5 ms·

I have used/owned the macs at various points in my life. The user interface has remained consistent over the years, but it has poor usability compared to even G

by jeswin 4y ago

I have used/owned the macs at various points in my life. The user interface has remained consistent over the years, but it has poor usability compared to even Gnome due to the accompanying legacy baggage. Here's an example. Closing all document windows doesn't close the app. This is a design decision from 1984 (at which point we knew far less about the usability of Desktop UIs than we do now) which imho hasn't quite aged well. What's the point of keeping an app open without documents? Most people open docs from the File Manager or Desktop (which might load the app as well if there isn't one already running). And not by going to an inactive app (with a hanging toolbar) and then doing File -> Open.

tpush 4y ago
Not closing the app once all windows are closed is not 'legacy baggage', but intentional design. An app can do more things than just display stuff in windows, e.g. playing music, or downloading stuff.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  It may be less intuitive that apps can run with few or no visual indicators.
ubercow13 4y ago
>Closing all document windows doesn't close the app I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document. Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going. Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document. The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.
- Steltek 4y ago
  Familiar != consistent. Mac is app-centric, all other mainstream OS's are window-centric, and they're all internally consistent. If you grew up with one system, the other feels alien and broken. For example, on MacOS, alt-tab not cycling through the list of windows feels so absurdly broken to me that I don't even bother trying to use that shortcut anymore. Focusing apps that don't even have a visual presence on screen is also a source of heightened frustration.
  - ubercow13 4y ago
    When keyboard shortcuts that control window/document lifetime sometimes also control app lifetime depending on context, that is an internal inconsistency in the abstraction. Familiarity can help you deal with it just fine, but I don't think I was confusing the two.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  “Magic windows” is something that bites me fairly often under Windows/Linux. “Well I’m done with this page, might as well close the browser wi— oh wait that’s right it’s downloading something.” I wish there were Linux distributions that took an app-centric approach similar to that of macOS. It just gels with my brain better.
splatcollision 4y ago
Your legacy baggage is my favorite feature. I may not need any documents open for an app right now, but what about 5 minutes later? Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. It’s called multitasking and there’s a ton of working memory these days to the point of rarely having to check, not like the legacy days you refer to.
- jeswin 4y ago
  > Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. This is a part of what I was saying. Apps are cold-starting much faster today than it was back in the days of disk spindles. There are also ways to keep it hot, while not being active.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    I am a professional artist who has been working with Adobe's tools since the turn of the century and let me assure you: Adobe's apps always take forever to cold-start. Always. I recently got an M2 Air and Illustrator loads the fastest it ever has - I'm staring at the splash screen for all of five seconds before it's ready to get to work. Normally it's been more like 20-120 seconds for the past decade. I am quite sure Adobe will find a way to make their apps take several minutes to start up on the M2. As a consequence, Illustrator cold-starts when I log in; the only time it stops running is if it crashes, or if I need to quit it to update plugins or the app itself. If I go off and do something else for a while it quietly gets swapped to disc by the system; the instant I switch back, it gets swapped into memory, ready to get back to work.
sirn 4y ago
I'm the opposite. Just the other day I was trying to find if I could keep an application running without any window on KDE Plasma :-) I want to keep some applications running so it continue to receive its own thing in the background, but I do not want to accidentally open the window during Alt-Tab, e.g. my email client, my chat application. (On macOS it's still showing up on Cmd+Tab, but selecting the application doesn't activate the window). I think this design decision still makes sense in 2022. On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.
- jeswin 4y ago
  > On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior. Yeah, but the number of apps which require this behavior is far less than those which don't. Hence in my view, not a good reason to default to it.
  - sirn 4y ago
    Personally, I found the opposite to be true. Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. That said, I still like KDE Plasma more than macOS as a desktop. But this and the proxy icons are two things that I missed the most.
    - jeswin 4y ago
      > Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. Why are desktop versions of TODO lists, note-taking applications, and time trackers constantly polling the server in the background? Social apps and web apps I understand.

by jeswin 4y ago

tpush 4y ago

Not closing the app once all windows are closed is not 'legacy baggage', but intentional design. An app can do more things than just display stuff in windows, e.g. playing music, or downloading stuff.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
It may be less intuitive that apps can run with few or no visual indicators.

ubercow13 4y ago

>Closing all document windows doesn't close the app I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document. Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going. Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document. The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.

Steltek 4y ago
Familiar != consistent. Mac is app-centric, all other mainstream OS's are window-centric, and they're all internally consistent. If you grew up with one system, the other feels alien and broken. For example, on MacOS, alt-tab not cycling through the list of windows feels so absurdly broken to me that I don't even bother trying to use that shortcut anymore. Focusing apps that don't even have a visual presence on screen is also a source of heightened frustration.
- ubercow13 4y ago
  When keyboard shortcuts that control window/document lifetime sometimes also control app lifetime depending on context, that is an internal inconsistency in the abstraction. Familiarity can help you deal with it just fine, but I don't think I was confusing the two.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
“Magic windows” is something that bites me fairly often under Windows/Linux. “Well I’m done with this page, might as well close the browser wi— oh wait that’s right it’s downloading something.” I wish there were Linux distributions that took an app-centric approach similar to that of macOS. It just gels with my brain better.

splatcollision 4y ago

Your legacy baggage is my favorite feature. I may not need any documents open for an app right now, but what about 5 minutes later? Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. It’s called multitasking and there’s a ton of working memory these days to the point of rarely having to check, not like the legacy days you refer to.

jeswin 4y ago
> Why would I wait for photoshop to start up again just because I was doing something else for a bit. This is a part of what I was saying. Apps are cold-starting much faster today than it was back in the days of disk spindles. There are also ways to keep it hot, while not being active.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  I am a professional artist who has been working with Adobe's tools since the turn of the century and let me assure you: Adobe's apps always take forever to cold-start. Always. I recently got an M2 Air and Illustrator loads the fastest it ever has - I'm staring at the splash screen for all of five seconds before it's ready to get to work. Normally it's been more like 20-120 seconds for the past decade. I am quite sure Adobe will find a way to make their apps take several minutes to start up on the M2. As a consequence, Illustrator cold-starts when I log in; the only time it stops running is if it crashes, or if I need to quit it to update plugins or the app itself. If I go off and do something else for a while it quietly gets swapped to disc by the system; the instant I switch back, it gets swapped into memory, ready to get back to work.

sirn 4y ago

I'm the opposite. Just the other day I was trying to find if I could keep an application running without any window on KDE Plasma :-) I want to keep some applications running so it continue to receive its own thing in the background, but I do not want to accidentally open the window during Alt-Tab, e.g. my email client, my chat application. (On macOS it's still showing up on Cmd+Tab, but selecting the application doesn't activate the window). I think this design decision still makes sense in 2022. On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior.

jeswin 4y ago
> On Windows and Linux, applications can have no window open by installing a background service (ugh) or hide to status bar, but application need to explicitly implement the behavior. On macOS, this is the expected behavior. Yeah, but the number of apps which require this behavior is far less than those which don't. Hence in my view, not a good reason to default to it.
- sirn 4y ago
  Personally, I found the opposite to be true. Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. That said, I still like KDE Plasma more than macOS as a desktop. But this and the proxy icons are two things that I missed the most.
  - jeswin 4y ago
    > Given more and more applications require constantly polling backend server (not only social apps, e.g. a TODO list, note-taking application, a time tracker, etc.) I much more prefer this behavior being the default. Why are desktop versions of TODO lists, note-taking applications, and time trackers constantly polling the server in the background? Social apps and web apps I understand.