5 ms·

The new system settings app is painful. It freezes for up to 30 seconds at a time after I take an action. It often goes completely blank, it flickers a lot and

by AJRF 4y ago

The new system settings app is painful. It freezes for up to 30 seconds at a time after I take an action. It often goes completely blank, it flickers a lot and in general it's so hard to find stuff in it - the search is bad and they have just jammed settings in places that don't make sense. I am on a 2020 MacBook Air with m1 chip, 16GB ram - wouldn't expect performance problems in the settings app, yet here we are. I also get that issue with Safari where it freezes the entire system, that happens on my work laptop which is an M1 Max with 32GB RAM

baggy_trough 4y ago
Agreed, the Settings app is horribly ugly now. So is About This Mac.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  its not only ugly, its harder to use, more confusing where things are placed now...
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Am I the only person who could never find where anything in the old prefs app was? I started using OS X in 2001. The old prefs app also didn’t scale.
wildrhythms 4y ago
Seriously, what was wrong with the old tried and true System Preferences? Everything had a recognizable icon, every icon arranged in simple rows, and every icon lay before me in a single window. Now, I'm forced to scroll the pane on the left (unclear since scroll bars are invisible by default) to find the outermost setting, and then deal with nested navigation confined inside of the right pane. Also, gone are the recognizable icons, replaced with confusingly similar colored gradients and a hieroglyph icon that is unreadable because the contrast ratio terrible against the gradient. Also, the 'search' causes the entire left navigational pane to go blank and replace itself with search results, rather than 'show me the way' like it used to. Extremely disappointing! Old: https://i.imgur.com/sZY9dUw.png https://i.imgur.com/sZY9dUw.png New: https://i.imgur.com/NGj7I69.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NGj7I69.jpg
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  It sort of feels like the only "advantage" to the new one is that it is more like the iOS Settings. Looks very similar in layout. That might be the intent. "Harmonization". Product Managers Gone Wild.
  - jxramos 4y ago
    This. It appears they want to harmonize the OS ecosystems. macOS has a control center UI someplace now off the menu bar which was pretty interesting to find the other week.
userbinator 4y ago
The Windows equivalent also went through a similar and just as horrible change (Control Panel being replaced by Settings), and strangely enough, Windows 11 Settings looks disturbingly similar to the macOS Ventura one.
ezfe 4y ago
I've got an M2 Air, can't say I've experienced any of the performance/visual issues you describe. Design wise...is a different story of course
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I don't mind the design. Whenever I want to know where to find something I just ask where would I expect to find it on the iphone and it's usually there.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Where would you expect to find the "Startup Disk" pane on iPhone?
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      No idea where I’d find that in the old UI either. I’d just use the search bar.
supercucumber 4y ago
System Preferences was rewritten for Ventura in SwiftUI, which is absolutely not ready for production, especially on Mac. Speaking from personal experience, I recently wrote a simple macOS app using SwiftUI. I found the framework to be slow (why does it use so much cpu/memory when idle??), unintuitive, and awkward to use. Despite being in its 4th year, SwiftUI is still very much beta software, and I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious.
- dagmx 4y ago
  As a counterpoint, I’ve done several Mac apps with SwiftUI for internal use and it’s been quite pleasant. Early SwiftUI was definitely rough, but it’s quite nice now as of Monterey and Ventura. If you’re seeing high CPU use and slow performance, it might be due to high usage of ObservableObject or other things that may be triggering updates under the hood more often than need be. SwiftUI is very sensitive to the data model structure since it’s a react style setup.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    Apple really needs to put some effort into evangelizing SwiftUI — some of the problem is poor or nonexistent Apple documentation and some is that every Stackoverflow answer is obsolete because the documentation is still so poor. You can still run into walls with SwiftUI, but there are fewer of them than there used to be.

by AJRF 4y ago

baggy_trough 4y ago

Agreed, the Settings app is horribly ugly now. So is About This Mac.

andrekandre 4y ago
its not only ugly, its harder to use, more confusing where things are placed now...
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Am I the only person who could never find where anything in the old prefs app was? I started using OS X in 2001. The old prefs app also didn’t scale.

wildrhythms 4y ago

Seriously, what was wrong with the old tried and true System Preferences? Everything had a recognizable icon, every icon arranged in simple rows, and every icon lay before me in a single window. Now, I'm forced to scroll the pane on the left (unclear since scroll bars are invisible by default) to find the outermost setting, and then deal with nested navigation confined inside of the right pane. Also, gone are the recognizable icons, replaced with confusingly similar colored gradients and a hieroglyph icon that is unreadable because the contrast ratio terrible against the gradient. Also, the 'search' causes the entire left navigational pane to go blank and replace itself with search results, rather than 'show me the way' like it used to. Extremely disappointing! Old: https://i.imgur.com/sZY9dUw.png https://i.imgur.com/sZY9dUw.png New: https://i.imgur.com/NGj7I69.jpg https://i.imgur.com/NGj7I69.jpg

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
It sort of feels like the only "advantage" to the new one is that it is more like the iOS Settings. Looks very similar in layout. That might be the intent. "Harmonization". Product Managers Gone Wild.
- jxramos 4y ago
  This. It appears they want to harmonize the OS ecosystems. macOS has a control center UI someplace now off the menu bar which was pretty interesting to find the other week.

userbinator 4y ago

The Windows equivalent also went through a similar and just as horrible change (Control Panel being replaced by Settings), and strangely enough, Windows 11 Settings looks disturbingly similar to the macOS Ventura one.

ezfe 4y ago

I've got an M2 Air, can't say I've experienced any of the performance/visual issues you describe. Design wise...is a different story of course

Gigachad 4y ago
I don't mind the design. Whenever I want to know where to find something I just ask where would I expect to find it on the iphone and it's usually there.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Where would you expect to find the "Startup Disk" pane on iPhone?
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    No idea where I’d find that in the old UI either. I’d just use the search bar.

supercucumber 4y ago

System Preferences was rewritten for Ventura in SwiftUI, which is absolutely not ready for production, especially on Mac. Speaking from personal experience, I recently wrote a simple macOS app using SwiftUI. I found the framework to be slow (why does it use so much cpu/memory when idle??), unintuitive, and awkward to use. Despite being in its 4th year, SwiftUI is still very much beta software, and I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious.

dagmx 4y ago
As a counterpoint, I’ve done several Mac apps with SwiftUI for internal use and it’s been quite pleasant. Early SwiftUI was definitely rough, but it’s quite nice now as of Monterey and Ventura. If you’re seeing high CPU use and slow performance, it might be due to high usage of ObservableObject or other things that may be triggering updates under the hood more often than need be. SwiftUI is very sensitive to the data model structure since it’s a react style setup.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Apple really needs to put some effort into evangelizing SwiftUI — some of the problem is poor or nonexistent Apple documentation and some is that every Stackoverflow answer is obsolete because the documentation is still so poor. You can still run into walls with SwiftUI, but there are fewer of them than there used to be.