "plumbing" is far from state-of-the-art, too: the networking APIs are continuing to be gimped, while the userspace continues to be overhauled in confusing, highly abstracted ways. Oh, and killer graphics? MacOS has the least-supported, most esoteric graphics interface available today. I've heard people say that it's easier to write graphics code for the Nintendo Switch, because at least that doesn't force you to use Metal. All for all, I wholeheartedly agree with what's being said here. After Mojave was released, I get the feeling that Apple started to panic, and began some unnecessary design regressions that really drove people like me away. They started gutting 32-bit apps and libraries, bloating one of the most space-efficient UIs on the market, and undoing a lot of the personalization options that I loved MacOS for. One day, I hope that Apple can put this all aside and make a genuinely great computer. They're holding a lot of the cards, but I still can't recommend the M1 to others yet, much less integrate it into my own professional workflow.

blacktriangle 5y ago
Apple is still killing it in the hardware space, but I think the writing was on the wall for Apple software when Forstall was forced out.
- handrous 5y ago
  ... oh damn, that does match up to when I felt iOS abruptly lost its way and headed down the road to becoming a complicated, full, multitasking GUI OS, rather than a light & simple thing-becomer.

thom 5y ago

Ironically, the thing that first got me really into Linux (which I consider a functional and pragmatic system at its core) was having lots of window managers, some of which did frivolous things like having waves lapping on my desktop. I think there are worse things than operating systems looking pretty. Your computer might be a tool, mine’s the spaceship I spend most of my life inside.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Your computer might be a tool, mine’s the spaceship I spend most of my life inside. If that's the case, then OS developers should spend less time making it fit some designer's aesthetic of beauty and instead make it super mailable, so users can make it look pleasing to them instead. Not surprisingly, 90s OS did that better too.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  I'm reminded that Windows 3.1 had dark mode in the early 1990s, and not simply inverting colors. Theming was so easy compared to today that it's embarrassing.
  - mst 5y ago
    Heck, the main reason I originally figured out how to root my high school's 3.1 setup was so I could enable the "black leather jacket" theme.
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  But the designers really, really want that aesthetic: https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
  - cocoafleck 5y ago
    I felt a bit queasy reading that.
  - eitland 5y ago

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

At work I mostly use Linux and at home mostly a 2017 Macbook Air. I do have a Windows PC that I put together in ~2012. I recently used the PC again because there was some Windows only software I needed to use and it was shocking going from Mac to that. Windows gets a lot of shit, but it felt way more responsive than Mac. I think due to the lack of animations on everything. The author of the article is on to something with regards to Apple focusing on what demos well rather than what is good to use.

seumars 5y ago

> Now you have overpaid “““designers””” that need to show “““impact””” every year, so they have to reinvent the wheel over and over. This is such an ignorant and oversimplified argument. The only reason one could assume that it’s the designers at Apple who “need to show impact” instead of PR project management shenanigans is if you’ve never worked with design at a large scale. I’m pretty sure some random designer at Apple has already redesigned something like Mission Control (which has been pretty much unchanged in the last few OS iterations) but it just isn’t the right time to launch said upgrade so it just sits on the back burner for years.

ajconway 5y ago
As a software engineer, who hasn't felt like "I definitely know how to make everything better by rewriting the whole thing!"? UI/UX designers feel the same way. It's never the answer, but it's not the end of the world if someone does it; after some time and feedback the product becomes useable again.

hota_mazi 5y ago

Bit odd to see the author of this article seems to be so vested in all things Apple and he still spells macOS incorrectly. Anyway: > First, we’re going to have a single OS strategy at Apple. We’re not going to have a dual or a triple or a quadruple OS strategy like some others. We’re going to have one OS, and that’s very important to us. And twenty years later, Apple still doesn't have a single OS.

etchalon 5y ago
Jobs was specifically targeting Microsoft there. Back then, Microsoft had two distinct operating systems … Windows 2000 (based on the NT kernel) and Windows ME (based on Windows 9x and MS-DOS). Windows 2000 was the "professional" operating system and ME was the "home" version. PLUS there were multiple versions of each of those. There were actually rumors and concerns that, moving forward, Apple would do the same with the NeXT stuff. Because they did do the same with the NeXT stuff. For a year, Apple had Mac OS 9 (Classic) and Mac OS X Server (which was based on NeXTStep). Amazingly, saying, "We're just gonna ship one thing to everyone, and change the features depending on the distribution" was actually novel. That same basic strategy persists today, since macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS are all ostensibly the same operating system with different interfaces.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  >That same basic strategy persists today, since macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS are all ostensibly the same operating system with different interfaces. That seems a stretch, MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS seems like the Windows ME, Windows 2000 problem but 100 times worse. For instance my mother searches for a covid tracking/checkin app on the iPad app store because she only has an iPad and it isn't even there despite running fine on iOS, it's just the developer is expected to put in the extra work to specifically support iPads so they never bother. Maybe there is some secret option somewhere to show iPhone apps but she certainly can't find it, or even begin to understand why my Dads iPhone can have the app but not her iPad.
  - etchalon 5y ago

amelius 5y ago

It's like fashion. When is skeuomorphism coming back?

makecheck 5y ago

To be blunt, while the macOS 11 UI is not all bad, it contains very serious design mistakes, ruining things that everyone has no choice but to use (like notifications and alerts). Somehow Apple doesn’t get how terrible this trend is, and that it is damaging their entire brand. I can only assume the hierarchy at Apple is broken to the point where the people in charge are either unreachable, or unresponding to feedback, while having entirely too much control. And as far as dumbed-down tools, it really feels like literally no one inside Apple even uses their tools (or they have access to better stuff and don’t care). For instance, “Console” - once the simplest imaginable concept with an implementation that everyone would expect - is now a pointless mess. An app that should have obvious behavior and usability is now just confusing every time I open it, leaving me feeling defeated because I cannot even find what I need. They messed it up and moved on, like many other things.

gknoy 5y ago
> macOS ... contains very serious design mistakes Would you be willing to elaborate, or link to articles supporting this? I'm sure that they have them, but since I swap between windows and mac daily I might just not be noticing them.
- makecheck 5y ago
  For notifications, here[1] is a pretty good overview of the problem. A collection of comments on reformatted alert messages: [2]. Comment on icons, translucency and other quirks: [3]. [1] https://tyler.io/240-invisible-pixels/ https://tyler.io/240-invisible-pixels/ [2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/03/big-surs-narrow-alerts/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/03/big-surs-narrow-alerts/ [3] https://medium.com/macoclock/why-apple-has-broken-some-basic-design-principles-in-the-new-macos-release-419cf74af099 https://medium.com/macoclock/why-apple-has-broken-some-basic... Not to mention posts on Reddit, Twitter, blogs, etc. about lots of these UI quirks.
  - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
    > Worse, though, Big Sur hides the (X) until you mouse over the literal bounds of the banner - not even the area where the hidden (X) will appear is initially valid. I so intensely hate this design trend of hiding UI elements until you move the mouse cursor into a “magic” area that makes them appear. I work a lot with tools and websites that do this and it’s simply maddening.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> "Is this really bad UI, or is it just you who are averse to change?" It doesn't matter! The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they are used by humans. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a constantly-changing interface is also a bad interface. When you change something—be it a GUI or an API—you need to take into account not just whether the change is better, but also whether it's worth the very high inherent cost of change. I don't think the modern tech industry does this anywhere near enough.

loopz 5y ago
This is exactly right. Producers get hyper-optimized on change, while users want either no change, or obvious improvements. Majority of incentives and goals of producers rarely align with every individual user. In this regard, I find Linux XWindows and WMs to strike a good balance. It allows me to choose Xfce, or even i3. It gets most of the bad bits about modern computing (notifications, desktop sounds, panels, popups, windows-fiddling, desktop icons, shortcuts, ads, whatever will they come up with next), to just go away and not torment me anymore.
antisthenes 5y ago
I'm very glad to see this line of reasoning being the top comment. A change in UI must generally be so good, as to completely overshadow the costs of change. Hence, most changes will NOT pass that high bar, and are thus bad changes. Unless some UI/UX feature you're considering received overwhelming support from your users (both regular and power-users), it's probably not worth doing and you should be directing your efforts anywhere else.
tshaddox 5y ago
> The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they are used by humans. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a constantly-changing interface is also a bad interface. The trouble with that epistemology is that it makes it impossible to discern (or at least pointless to discuss) any qualities of a user interface except how popular the interface is or how much humans enjoy using the interface. > When you change something—be it a GUI or an API—you need to take into account not just whether the change is better, but also whether it's worth the very high inherent cost of change. This sounds dangerously close to the awful epistemology that is the precautionary principle. Both are saying that if there is some proposal for which we don't have any good knowledge about its potential downsides, we ought to reject the proposal. Your variation seems to be that we should assign the proposal some baseline cost (and thus reject the proposal unless we have knowledge that the benefit exceeds the cost). I simply don't think there is any way of establishing that baseline cost.

peatmoss 5y ago

I feel like Apple has generally done a good job containing churn to the superficial parts of the OS. That said, I wish the Linux/BSD mindshare had chosen to invest its desktop efforts into creating a rock solid OpenStep implementation. Had GNUStep or something like it been able to marshal the resources that have been poured into multiple rewrites of Gnome & KDE, I think we’d have the basis for the low-churn system we wish Apple had provided us. Maybe if someone like this had come along 20 years ago things would be different https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

webmobdev 5y ago

My friend was trying to pitch anal sex to me, and one of the things he said was - "Well, the anus might adjust and accommodate to you inserting stuff in it, but it doesn't mean it likes things shoved into it." That's exactly how I feel about the crappy design changes that Windows and macOS have been increasingly forcing on us. We get used to it not because we like it, but often because there is no other way. As a long time Windows user migrant to macOS, I find this more true of macOS now (it really pisses me off that you still can't maximise a window consistently on macOS). Both get a lot of things right, but I feel Windows UI still has an edge (if you choose to ignore Windows 8). (For the Apple lovers - I say this confidently after I deliberately chose not to customize macOS to be like Windows And really embraced the whole "Apple way of doing things" to really experience if it is better. I can honestly say no, it isn't.) But just as the Americans stubbornly decided to drive on the right when the the rest of the world drove on the left, Windows and macOS too deliberately choose different UI paradigm and approach more for business reasons than functional ones. It's often irritating because sometimes it feels as if the changes in UI are just a way to try to differentiate the products without any improvement in usability - it took me nearly a year and half to get as comfortable with macOS as I was with Windows. But I still feel Windows UI is more productive, and less irritating, than macOS. (The only thing I like on the macOS desktop environment is the unified Menubar on top and Spotlight.)

willyt 5y ago
Option click plus window button in top left of window to maximise without going into full screen. Everywhere except Britain and Japan drives on the right.
- Someone 5y ago
  We’re way of from the subject at hand, but driving at the left is not that rare. A couple of former British colonies drive at the left, too (e.g. Australia, India, and South Africa) plus a few countries such as Indonesia, Suriname and Thailand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic) I guess that’s 15% to 20% of the world’s population.

etchalon 5y ago

I do not understand what this author is talking about. Apple has always been focused on superficial interface changes. Every single release of OS X has had minor, sometimes major, revisions to the interface. Remember when Sheets were gonna be a thing? And Drawers? And Metal (the UI, not the GL)? Show me an OS release and I'll show you things Apple moved around. Go back further, and you'll see it's always been the case. System 7 was a massive change from System 6. Mac OS 8 was a HUGE departure from System 7. Mac OS 9 had substation changes from Mac OS 8. This whole "remember the good ole days when nothing changed?" schtick people pull to make bad points is insanely frustrating if you actually pay attention to things as they change.