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This guy has no idea what he’s talking about. One language, one gui framework, and one API paradigm - unified across all contextual devices - is exactly what Ap

This guy has no idea what he’s talking about. One language, one gui framework, and one API paradigm - unified across all contextual devices - is exactly what Apple should do. SwiftUI is not it by any means, but to say that the idea of SwiftUI tries to achieve is a bad aim is completely wrong. The aim of UIKit on all Apple devices is 100% correct; and allows developers to go deep into the API forest to create mystical interactions for their customers, friends and users - in every device context. Merging AppKit and UIKit (MacCatalyst) should have been the team to win out the battle, just like in the days of the competing iPhones. The idea Apple is letting both live and fostering the wrong team is its only black eye in this story - So no, the Mac is flourishing, you’re just not following the way.

grishka 4y ago
No, it's absolutely unacceptable to merge touchscreens and keyboards/mice. These should be separate frameworks where you couldn't reuse any GUI code whatsoever, not a single line. You must design everything from scratch for phones and for computers because of how different the interaction paradigms are.
smeagull 4y ago
Unify everything by fragmenting further?
incanus77 4y ago
It's not the mystical interactions or feel of widgets, layout, and function that are the problem, it's bad UX paradigms, declining consistency between apps and across versions (a Mac hallmark), buggy software on an aggressive annual schedule, holes and rot in developer documentation, constant treadmill of Xcode and device updates, and general lack of attention to detail in Mac apps. I've been a Mac user and dev for twenty years. Music.app is probably the most egregious example and gets a lot of flak for good reason. It's so bad, when I'm working all day on my Mac, I listen to music on my iPhone instead. It's utter trash, designed with the foremost goal to push Apple Music sales and subscriptions, with everything else propping that up. There are still so many magical features — Safari Cloud Tabs, using your iPad as a second display with automatic keyboard & mouse switching, attention to Focus and Notification management, a very solid iCloud sync service for so many core data apps like Contacts, Notes, and Messages, and so much more. But the whole platform just feels like a rot, and the generational gap alluded to in the post is spot on. It's not necessarily an age thing, but it feels like those who "get it" and know what the Mac was and could be, and those who are making decisions and setting deadlines who are largely driven by company-wide synergistic goals. It could be both. But instead, the latter is winning.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jahewson 4y ago
  Could you give an example of some “bad UX paradigms”?
  - incanus77 4y ago
    Sure. I don't keep a running list of this (and I feel like I've seen some, but can't find them now) so it's a little off the cuff... - Scrollbars not appearing until you attempt scrolling, so no indication that there is more content to scroll to. If you mouse-wheel scroll, then try to move over to click and drag, sometimes the scrollbar disappears before you can grab it. Yes, you can change this default, but... it's the default. Good examples: Dock & Menu Bar System Preferences sidebar, Spotlight results, Finder windows in list view. - Having to hover over the more inner portion of a notification to get its close button to appear. - Unintuitive Finder toolbar buttons for changing types of view, grouping, and 'More...'. Years on I still click the wrong ones routinely. - Try searching your own music instead of Apple Music in the Music app. And then do it again. You are fighting the system to access your own content. Here's an example of something that to date still is adhered to pretty well: having dialogs with OK/Cancel/possibly other interactions be ordered such that OK is to the right and the default, non-destructive action is the one that is both visually highlighted and resounds to the Return key. And Cancel responds to the Esc key. If you use another system where you literally have to pause for even a split-second and figure out which button is tied to which key action and whether you are going to lose some work — or read the informative text to parse it out — it drives you batty. Have a browse over https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/components/menus-and-actions/buttons https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... to see the sorts of things I'm talking about. There are countless little interactions now that, if you've only used other computing systems, just feel like the things you need to do to accomplish tasks. Often they are "intuitive" to pro computer users because those users have gotten used to thinking how the computer wants them to think. But, if you've ever used a Mac thing done well, each use is a delight. Sometimes you can almost reflexively use a new interface and be delighted that the right thing just happened. If you then experience the sorts of degradations that have been happening over recent years, it's a double punch: one, a tedious annoyance and two, a reminder that it used to be — and can be — different.
reissbaker 4y ago
I don't think he was arguing against unification; he was just arguing that in practice, the unification Apple settled upon was one that made macOS worse and thus represents their continual disinvestment in the platform (because, as you note, "SwiftUI is not it by any means"). This comes after years of neglect for the Mac platform; OP says Apple was "distracted" by iOS, but IMO that is unfair; instead I would say they were focused on iOS, probably correctly, but with a downside cost for Mac users. Macs are no longer the primary breadwinners for Apple, so they get a smaller percentage of focus and resourcing. It sure seems like they could've done a better job at the unification attempts though, at least from the videos of the new Settings app floating around the internet. How can you break toggles that badly? It seems like it should be very hard to make a toggle button that occupies the regular amount of screen real estate, but has a click target that is 1px. That shouldn't happen by accident!
musicale 4y ago
Personally I'm kind of glad they let them all live. SwiftUI isn't fully baked but it seems OK. I also kind of liked Interface Builder and Storyboards.
biztos 4y ago
> one gui framework Every time I try to copy a fragment of text on my iPhone, I am reminded that "one GUI framework" is very far from a solved problem.
- Lio 4y ago
  Oh yes, that is so badly done on iOS! I thought I was the only person bothered by copy and paste on the iPhone. Even Apple’s own Messages app won’t let you copy single words. I end up having to paste the entire message into the Notes app (having fought its UI to get a blank page first). How about text entry on iOS in general? It seems almost designed to cause typos and autocorrect mistakes. Whole websites are devoted to laughing at users who make them. I hardly think Jobs would have thought that was a cool glass of water but who really knows.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    Hasn’t this issue been around sonce Jobs, if not since the introduction of the iPhone?
firecall 4y ago
It's a bit of big claim to say that Steve Troughton-Smith has no idea what he is talking about. He's not just 'this guy'. STS deserves more respect and credit for his opinions than that. Others may not agree with him, but he does know what he is talking about! :-)

grishka 4y ago

No, it's absolutely unacceptable to merge touchscreens and keyboards/mice. These should be separate frameworks where you couldn't reuse any GUI code whatsoever, not a single line. You must design everything from scratch for phones and for computers because of how different the interaction paradigms are.

smeagull 4y ago

Unify everything by fragmenting further?

incanus77 4y ago

It's not the mystical interactions or feel of widgets, layout, and function that are the problem, it's bad UX paradigms, declining consistency between apps and across versions (a Mac hallmark), buggy software on an aggressive annual schedule, holes and rot in developer documentation, constant treadmill of Xcode and device updates, and general lack of attention to detail in Mac apps. I've been a Mac user and dev for twenty years. Music.app is probably the most egregious example and gets a lot of flak for good reason. It's so bad, when I'm working all day on my Mac, I listen to music on my iPhone instead. It's utter trash, designed with the foremost goal to push Apple Music sales and subscriptions, with everything else propping that up. There are still so many magical features — Safari Cloud Tabs, using your iPad as a second display with automatic keyboard & mouse switching, attention to Focus and Notification management, a very solid iCloud sync service for so many core data apps like Contacts, Notes, and Messages, and so much more. But the whole platform just feels like a rot, and the generational gap alluded to in the post is spot on. It's not necessarily an age thing, but it feels like those who "get it" and know what the Mac was and could be, and those who are making decisions and setting deadlines who are largely driven by company-wide synergistic goals. It could be both. But instead, the latter is winning.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jahewson 4y ago
Could you give an example of some “bad UX paradigms”?
- incanus77 4y ago
  Sure. I don't keep a running list of this (and I feel like I've seen some, but can't find them now) so it's a little off the cuff... - Scrollbars not appearing until you attempt scrolling, so no indication that there is more content to scroll to. If you mouse-wheel scroll, then try to move over to click and drag, sometimes the scrollbar disappears before you can grab it. Yes, you can change this default, but... it's the default. Good examples: Dock & Menu Bar System Preferences sidebar, Spotlight results, Finder windows in list view. - Having to hover over the more inner portion of a notification to get its close button to appear. - Unintuitive Finder toolbar buttons for changing types of view, grouping, and 'More...'. Years on I still click the wrong ones routinely. - Try searching your own music instead of Apple Music in the Music app. And then do it again. You are fighting the system to access your own content. Here's an example of something that to date still is adhered to pretty well: having dialogs with OK/Cancel/possibly other interactions be ordered such that OK is to the right and the default, non-destructive action is the one that is both visually highlighted and resounds to the Return key. And Cancel responds to the Esc key. If you use another system where you literally have to pause for even a split-second and figure out which button is tied to which key action and whether you are going to lose some work — or read the informative text to parse it out — it drives you batty. Have a browse over https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/components/menus-and-actions/buttons https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... to see the sorts of things I'm talking about. There are countless little interactions now that, if you've only used other computing systems, just feel like the things you need to do to accomplish tasks. Often they are "intuitive" to pro computer users because those users have gotten used to thinking how the computer wants them to think. But, if you've ever used a Mac thing done well, each use is a delight. Sometimes you can almost reflexively use a new interface and be delighted that the right thing just happened. If you then experience the sorts of degradations that have been happening over recent years, it's a double punch: one, a tedious annoyance and two, a reminder that it used to be — and can be — different.

reissbaker 4y ago

I don't think he was arguing against unification; he was just arguing that in practice, the unification Apple settled upon was one that made macOS worse and thus represents their continual disinvestment in the platform (because, as you note, "SwiftUI is not it by any means"). This comes after years of neglect for the Mac platform; OP says Apple was "distracted" by iOS, but IMO that is unfair; instead I would say they were focused on iOS, probably correctly, but with a downside cost for Mac users. Macs are no longer the primary breadwinners for Apple, so they get a smaller percentage of focus and resourcing. It sure seems like they could've done a better job at the unification attempts though, at least from the videos of the new Settings app floating around the internet. How can you break toggles that badly? It seems like it should be very hard to make a toggle button that occupies the regular amount of screen real estate, but has a click target that is 1px. That shouldn't happen by accident!

musicale 4y ago

Personally I'm kind of glad they let them all live. SwiftUI isn't fully baked but it seems OK. I also kind of liked Interface Builder and Storyboards.

biztos 4y ago

> one gui framework Every time I try to copy a fragment of text on my iPhone, I am reminded that "one GUI framework" is very far from a solved problem.

Lio 4y ago
Oh yes, that is so badly done on iOS! I thought I was the only person bothered by copy and paste on the iPhone. Even Apple’s own Messages app won’t let you copy single words. I end up having to paste the entire message into the Notes app (having fought its UI to get a blank page first). How about text entry on iOS in general? It seems almost designed to cause typos and autocorrect mistakes. Whole websites are devoted to laughing at users who make them. I hardly think Jobs would have thought that was a cool glass of water but who really knows.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Hasn’t this issue been around sonce Jobs, if not since the introduction of the iPhone?

firecall 4y ago

It's a bit of big claim to say that Steve Troughton-Smith has no idea what he is talking about. He's not just 'this guy'. STS deserves more respect and credit for his opinions than that. Others may not agree with him, but he does know what he is talking about! :-)