5 ms·

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

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.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    If you want to see scrollbars everywhere then I'm not going to read the rest of your comment.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      What a petty way of responding. If everybody stopped listening once they heard one thing they disagreed with, the whole world would be deaf
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    > Scrollbars I don't get it. If I want to see whether/how much I can scroll ... I try it. I appreciate only having to see the information when I actually need to see it instead of it distracting me otherwise. > Having to hover over the more inner portion of a notification to get its close button to appear This reminds me of a much worse thing regarding notifications. When you install an app, often you get a notification telling you something like "This app will send you notifications". For some reason these apps don't go away automatically, so okay, you swipe it away manually. But for some reason they keep re-appearing. After over a year of using macOS I found out a hidden button saying "allow". A hidden button. Asking you whether you agree to something that wasn't a question. The fuck?
    - incanus77 4y ago
      Part of the scroll bar thing is an admittedly subtle old interaction cue, which is that the scroll bars are sized proportionally to how many screens of data there are. So in just glancing at a list of ten files, you can see that there are approximately 20-25 files total, with no interactions.
      - solarkraft 4y ago
        Sure. I may have worded it a big ambiguously, but I mean that too. I don't want to be confronted with information I don't need at a moment, so I prefer this information that I need maybe 1% of the time to be behind an explicit interaction.
carabiner 4y ago
Messages sync has been giving me problems for months. I'm receiving SMS messages on my MBP that are not being sent to my phone for some reason. Then when they show up in MacOS, they're labeled as iMessages even though they're green bubbles from Android users. This is definitely degradation of the Apple experience for me. I just don't get it.

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.
- jononomo 4y ago
  If you want to see scrollbars everywhere then I'm not going to read the rest of your comment.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    What a petty way of responding. If everybody stopped listening once they heard one thing they disagreed with, the whole world would be deaf
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > Scrollbars I don't get it. If I want to see whether/how much I can scroll ... I try it. I appreciate only having to see the information when I actually need to see it instead of it distracting me otherwise. > Having to hover over the more inner portion of a notification to get its close button to appear This reminds me of a much worse thing regarding notifications. When you install an app, often you get a notification telling you something like "This app will send you notifications". For some reason these apps don't go away automatically, so okay, you swipe it away manually. But for some reason they keep re-appearing. After over a year of using macOS I found out a hidden button saying "allow". A hidden button. Asking you whether you agree to something that wasn't a question. The fuck?
  - incanus77 4y ago
    Part of the scroll bar thing is an admittedly subtle old interaction cue, which is that the scroll bars are sized proportionally to how many screens of data there are. So in just glancing at a list of ten files, you can see that there are approximately 20-25 files total, with no interactions.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      Sure. I may have worded it a big ambiguously, but I mean that too. I don't want to be confronted with information I don't need at a moment, so I prefer this information that I need maybe 1% of the time to be behind an explicit interaction.

carabiner 4y ago

Messages sync has been giving me problems for months. I'm receiving SMS messages on my MBP that are not being sent to my phone for some reason. Then when they show up in MacOS, they're labeled as iMessages even though they're green bubbles from Android users. This is definitely degradation of the Apple experience for me. I just don't get it.