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As a long time Mac user, in my opinion what has historically distinguished the Mac from other platforms is the high degree of UI/UX consistency across applicati

As a long time Mac user, in my opinion what has historically distinguished the Mac from other platforms is the high degree of UI/UX consistency across applications. Mac users historically valued software products that conformed to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and tended to shun non-compliant products; this is why Microsoft Word 5.1 was so well-received by classic Mac users while Microsoft Word 6 was rejected by many of these users (https://lowendmac.com/2013/microsoft-word-for-mac-faq/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/microsoft-word-for-mac-faq/). While consistency among popular Mac apps isn't (and never has been) perfect, there's much more consistency among Mac apps than among Windows apps or among the X11 ecosystem (though, to be fair, consistency improves when sticking to apps designed for a specific desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME). This is just my opinion, but I've found the classic Mac OS and pre-Yosemite Mac OS X Apple Human Interface Guidelines to be quite well thought of. In fact, while I prefer the technical underpinnings of Mac OS X to those of the classic Mac OS, I prefer the classic Mac OS's interface, which seems more intuitive to me. Having the ability to theme one's desktop is nice, but I prefer having an ecosystem of well-designed applications that all conform to a common set of well-designed UI/UX guidelines. This is what has kept me on the Mac all these years, and my disappointment with the Linux desktop is that while it's easy for me to theme the desktop, the applications themselves are inconsistent, theming is only skin-deep, and what does not help is the fact that there is no single toolkit, desktop, and/or UI/UX guidelines (though, once again, I can achieve some greater consistency by sticking to Qt/KDE or GTK/GNOME apps). Granted, I admit the holy grail for me is for those well-designed applications to also have customizable UIs. However, in an age where Electron apps are becoming more common and where M1 Macs can run some iOS apps, there is less cross-application consistency these days on the Mac. I regularly use Zoom and Slack, which clearly stand out when compared to applications that use the native AppKit API's controls.

grawprog 5y ago
Thank you for actually giving a good objective, non emotionally driven response. I appreciate it. I really was curious to hear some perspective on this that wasn't just because I like it. Thank you.
jcelerier 5y ago
> Having the ability to theme one's desktop is nice, but I prefer having an ecosystem of well-designed applications that all conform to a common set of well-designed UI/UX guidelines. How is "well-designed" defined in that case ? e.g. the oft-referenced paper that Apple apparently used to define their environment as primary mouse-driven ("keyboards users state that they take less time and measurably take more time than mouse users to achieve a given task with a keyboard" or something like that, don't remember the actual phrasing) has famously not been reproduced. In contrast the UI work that went into the win95 design seemed much more experimentally reliable.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I have over 200 apps on my Mac, including a bunch of “big ones,” like the Adobe CS Suite, and the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. I have dozens of dev tools and smaller apps. Most, I only use occasionally. I use Xcode, SourceTree, BBEdit, and Adobe Illustrator (to create graphic assets for apps), the most. I am probably at expert level on most of the apps on my computer (which isn’t really saying that much, as most are “one-tick ponies”); even though I may only use most of them, once a month, or less. That’s the value of a consistent UI, to me. I am not always happy with the platform standards, but being able to fire up an application that I haven’t used in months, and get productive in seconds, is quite valuable.
mewpmewp2 5y ago
I started using Macs 5-6 years ago due to the companies I was working at providing Macbooks and maybe my intuition is ruined by Windows, but I still find Mac very unintuitive and frustrating. I also use Windows and Ubuntu personally and I like both of these more design, smoothness and animation wise. I feel like everything about the macOS is just weird and the animations are also really weird, like minimizing the window animation - what the hell is that? And it's also weird how icons increase nearby when I hover on something, little things like that feel so off about Mac. As see on this App, when I hover on the icons in the bottom, they jump bigger and it immediately disorientates me. Like why do that? Am I unable to see the icons in any other way that you have to zoom increase them? And that annoying bouncy animation when those apps require attention.
- dnh44 5y ago
  Just an FYI but the minimise window animation can be changed in settings. As can the icon zoom and bounce.
- masalachai 5y ago
  Same here. I'm equally annoyed with the animations. Especially when an app requires attention, it keeps demanding it every few seconds by bouncing on the task bar. It's unnecessary distraction and I don't know of a way to stop it without clicking on the bouncy icon and addressing its need. Far more frustrating, however, is the inconsistent window management. Mac is very unintuitive (coming from Windows). If I have multiple windows of an app open, I can't switch to the right window with Cmd + Tab. It opens the window in the same desktop. It's annoying as hell! A four finger swipe always takes me to the next desktop and there's no way to swipe between the apps on the same desktop (a three finger swipe in Windows). And while this might be in equal parts Microsoft's fault, but MS apps like Teams just suck. When I'm on a different desktop than the one containing Teams, it takes me three clicks to open up the damn window. In some apps, Cmd + Right arrow will advance the cursor by a word and in most others, all the way to the end of the sentence. I still fail to understand the allure.
Dah00n 5y ago
As a heavy keyboard shortcut user I find it hard to agree. Windows has been better in that regard for a long time and Linux is catching up fast. The rest to me is just unnecessary eye candy, like the hideous animations everywhere on Mac.
- aikinai 5y ago
  What’s better about keyboard shortcuts on Windows? MacOS has a very rich set of keyboard shortcuts, the prevailing culture is for third-party apps to have them too, and you can map custom shortcuts to any command accessible in a menu. I haven’t used Windows extensively since 2015, but at least back then I had to have a suite of AutoHotKey scripts just to get close to native MacOS functionality.
  - IggleSniggle 5y ago
    My biggest issue with macOS keyboard shortcuts and gestures (and it’s a much worse issue on iOS) is discoverability. Once you know them, though, they do work almost everywhere.
    - aikinai 5y ago
      On MacOS, every menu item has the keyboard shortcut displayed to the right, even the ones you’ve custom assigned. On iOS this is about to get a lot better too; on iOS/iPadOS 15, if you hold down ⌘, you get a list of keyboard shortcuts currently available, interestingly organized just like the menu bar on MacOS. The totally secret stuff is all hidden behind ⌥, but actually if you hold that down while looking at menu items, they transform into their secret versions. Still not really discoverable, but there if you know where to look.
      - IggleSniggle 5y ago
        Yes, this is exactly what I’m talking about. “Hold down CMD,” how do you discover this? CMD-ALT-SPACE for Spotlight? CMD-CTL-SPACE for Emojis? 2-fingers to right click? ALT-2-finger-click for a context menu? Four/Five finger swipe gesture functions? Two fingers from the right for Notifications? The situation is even worse on iOS. Remember when it was news that you could long-press SPACE in order to relocate the text cursor? There’s a million of these little things, and if you’re in the ecosystem for awhile, you forget that you’ve learned them. They are genuinely useful and pleasant shortcuts that feel appropriate once you’ve learned them. But as far as I know, there’s no universal way to learn all these handy shortcuts. A few are configurable via System Preferences, and so you can discover them that way. Many of them are not. Particularly frustrating is that gestures change depending on your device, even stock settings! A swipe from the upper right corner of my iPhone 7 is different than a swipe from the upper corner of my iPhone 11 which is different, and while a two-finger swipe from the right on macOS gives me notifications neither iPad nor iOS do that. Why is it that two-finger tap is context menu on macOS but a two-finger tap on iOS generally does nothing, and there’s a whole different gesture of long-press (I don’t even know if ForceTap is still a thing or not). The consistency WITHIN macOS across apps is what’s great about macOS. It’s a shame it’s so hard to discover, and it’s a shame they keep changing these patterns without bothering to unify them.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Not only electron, but also apples own iOS ported apps are plain shit in terms of UX. Look at HomeKit for example, or any of the other ported apps, no keyboard shortcuts, no keyboard navigation, resizing is a bitch, the proxy icons are on their way out. Pretty looks, but no substance.
- andrekandre 5y ago
  i think alot of those are catalyst apps... yea, pretty sub par imo (im looking at you swift playgrounds)

grawprog 5y ago

Thank you for actually giving a good objective, non emotionally driven response. I appreciate it. I really was curious to hear some perspective on this that wasn't just because I like it. Thank you.

jcelerier 5y ago

> Having the ability to theme one's desktop is nice, but I prefer having an ecosystem of well-designed applications that all conform to a common set of well-designed UI/UX guidelines. How is "well-designed" defined in that case ? e.g. the oft-referenced paper that Apple apparently used to define their environment as primary mouse-driven ("keyboards users state that they take less time and measurably take more time than mouse users to achieve a given task with a keyboard" or something like that, don't remember the actual phrasing) has famously not been reproduced. In contrast the UI work that went into the win95 design seemed much more experimentally reliable.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I have over 200 apps on my Mac, including a bunch of “big ones,” like the Adobe CS Suite, and the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. I have dozens of dev tools and smaller apps. Most, I only use occasionally. I use Xcode, SourceTree, BBEdit, and Adobe Illustrator (to create graphic assets for apps), the most. I am probably at expert level on most of the apps on my computer (which isn’t really saying that much, as most are “one-tick ponies”); even though I may only use most of them, once a month, or less. That’s the value of a consistent UI, to me. I am not always happy with the platform standards, but being able to fire up an application that I haven’t used in months, and get productive in seconds, is quite valuable.

mewpmewp2 5y ago

I started using Macs 5-6 years ago due to the companies I was working at providing Macbooks and maybe my intuition is ruined by Windows, but I still find Mac very unintuitive and frustrating. I also use Windows and Ubuntu personally and I like both of these more design, smoothness and animation wise. I feel like everything about the macOS is just weird and the animations are also really weird, like minimizing the window animation - what the hell is that? And it's also weird how icons increase nearby when I hover on something, little things like that feel so off about Mac. As see on this App, when I hover on the icons in the bottom, they jump bigger and it immediately disorientates me. Like why do that? Am I unable to see the icons in any other way that you have to zoom increase them? And that annoying bouncy animation when those apps require attention.

dnh44 5y ago
Just an FYI but the minimise window animation can be changed in settings. As can the icon zoom and bounce.
masalachai 5y ago
Same here. I'm equally annoyed with the animations. Especially when an app requires attention, it keeps demanding it every few seconds by bouncing on the task bar. It's unnecessary distraction and I don't know of a way to stop it without clicking on the bouncy icon and addressing its need. Far more frustrating, however, is the inconsistent window management. Mac is very unintuitive (coming from Windows). If I have multiple windows of an app open, I can't switch to the right window with Cmd + Tab. It opens the window in the same desktop. It's annoying as hell! A four finger swipe always takes me to the next desktop and there's no way to swipe between the apps on the same desktop (a three finger swipe in Windows). And while this might be in equal parts Microsoft's fault, but MS apps like Teams just suck. When I'm on a different desktop than the one containing Teams, it takes me three clicks to open up the damn window. In some apps, Cmd + Right arrow will advance the cursor by a word and in most others, all the way to the end of the sentence. I still fail to understand the allure.

Dah00n 5y ago

As a heavy keyboard shortcut user I find it hard to agree. Windows has been better in that regard for a long time and Linux is catching up fast. The rest to me is just unnecessary eye candy, like the hideous animations everywhere on Mac.

aikinai 5y ago
What’s better about keyboard shortcuts on Windows? MacOS has a very rich set of keyboard shortcuts, the prevailing culture is for third-party apps to have them too, and you can map custom shortcuts to any command accessible in a menu. I haven’t used Windows extensively since 2015, but at least back then I had to have a suite of AutoHotKey scripts just to get close to native MacOS functionality.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  My biggest issue with macOS keyboard shortcuts and gestures (and it’s a much worse issue on iOS) is discoverability. Once you know them, though, they do work almost everywhere.
  - aikinai 5y ago
    On MacOS, every menu item has the keyboard shortcut displayed to the right, even the ones you’ve custom assigned. On iOS this is about to get a lot better too; on iOS/iPadOS 15, if you hold down ⌘, you get a list of keyboard shortcuts currently available, interestingly organized just like the menu bar on MacOS. The totally secret stuff is all hidden behind ⌥, but actually if you hold that down while looking at menu items, they transform into their secret versions. Still not really discoverable, but there if you know where to look.
    - IggleSniggle 5y ago
      Yes, this is exactly what I’m talking about. “Hold down CMD,” how do you discover this? CMD-ALT-SPACE for Spotlight? CMD-CTL-SPACE for Emojis? 2-fingers to right click? ALT-2-finger-click for a context menu? Four/Five finger swipe gesture functions? Two fingers from the right for Notifications? The situation is even worse on iOS. Remember when it was news that you could long-press SPACE in order to relocate the text cursor? There’s a million of these little things, and if you’re in the ecosystem for awhile, you forget that you’ve learned them. They are genuinely useful and pleasant shortcuts that feel appropriate once you’ve learned them. But as far as I know, there’s no universal way to learn all these handy shortcuts. A few are configurable via System Preferences, and so you can discover them that way. Many of them are not. Particularly frustrating is that gestures change depending on your device, even stock settings! A swipe from the upper right corner of my iPhone 7 is different than a swipe from the upper corner of my iPhone 11 which is different, and while a two-finger swipe from the right on macOS gives me notifications neither iPad nor iOS do that. Why is it that two-finger tap is context menu on macOS but a two-finger tap on iOS generally does nothing, and there’s a whole different gesture of long-press (I don’t even know if ForceTap is still a thing or not). The consistency WITHIN macOS across apps is what’s great about macOS. It’s a shame it’s so hard to discover, and it’s a shame they keep changing these patterns without bothering to unify them.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Not only electron, but also apples own iOS ported apps are plain shit in terms of UX. Look at HomeKit for example, or any of the other ported apps, no keyboard shortcuts, no keyboard navigation, resizing is a bitch, the proxy icons are on their way out. Pretty looks, but no substance.

andrekandre 5y ago
i think alot of those are catalyst apps... yea, pretty sub par imo (im looking at you swift playgrounds)