9 ms·

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.

What changed?

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.