20 ms·

New Human Interface Guidelines

146 points by soheilpro 4y ago

o_____________o 4y ago
What changed?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Apparently, they revised a few recommendations to change the look of MacOS Ventura: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/v7o87z/apple_should_read_its_own_guidelines/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/v7o87z/apple_should_...
  - sph 4y ago
    That Ventura screenshot looks terrible. Is that real or has it been photoshopped?
    - SllX 4y ago
      It’s real. Not that System Preferences was blowing anyone away, but System “Settings” is Apple answering the question no one asked: what if we had iPhone Settings but on the Mac?
    - SkyMarshal 4y ago
      I like it better actually. Cleaner, less cluttered, everything related to an option is clearly grouped and visually associated.
      - cosmotic 4y ago
        It was all clearly grouped before, but also had visual anchors. The new groups don't satisfy the WCAG contrast ratio guidelines. The new view is definitely 'cleaner', but in this case, that's worse. This isn't an artistic effort, this is a human interface. Did the 40 years of HCI research just turn up the wrong answers before? And the all-along more obvious approach is now the supposedly better approach? Unlikely.
        SkyMarshal 4y ago
        > but also had visual anchors. I only see one visual anchor in the old one, the horizontal rule at the bottom separating Menu Bar. Everything else is just jumbled together. The new one at least attempts visual anchors with gradient background boxes and by right-justifying all the controls. I grant you the contrast ratio is worse and Apple should read Contrast Rebellion. And I personally don't care whether they use a checkbox or a switch, as long as its placement is convenient and aesthetic. I use Linux with Gnome 4 on my workstations, which uses switches for settings, and a MacBook laptop with checkboxes, and iPad with switches, and none of that makes any difference to me. But otherwise I prefer the layout arrangement of the new one. Vertical and horizontal spacing are more orderly, left-justification of text and right-justification of controls improves UI consistency, and grouping within gradient boxes is more aesthetically calmer to my eye. Just my $0.02, to each their own. https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/
        cosmotic 4y ago
        One of us misunderstands what visual anchors are. I consider the staggered drop downs visual anchors. I don't disagree with a single point you made about the anesthetics, and still passionately believe the ux is worse now. The new one would look better in a luxury furniture catalog but humans using it would take longer to complete tasks and produce more mistakes.
        astrange 4y ago
        New UIs are less contrasty because old UIs were designed for low-quality TN LCD screens. Modern LCDs and OLEDs have better black points, so the UI gets grayer to make up for it. There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though. No. Just no. You make these things readable and accessible by default. You don't bury it in a setting somewhere. I have 20/20 vision and I felt compelled to turn high contrast and button shapes on because the OS is so goddam unreadable.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Not sure how I feel about detaching controls from their label like that. I thought we learned our lesson with this when we switched to HiDPI displays, but oh well...
        SkyMarshal 4y ago
        Yeah I can see the argument for keeping the checkboxes on the left and their explainer text immediately adjacent on the right. But the problem is that the choose-boxes and radio buttons at the top can't be treated the same way, and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes. Moving all the text to the left, and all the controls to the right, and boxing each choice together with its text using gradient background boxes, feels overall cleaner, more consistent, and better organized.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes. This is not a Wes Anderson movie where everything has to be symmetric. You're free to mix controls. To put them in grids. To put them in multiple columns. Just go and look at your System Preferences now. Or https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649 https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649
      - mafalda 4y ago
        This makes sense if you came from touch ui. Mouse and keyboard UI favours the old design because the way you hit things with the mouse is different. It is also bad to compare the two screenshots because the sizes are not in the same scale. The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? The older makes it trivial to discover that the dock moves unlike the newer one. My view is that the design is much less refined and have a lot of space to improve. It isn't bad, the potential is there if you consider a touch + mouse ui. So let's wait I guess.
        SkyMarshal 4y ago
        > The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? Both seem faulty in that regard. Both cram Dock and Window behavior into the same section, when each should be a separate section similar to the Menu Bar section at the bottom. But that's not a fault of the design language here, and can be fixed without changing it.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      it's likely taken from that tweet https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649 https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I like the new one more. Looks kinda cluttered and unorganised with the checkbox version. But I think I’m general HN tends to hold a very conservative view on UI while the general public does not. The feeling I get is that most users here believe that windows XP was the peak of UI and everything after was worse. Which is not at all what the average person would say.
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        What's wrong with WinXP UI? Apart from not being touch-ready (though Microsoft also had pen-driven "Tablet PC" and "Pocket PC" UI's in the same style) or usable with mixed-DPI display settings. I for one find it quite modern and intuitive at the same time. Those old-style UI's were rigorously tested using focus groups of "average" folks, so practicality was very highly valued.
        xattt 4y ago
        They were pen-driven interfaces, so targets would have been smaller than a capacitive touchscreen used with fingers.
        GeorgeWBasic 4y ago
        Nothing's wrong with it, if you turned off the Fisher-Price theme. It was usable and simple, and displayed information clearly. It wasn't suitable for mixed-DPI, but a replacement easily could be without losing anything. Instead, we get the garbage that is Windows 11. All three desktop platforms have been taking leaps backwards in usability.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        > while the general public does not The general public spends too much time peck-typing or fighting with ads/spam/etc to even begin to feel limited by the UI "improvements". The problem however is that by removing power-user features and dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator it also prevents those users from ever levelling up.
        4y ago
  - hbn 4y ago
    I hate this converging of touch interfaces and desktop interfaces. I get that it's easier than ever to share codebases between your desktop and mobile app, but all you get out of this trend is interfaces that are neither good for touch nor for desktop. They're just... passable and occasionally annoying for each. It's why I'm against the idea that so many have put forward of bringing macOS to the iPad. It just means that macOS will be forced into being a touch-first OS (since many people use iPads without keyboards, so every interaction now needs to be doable without one) and it'll just be a worse experience for a keyboard and mouse setup.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gumby 4y ago
      I like, well not convergence exactly, but certainly coherence. TBH the old system preferences with its array of icons is more iOS like and the transition should have gone the other way. OTOH I agree that the Mac should retain and maintain the primacy of kbd-and-mouse interaction and ipad/phone the finger interaction. Jamming one metaphor into the other is terrible and lazy, which I think is what you were getting at. Omni group’s apps are good examples of getting it right. The app icons aren’t the same but they rhyme; the visual metaphors are the same but the interactions are appropriate to the tools (kbd/mouse or finger) and sizes of the various devices. Pity Apple can’t go to the same effort. It’s newly great, or even that great at all.
    - usrn 4y ago
      tbh mobile interfaces aren't even nice on phones. I own a Pinephone and normal X11 apps feel like an improvement even with that form factor.
    - bromuro 4y ago
      > I hate this converging of touch interfaces and desktop interfaces. In 2022 the first experience with a computer is, for most people, a smartphone. It feels natural removing checkboxex for toggle buttons. After all isn’t the web UI all about converging touch and non-touch (aka “desktop”)?
  - spupy 4y ago
    What's wrong with the old checkboxes and why are the sliding switches replacing them?
- _jal 4y ago
  Apple blesses a converged Mac/iOS approach, which in practice means you basically throw away a lot of what made the Mac excellent. Not that Apple is even following their own guidelines... https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/ The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot, and a new-feature focus on lock-in are making the platform increasingly something I just don't care about anymore. Not to mention every time I get another Buy Apple Music! nudge or deal with their bratty "not now" dismissal of the fucking credit card offer makes me actively dislike Apple a bit more. I'm clearly not the customer Apple wants, and all good things come to an end. It just saddens me a bit - I've been using Macs for over 30 years now. Watching them become more annoying and arrogant than IBM sucks.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    > letting the command line rot how so?
  - seltzered_ 4y ago
    Oddly, the settings panel in Ventura looks closer to what Gnome Settings looks like. Just without the "Buy Apple Music! nudge" or "credit card offer" elements.
    - Macha 4y ago
      The last redesign of Apple Mail made it look a lot more like Gnome too
    - threeseed 4y ago
      It also looks like the original Mac Control Panel from 1987: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_4.1?file=System_4.1 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_4.1?file=System_4.1
    - musicale 4y ago
      Advertising in Settings is pure evil and needs to go away. Same for pushing ads through Notifications. Apple's road to hell is paved with OS-embedded advertising and user manipulation in the name of service and subscription revenue.
- neilpanchal 4y ago
  For sure, humans haven’t.
ushakov 4y ago
> The HIG has merged its platform-specific guidance into a unified document, making it simpler to explore common design approaches while still preserving relevant details about each platform i’m very much against this approach of generalizing design instead of strict rule set they now offer some opaque suggestions this is how material design lost its meaning hopefully this decision won’t result with everyone implementing their own design language rather than using the standard the platform dictates frankly, same design language across all apps is what makes me choose Apple software this looks like an attempt to keep their design language to themselves while asking others to implement their own
- toiletfuneral 4y ago
  Can you elaborate more? Most of the 'specificity' I see missing just lives inside SwiftUI and IB now. The platform/OS manages so much layout automatically these days I think the 'design' work is moving up the abstracting ladder as well, or are you talking about something totally different?
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  That quoted bit seems more like, IMO, that they're just unifying their HIG since the design across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS are converging, partly due to the unified developer process for all of these platforms. It doesn't seem any more generalized than it has in the recent past. It's just that each platform previously had their own distinct design languages, which have been gradually reaching a shared state. One can certainly argue against the merits of said convergence though. However, I don't see how this is any indication of them hoarding their design language for themselves.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    fair point, but i still don’t see what the benefit of shared design system is when you have 4 different screen-sizes (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch) with unique capabilities for each platform?
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
alsetmusic 4y ago
And it’s been shown that the new System Settings app breaks the HIG (end of the article as “Addendum”). https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html
- deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
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- quenix 4y ago
  Seems unfair at times. macOS Ventura is currently being developer beta tested—it’s not even the public beta yet. The tiny UI inconsistencies are to be expected in developer beta 1. It’s not a finished product—it’s three months from even being out. Why criticise such small things as the button outlines?
  - s3p 4y ago
    The gripes with System Settings are not just with the button outlines. It is the entire design of it; replacing an easily-clickable platter of icons with a scrollable list of them which takes much longer to search if one is looking for a settings pane.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Unfair? This is just another step in a long, long, long journey of Apple butchering MacOS and throwing HIG out of the window.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Regarding switches vs checkboxes: it seems natural that switches should belong to standalone settings, whereas checkboxes should belong to a family of related settings. For instance, "enable notifications for this app" should be a switch, but then the related sub-settings "badges", "sounds", "show on lock screen" etc should be checkboxes.
nixpulvis 4y ago
Here's a fail right on the navigation of their own new pages: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c9LThpG0yiOvUyEocKXvI8JQ https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c9LThpG0yiOvUyEocKXvI8JQ Something a well organized PDF doesn't suffer from, just saying. P.S. I hope non-iOS users can view this link... I didn't really know where else to put it easily.
- mgsk 4y ago
  imgur is popular
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ninkendo 4y ago
  non-iOS users probably have a better time trying to view it than I do. For me, my iPad tries to open it in the photos app (which I rejected, because it’s a website and I just want to view it as a website), and the dialog says “<your full name> shared this”. Hope you’re ok if everyone that has an iOS device sees your full name right now.
  - nixpulvis 4y ago
    I kinda assumed that link would somehow out me one way or another. Apple talks big on privacy, but fails in the details. It's OK in this case I guess...
    - usrn 4y ago
      Generally when I want to share photos here I just use IPFS since it's free and super easy via https://anarkrypto.github.io/upload-files-to-ipfs-from-browser-panel/public/ https://anarkrypto.github.io/upload-files-to-ipfs-from-brows... Then just use the cloudflare gateway to share the link.
  - bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
    Weird, my iPhone just opened it in the browser without issue. I have to agree it's fucking weird to have your full name attached to your public iCloud links.
gumby 4y ago
The real question is: will apple follow its own guidelines? That wouldn’t happen if Steve Jobs were still alive
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- productceo 4y ago
  No. From Monterey to Ventura, they changed checkboxes to switches, which they explicitly recommend against in their Human Interface Guidelines. Having said, I don't think 100% consistency is a useful goal anyway. The Ventura design is usable, and the guideline is useful. Gap between the two can be operational "debt" (like technical debt) which is not theoretically ideal, but practically useful to keep making/shipping progress.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Gap between the two can be operational "debt" It’s true, but the disregarding of the HIG was a source of much anguish and whining on Mac forums and HN too for many of the early years of OS X.
- kergonath 4y ago
  It happened all the time when Steve Jobs was alive. See the brushed metal thing, for example, or the selective application of skeuomorphism in iOS 1 to 6.
hsn915 4y ago
- wonderbore 4y ago
  > spectrum Does this mean we’ll soon get a range picker when we sign up for iCloud?
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      You know bisexual isn't the same thing as a hermaphrodite right?
      - ASalazarMX 4y ago
        We're talking about choice of gender, not sex. Sexes are male and female, and to be fair, hermaphrodite should be a third option. Gender can be any random combination of man and woman. People confounding sex and gender has caused a great deal of rhetoric. You can't choose your sex, that's in your DNA, but you can choose your gender.
        stephenr 4y ago
        And "bisexual" is neither a gender nor a sex.
        ASalazarMX 4y ago
        go on.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
andkenneth 4y ago
- usrn 4y ago
  I mean they have a whole paragraph on gender, which feels like an almost completely irrelevant standard shoehorning of gender into a place it doesn't belong. I don't really see much to complain about here though and I'm usually the first.
  - weakfish 4y ago
    It seems pretty relevant for interfacing with humans
    - usrn 4y ago
      I honestly can't think of a single piece of software on my current machine that knows my gender. It's really irrelevant. EDIT: Yeah? That's why I said there's nothing to complain about. I just don't think they really needed to bother writing a paragraph to explain it. Most things are done that way anyway.
      - elicash 4y ago
        So you agree with their human interface guidelines, then? "You can help everyone feel welcome in your app by avoiding unnecessary references to specific genders. [...] Most apps don’t need to know a person’s gender, but if your app requires this information — such as for health or legal reasons — consider providing inclusive options, such as nonbinary, self-identify, and decline to state." For example, if the app is a period tracker the rec here is to not assume everyone using it identifies as a woman.
      - Barrin92 4y ago
        >I honestly can't think of a single piece of software on my current machine that knows my gender. It's really irrelevant. Then you're probably not a user of dating apps, which are fairly popular.
cc101 4y ago
Been programing Mac since 1985. Apple today is so messed up, I give up.
- anonymouse008 4y ago
  They didn't realize that Steve wasn't polished, he just cared.
- musicale 4y ago
  Apple Silicon hardware is pretty cool. On the programming side, SwiftUI looks pretty cool. I am impressed whenever I see posts about classic Macs and Think C, but there have been some improvements since then.
  - cc101 4y ago
    These are all worthy engineering-related accomplishments. That's sort of the problem. Apple has lost touch with the Mac user. The Mac user is a sophisticated creative or professional who strongly relates to the spirit of quality that Jobs invested into the Mac. The Mac has Presence the way a work or art does. Apple is trivializing the Mac and demeaning The Mac Presence by eliminating the stylistic difference between the Mac and iOS devices.
tayistay 4y ago
Here’s hoping that app review enforces the Inclusion section. Once some religious app gets rejected for traditional depictions of families, that will be more fodder to get rid of Apple’s App Store monopoly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AnonHP 4y ago
One thing that really annoys me is how keyboard hostile the apps, including Apple’s apps on macOS, have become. The apps developed lazily with Catalyst are probably the worst, but I’m guessing it’s a general issue with the newer SDKs like SwiftUI. An example: in the Reminders app on macOS, using the Tab key to navigate from one input to another (like date, time, location, etc.) is so broken in the tab order that it begs the question if Apple has: 1. a development team that knows macOS and cares about productivity 2. a QA team 3. a QA team that understands keyboard usage, tab order and other navigation elements I recall seeing similar brain damaged (yeah, I’m really annoyed that I’m using such terms in frustration) tab order implementations in Finder and elsewhere. Some companies decline gradually before they look like a creature with an entirely different DNA, and that’s been happening with Apple ever since the convergence between iOS and macOS started. Doesn’t matter what the top execs like Craig Federighi say about the Mac being important. The user experience and user friendliness cultivated over decades has been eroding over time, and that’s sad to see because the competition doesn’t seem to be doing better either, though on other fronts. Things weren’t completely perfect in Apple’s Mac operating systems in the past either. But it was close to getting to that, and I will remember it as “the golden age”. The M1 chips are phenomenal, but crippled by this cavalier attitude to software.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Using control + arrow keys with multiple screens is a nightmare. It always moves the focus to the other screen so if I change some code -> arrow key back to chrome and refresh it refreshes (or whatever other command) the window on my other screen.
- musicale 4y ago
  I don't think those apps are tested on Mac. News doesn't work properly on macOS either.
- twirlock 4y ago
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  > how keyboard hostile the apps Some macos apps have become very mouse hostile too. Example is activity monitor. You cannot right click anywhere. Even though it would be natural to use that for killing a process.
musicale 4y ago
The Apple II HIG document looks interesting - it's a shame it's not a PDF link!!
- SebastianKra 4y ago
  It's good to see that PDFs are slowly dying. I've probably wasted hundreds of hours both reading and writing them
  - kaba0 4y ago
    How is reading them wasting time? Also, until any alternative manages to provide properly aligned/justified text, or the ability to truly nicely format for example a scientific paper, then PDF will never die. Also, it is not a bad format, some modern extension of it is stupid, but otherwise it is really cool and it is a pleasure to read a nice PDF book on a big enough screen over an epub format for example that pushes figures around like nothing.
    - SebastianKra 4y ago
      > How is reading them wasting time? - No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. - Can't copy images in most PDF readers. - Text selection so bad that it has a 50% chance of selecting some random unrelated characters on the page. - Not to mention needless page breaks which further complicate selection and highlighting. - Hyperlinks often don't work. When reading citations I don't even bother to click links anymore. - Hyperlinks within documents make it difficult to go back. Some readers have a history function, but it is inconsistent. > [...] then PDF will never die. - Documentation is usually written in nice HTML pages and optionally browsable through Apps like Dash. - EPub is standard for books - Academia is the last bastion, but scientific journals already publish HTML versions of papers.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        > No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. Sure, it is not a great UX, but it is not like text reflow would produce meaningful results unless explicitly planned for, so the alternative is just shitty text reflow. I much rather rotate my phone. > Can't copy images in most PDF readers, text selection, hyperlinks These are all inherent to PDF generators, nothing to do with the format itself. For every shitty PDF, there is a well-formatted book with proper hyperlinks, beautiful typography, etc. Also, text selection usually doesn’t work when it is either an OCR or deliberately obfuscated which can just as well be done in web tech (by rendering to a canvas for example). Other than text-only books, epub is nigh useless if you have even a single figure in the text. And then there is the question of changing page numbers (depending on font rendering), and the text rendering is still nowhere near as good as what LaTeX generates.

146 points by soheilpro 4y ago

o_____________o 4y ago

What changed?

smoldesu 4y ago
Apparently, they revised a few recommendations to change the look of MacOS Ventura: https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/v7o87z/apple_should_read_its_own_guidelines/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/v7o87z/apple_should_...
- sph 4y ago
  That Ventura screenshot looks terrible. Is that real or has it been photoshopped?
  - SllX 4y ago
    It’s real. Not that System Preferences was blowing anyone away, but System “Settings” is Apple answering the question no one asked: what if we had iPhone Settings but on the Mac?
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    I like it better actually. Cleaner, less cluttered, everything related to an option is clearly grouped and visually associated.
    - cosmotic 4y ago
      It was all clearly grouped before, but also had visual anchors. The new groups don't satisfy the WCAG contrast ratio guidelines. The new view is definitely 'cleaner', but in this case, that's worse. This isn't an artistic effort, this is a human interface. Did the 40 years of HCI research just turn up the wrong answers before? And the all-along more obvious approach is now the supposedly better approach? Unlikely.
      - SkyMarshal 4y ago
        > but also had visual anchors. I only see one visual anchor in the old one, the horizontal rule at the bottom separating Menu Bar. Everything else is just jumbled together. The new one at least attempts visual anchors with gradient background boxes and by right-justifying all the controls. I grant you the contrast ratio is worse and Apple should read Contrast Rebellion. And I personally don't care whether they use a checkbox or a switch, as long as its placement is convenient and aesthetic. I use Linux with Gnome 4 on my workstations, which uses switches for settings, and a MacBook laptop with checkboxes, and iPad with switches, and none of that makes any difference to me. But otherwise I prefer the layout arrangement of the new one. Vertical and horizontal spacing are more orderly, left-justification of text and right-justification of controls improves UI consistency, and grouping within gradient boxes is more aesthetically calmer to my eye. Just my $0.02, to each their own. https://contrastrebellion.com/ https://contrastrebellion.com/
        cosmotic 4y ago
        One of us misunderstands what visual anchors are. I consider the staggered drop downs visual anchors. I don't disagree with a single point you made about the anesthetics, and still passionately believe the ux is worse now. The new one would look better in a luxury furniture catalog but humans using it would take longer to complete tasks and produce more mistakes.
        astrange 4y ago
        New UIs are less contrasty because old UIs were designed for low-quality TN LCD screens. Modern LCDs and OLEDs have better black points, so the UI gets grayer to make up for it. There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though. No. Just no. You make these things readable and accessible by default. You don't bury it in a setting somewhere. I have 20/20 vision and I felt compelled to turn high contrast and button shapes on because the OS is so goddam unreadable.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Not sure how I feel about detaching controls from their label like that. I thought we learned our lesson with this when we switched to HiDPI displays, but oh well...
      - SkyMarshal 4y ago
        Yeah I can see the argument for keeping the checkboxes on the left and their explainer text immediately adjacent on the right. But the problem is that the choose-boxes and radio buttons at the top can't be treated the same way, and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes. Moving all the text to the left, and all the controls to the right, and boxing each choice together with its text using gradient background boxes, feels overall cleaner, more consistent, and better organized.
        dmitriid 4y ago
        > and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes. This is not a Wes Anderson movie where everything has to be symmetric. You're free to mix controls. To put them in grids. To put them in multiple columns. Just go and look at your System Preferences now. Or https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649 https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649
    - mafalda 4y ago
      This makes sense if you came from touch ui. Mouse and keyboard UI favours the old design because the way you hit things with the mouse is different. It is also bad to compare the two screenshots because the sizes are not in the same scale. The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? The older makes it trivial to discover that the dock moves unlike the newer one. My view is that the design is much less refined and have a lot of space to improve. It isn't bad, the potential is there if you consider a touch + mouse ui. So let's wait I guess.
      - SkyMarshal 4y ago
        > The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? Both seem faulty in that regard. Both cram Dock and Window behavior into the same section, when each should be a separate section similar to the Menu Bar section at the bottom. But that's not a fault of the design language here, and can be fixed without changing it.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    it's likely taken from that tweet https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649 https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I like the new one more. Looks kinda cluttered and unorganised with the checkbox version. But I think I’m general HN tends to hold a very conservative view on UI while the general public does not. The feeling I get is that most users here believe that windows XP was the peak of UI and everything after was worse. Which is not at all what the average person would say.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      What's wrong with WinXP UI? Apart from not being touch-ready (though Microsoft also had pen-driven "Tablet PC" and "Pocket PC" UI's in the same style) or usable with mixed-DPI display settings. I for one find it quite modern and intuitive at the same time. Those old-style UI's were rigorously tested using focus groups of "average" folks, so practicality was very highly valued.
      - xattt 4y ago
        They were pen-driven interfaces, so targets would have been smaller than a capacitive touchscreen used with fingers.
      - GeorgeWBasic 4y ago
        Nothing's wrong with it, if you turned off the Fisher-Price theme. It was usable and simple, and displayed information clearly. It wasn't suitable for mixed-DPI, but a replacement easily could be without losing anything. Instead, we get the garbage that is Windows 11. All three desktop platforms have been taking leaps backwards in usability.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      > while the general public does not The general public spends too much time peck-typing or fighting with ads/spam/etc to even begin to feel limited by the UI "improvements". The problem however is that by removing power-user features and dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator it also prevents those users from ever levelling up.
      - 4y ago
- hbn 4y ago
  I hate this converging of touch interfaces and desktop interfaces. I get that it's easier than ever to share codebases between your desktop and mobile app, but all you get out of this trend is interfaces that are neither good for touch nor for desktop. They're just... passable and occasionally annoying for each. It's why I'm against the idea that so many have put forward of bringing macOS to the iPad. It just means that macOS will be forced into being a touch-first OS (since many people use iPads without keyboards, so every interaction now needs to be doable without one) and it'll just be a worse experience for a keyboard and mouse setup.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gumby 4y ago
    I like, well not convergence exactly, but certainly coherence. TBH the old system preferences with its array of icons is more iOS like and the transition should have gone the other way. OTOH I agree that the Mac should retain and maintain the primacy of kbd-and-mouse interaction and ipad/phone the finger interaction. Jamming one metaphor into the other is terrible and lazy, which I think is what you were getting at. Omni group’s apps are good examples of getting it right. The app icons aren’t the same but they rhyme; the visual metaphors are the same but the interactions are appropriate to the tools (kbd/mouse or finger) and sizes of the various devices. Pity Apple can’t go to the same effort. It’s newly great, or even that great at all.
  - usrn 4y ago
    tbh mobile interfaces aren't even nice on phones. I own a Pinephone and normal X11 apps feel like an improvement even with that form factor.
  - bromuro 4y ago
    > I hate this converging of touch interfaces and desktop interfaces. In 2022 the first experience with a computer is, for most people, a smartphone. It feels natural removing checkboxex for toggle buttons. After all isn’t the web UI all about converging touch and non-touch (aka “desktop”)?
- spupy 4y ago
  What's wrong with the old checkboxes and why are the sliding switches replacing them?
_jal 4y ago
Apple blesses a converged Mac/iOS approach, which in practice means you basically throw away a lot of what made the Mac excellent. Not that Apple is even following their own guidelines... https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/ The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot, and a new-feature focus on lock-in are making the platform increasingly something I just don't care about anymore. Not to mention every time I get another Buy Apple Music! nudge or deal with their bratty "not now" dismissal of the fucking credit card offer makes me actively dislike Apple a bit more. I'm clearly not the customer Apple wants, and all good things come to an end. It just saddens me a bit - I've been using Macs for over 30 years now. Watching them become more annoying and arrogant than IBM sucks.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  > letting the command line rot how so?
- seltzered_ 4y ago
  Oddly, the settings panel in Ventura looks closer to what Gnome Settings looks like. Just without the "Buy Apple Music! nudge" or "credit card offer" elements.
  - Macha 4y ago
    The last redesign of Apple Mail made it look a lot more like Gnome too
  - threeseed 4y ago
    It also looks like the original Mac Control Panel from 1987: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_4.1?file=System_4.1 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_4.1?file=System_4.1
  - musicale 4y ago
    Advertising in Settings is pure evil and needs to go away. Same for pushing ads through Notifications. Apple's road to hell is paved with OS-embedded advertising and user manipulation in the name of service and subscription revenue.
neilpanchal 4y ago
For sure, humans haven’t.

ushakov 4y ago

> The HIG has merged its platform-specific guidance into a unified document, making it simpler to explore common design approaches while still preserving relevant details about each platform i’m very much against this approach of generalizing design instead of strict rule set they now offer some opaque suggestions this is how material design lost its meaning hopefully this decision won’t result with everyone implementing their own design language rather than using the standard the platform dictates frankly, same design language across all apps is what makes me choose Apple software this looks like an attempt to keep their design language to themselves while asking others to implement their own

toiletfuneral 4y ago
Can you elaborate more? Most of the 'specificity' I see missing just lives inside SwiftUI and IB now. The platform/OS manages so much layout automatically these days I think the 'design' work is moving up the abstracting ladder as well, or are you talking about something totally different?
nvrspyx 4y ago
That quoted bit seems more like, IMO, that they're just unifying their HIG since the design across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS are converging, partly due to the unified developer process for all of these platforms. It doesn't seem any more generalized than it has in the recent past. It's just that each platform previously had their own distinct design languages, which have been gradually reaching a shared state. One can certainly argue against the merits of said convergence though. However, I don't see how this is any indication of them hoarding their design language for themselves.
- ushakov 4y ago
  fair point, but i still don’t see what the benefit of shared design system is when you have 4 different screen-sizes (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch) with unique capabilities for each platform?
  - nvrspyx 4y ago

alsetmusic 4y ago

And it’s been shown that the new System Settings app breaks the HIG (end of the article as “Addendum”). https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html

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- deleted 4y ago
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quenix 4y ago
Seems unfair at times. macOS Ventura is currently being developer beta tested—it’s not even the public beta yet. The tiny UI inconsistencies are to be expected in developer beta 1. It’s not a finished product—it’s three months from even being out. Why criticise such small things as the button outlines?
- s3p 4y ago
  The gripes with System Settings are not just with the button outlines. It is the entire design of it; replacing an easily-clickable platter of icons with a scrollable list of them which takes much longer to search if one is looking for a settings pane.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Unfair? This is just another step in a long, long, long journey of Apple butchering MacOS and throwing HIG out of the window.
bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Regarding switches vs checkboxes: it seems natural that switches should belong to standalone settings, whereas checkboxes should belong to a family of related settings. For instance, "enable notifications for this app" should be a switch, but then the related sub-settings "badges", "sounds", "show on lock screen" etc should be checkboxes.

nixpulvis 4y ago

Here's a fail right on the navigation of their own new pages: https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c9LThpG0yiOvUyEocKXvI8JQ https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c9LThpG0yiOvUyEocKXvI8JQ Something a well organized PDF doesn't suffer from, just saying. P.S. I hope non-iOS users can view this link... I didn't really know where else to put it easily.

mgsk 4y ago
imgur is popular
deleted 4y ago
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ninkendo 4y ago
non-iOS users probably have a better time trying to view it than I do. For me, my iPad tries to open it in the photos app (which I rejected, because it’s a website and I just want to view it as a website), and the dialog says “<your full name> shared this”. Hope you’re ok if everyone that has an iOS device sees your full name right now.
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  I kinda assumed that link would somehow out me one way or another. Apple talks big on privacy, but fails in the details. It's OK in this case I guess...
  - usrn 4y ago
    Generally when I want to share photos here I just use IPFS since it's free and super easy via https://anarkrypto.github.io/upload-files-to-ipfs-from-browser-panel/public/ https://anarkrypto.github.io/upload-files-to-ipfs-from-brows... Then just use the cloudflare gateway to share the link.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Weird, my iPhone just opened it in the browser without issue. I have to agree it's fucking weird to have your full name attached to your public iCloud links.

gumby 4y ago

The real question is: will apple follow its own guidelines? That wouldn’t happen if Steve Jobs were still alive

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productceo 4y ago
No. From Monterey to Ventura, they changed checkboxes to switches, which they explicitly recommend against in their Human Interface Guidelines. Having said, I don't think 100% consistency is a useful goal anyway. The Ventura design is usable, and the guideline is useful. Gap between the two can be operational "debt" (like technical debt) which is not theoretically ideal, but practically useful to keep making/shipping progress.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Gap between the two can be operational "debt" It’s true, but the disregarding of the HIG was a source of much anguish and whining on Mac forums and HN too for many of the early years of OS X.
kergonath 4y ago
It happened all the time when Steve Jobs was alive. See the brushed metal thing, for example, or the selective application of skeuomorphism in iOS 1 to 6.

hsn915 4y ago

wonderbore 4y ago
> spectrum Does this mean we’ll soon get a range picker when we sign up for iCloud?
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    You know bisexual isn't the same thing as a hermaphrodite right?
    - ASalazarMX 4y ago
      We're talking about choice of gender, not sex. Sexes are male and female, and to be fair, hermaphrodite should be a third option. Gender can be any random combination of man and woman. People confounding sex and gender has caused a great deal of rhetoric. You can't choose your sex, that's in your DNA, but you can choose your gender.
      - stephenr 4y ago
        And "bisexual" is neither a gender nor a sex.
        ASalazarMX 4y ago
        go on.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

andkenneth 4y ago

usrn 4y ago
I mean they have a whole paragraph on gender, which feels like an almost completely irrelevant standard shoehorning of gender into a place it doesn't belong. I don't really see much to complain about here though and I'm usually the first.
- weakfish 4y ago
  It seems pretty relevant for interfacing with humans
  - usrn 4y ago
    I honestly can't think of a single piece of software on my current machine that knows my gender. It's really irrelevant. EDIT: Yeah? That's why I said there's nothing to complain about. I just don't think they really needed to bother writing a paragraph to explain it. Most things are done that way anyway.
    - elicash 4y ago
      So you agree with their human interface guidelines, then? "You can help everyone feel welcome in your app by avoiding unnecessary references to specific genders. [...] Most apps don’t need to know a person’s gender, but if your app requires this information — such as for health or legal reasons — consider providing inclusive options, such as nonbinary, self-identify, and decline to state." For example, if the app is a period tracker the rec here is to not assume everyone using it identifies as a woman.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      >I honestly can't think of a single piece of software on my current machine that knows my gender. It's really irrelevant. Then you're probably not a user of dating apps, which are fairly popular.

cc101 4y ago

Been programing Mac since 1985. Apple today is so messed up, I give up.

anonymouse008 4y ago
They didn't realize that Steve wasn't polished, he just cared.
musicale 4y ago
Apple Silicon hardware is pretty cool. On the programming side, SwiftUI looks pretty cool. I am impressed whenever I see posts about classic Macs and Think C, but there have been some improvements since then.
- cc101 4y ago
  These are all worthy engineering-related accomplishments. That's sort of the problem. Apple has lost touch with the Mac user. The Mac user is a sophisticated creative or professional who strongly relates to the spirit of quality that Jobs invested into the Mac. The Mac has Presence the way a work or art does. Apple is trivializing the Mac and demeaning The Mac Presence by eliminating the stylistic difference between the Mac and iOS devices.

tayistay 4y ago

Here’s hoping that app review enforces the Inclusion section. Once some religious app gets rejected for traditional depictions of families, that will be more fodder to get rid of Apple’s App Store monopoly.

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AnonHP 4y ago

One thing that really annoys me is how keyboard hostile the apps, including Apple’s apps on macOS, have become. The apps developed lazily with Catalyst are probably the worst, but I’m guessing it’s a general issue with the newer SDKs like SwiftUI. An example: in the Reminders app on macOS, using the Tab key to navigate from one input to another (like date, time, location, etc.) is so broken in the tab order that it begs the question if Apple has: 1. a development team that knows macOS and cares about productivity 2. a QA team 3. a QA team that understands keyboard usage, tab order and other navigation elements I recall seeing similar brain damaged (yeah, I’m really annoyed that I’m using such terms in frustration) tab order implementations in Finder and elsewhere. Some companies decline gradually before they look like a creature with an entirely different DNA, and that’s been happening with Apple ever since the convergence between iOS and macOS started. Doesn’t matter what the top execs like Craig Federighi say about the Mac being important. The user experience and user friendliness cultivated over decades has been eroding over time, and that’s sad to see because the competition doesn’t seem to be doing better either, though on other fronts. Things weren’t completely perfect in Apple’s Mac operating systems in the past either. But it was close to getting to that, and I will remember it as “the golden age”. The M1 chips are phenomenal, but crippled by this cavalier attitude to software.

edgyquant 4y ago
Using control + arrow keys with multiple screens is a nightmare. It always moves the focus to the other screen so if I change some code -> arrow key back to chrome and refresh it refreshes (or whatever other command) the window on my other screen.
musicale 4y ago
I don't think those apps are tested on Mac. News doesn't work properly on macOS either.
twirlock 4y ago
perryizgr8 4y ago
> how keyboard hostile the apps Some macos apps have become very mouse hostile too. Example is activity monitor. You cannot right click anywhere. Even though it would be natural to use that for killing a process.

musicale 4y ago

The Apple II HIG document looks interesting - it's a shame it's not a PDF link!!

SebastianKra 4y ago
It's good to see that PDFs are slowly dying. I've probably wasted hundreds of hours both reading and writing them
- kaba0 4y ago
  How is reading them wasting time? Also, until any alternative manages to provide properly aligned/justified text, or the ability to truly nicely format for example a scientific paper, then PDF will never die. Also, it is not a bad format, some modern extension of it is stupid, but otherwise it is really cool and it is a pleasure to read a nice PDF book on a big enough screen over an epub format for example that pushes figures around like nothing.
  - SebastianKra 4y ago
    > How is reading them wasting time? - No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. - Can't copy images in most PDF readers. - Text selection so bad that it has a 50% chance of selecting some random unrelated characters on the page. - Not to mention needless page breaks which further complicate selection and highlighting. - Hyperlinks often don't work. When reading citations I don't even bother to click links anymore. - Hyperlinks within documents make it difficult to go back. Some readers have a history function, but it is inconsistent. > [...] then PDF will never die. - Documentation is usually written in nice HTML pages and optionally browsable through Apps like Dash. - EPub is standard for books - Academia is the last bastion, but scientific journals already publish HTML versions of papers.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      > No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. Sure, it is not a great UX, but it is not like text reflow would produce meaningful results unless explicitly planned for, so the alternative is just shitty text reflow. I much rather rotate my phone. > Can't copy images in most PDF readers, text selection, hyperlinks These are all inherent to PDF generators, nothing to do with the format itself. For every shitty PDF, there is a well-formatted book with proper hyperlinks, beautiful typography, etc. Also, text selection usually doesn’t work when it is either an OCR or deliberately obfuscated which can just as well be done in web tech (by rendering to a canvas for example). Other than text-only books, epub is nigh useless if you have even a single figure in the text. And then there is the question of changing page numbers (depending on font rendering), and the text rendering is still nowhere near as good as what LaTeX generates.