5 ms·

The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple them

by Y-bar 3y ago

The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey. This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behind that hover animation you can't easily target it because the actual target area is not visible and active until after you have moved the mouse in the exact area. Most egregious is the Music app as well as notification actions. Edit: Another issue is the lack of distinct draggable area in window titles, never understood why one pixel makes the window draggable, then the one below which looks identical is not.

pcurve 3y ago
Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff. IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse. What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.
- BruceEel 3y ago
  Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on. Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    From just a UI point of view, my preference is MacOS 8 — and I don't mean Mountain Lion, I mean Classic. The rest of the OS would be a nightmare today for so many reasons; but the UI was fantastic.
    - BruceEel 3y ago
      Ah yes, Mac OS 8, I have very, very limited experience with it, mostly in the form of one/two-week bursts on taking over from a coworker whenever he went on holiday. It's loooong time ago but on the negatives I remember getting very annoyed with this app called Toaster, on the positives I remember thinking how extremely pretty everything looked (still does) and being blown away by little things like, to set the icon for a folder or document you could just copy and paste one over from another file :)
    - pcurve 3y ago
      I loved MacOS 8 as well. It was a nice improvement from the System 7.6. The only thing I didn't like about MacOS was occasional system lock-up and application crashes due to real multi-threading. Back then, when your Mac crashed, it crashed hard... like your cursor didn't move. ;-)
  - gjvc 3y ago
    This thread correctly identifies "discoverability", perhaps aka "progressive disclosure", or "some form of incrementalism" as the measure by which good user interfaces are evaluated. Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity, and multiple modules, not all of which are necessarily in use by the users at any given time. Therefore, the problem of GUI design becomes one of navigating the complexity/depth-of-knowledge curve, as much as it does creating a usable set of features at each point along it. The most egregious offenders are the latest Windows, 10 and later, IMHO. When I was a kid, (coming from the world of RISC OS which had a much shallower GUI) trying to understand the big deep Windows interface, I joined the dots by telling myself "This is how they put it together. This is how they are trying to make the things work consistently and in concert." I rarely broke out of that story-telling loop. Now, when using Windows 10 or later, and a few clicks brings one to a Windows 2000 and before-era network dialogue box, the "fourth wall" as it were, of GUI design is broken, the story-telling loop above is replaced by a jarring feeling of bewilderment or all-too familiar frustration, and it's obvious they are shipping the org chart, and doing so over time, as much older GUI components are still available. At the risk of sounding nihilistic, I fear that both OS X and Windows have reached their respective local maximas of design, and we won't see any changes for the better (by the above metric) any time soon.
    - Condition1952 3y ago
      >Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity. Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. I do not need unstoppable “gamed” and “studentd” services on my computer. The sealed system implemented by Apple has actually meant the overthrow of the root user by the corporation. Now I can’t reduce complexity, bloatware. The only solution seems to be praying that BSD or Linux become useable one day
      - gjvc 3y ago
        > Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. Yup, updated my comment to clarify that point -- thank you. "the overthrow of the root user by the corporation" -- damn. Good turn of phrase :-(
  - Condition1952 3y ago
    I am not afraid of the decadence they’ve made of the settings panel because I use Alfred. I haven’t yet installed Ventura. I had to downgrade from Monterey because the cmd-L keyboard shortcut had stopped working on Contacs.app
    - nntwozz 3y ago
      You can remap cmd-L in settings globally or for each app, did you try that?
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Yeah. I first started using MacOS seriously for a job a few years ago, and I was amazed at how poor the discoverability was, especially given its reputation. Important functions were hidden behind arcane modifier combinations or only available via "intuitive" gestures that you'd never work out on your own. I don't think this was just a case of unfamiliarity - as a usually-Linux user I've been unfamiliar with Windows functions before, but still managed to work them out without resorting to Google, even in the post-8 era And the window management as a whole seems like a case of form over function, with no way to see what windows are actually open, or switch between several of the same application, without multi-step processes (Expose/MC or cmd-tab cycling) And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, but it seems we're stuck with this space-saving measure from 40 years ago since it's now part of the brand identity
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago
    > And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, On other hand a menu bar at the corner of the screen has an infinite size if you are using a mouse, a trackball or a touchpad. But it's size is finite if you are using a touch display. Let me explain what I mean with infinite size. You can overshoot arbitrarily far when using the mouse and you would still be inside the menu, since top of the menu is the screen corner. While writing this, I've noticed that in a maximized Firefox under Gnome this isn't true anymore. There is at list one line of pixels above menu. When you click on them nothing happens. Therefore I cannot overshoot anymore. Another failure of modern UIs.
estebarb 3y ago
Recently I bought a MBP and I'm surprised by how hard to use it is. Printing by both sides? Not supported, you must do it by hand. And some apps print the pages in reverse order, so you end up having to sort the pages. Use numberpad . as . instead of ,? You have to download an app to use a sane default. Alt+. in terminal? No luck if you aren't using an English keyboard. Run a downloaded app? Run it, accept failure, settings, security, look for blocked app, enable it. It is even worse than Windows Vista. Give some app permissions? Yeah, you must know which permissions, as you cannot search by app... And so on...
- matthew_stone 3y ago
  It has been possible to print double-sided since at least Lion/2008…
  - estebarb 3y ago
    Only if you have a printer that supports it. Otherwise you have to do it by hand https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-double-sided-on-mac https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-dou...
    - yawaramin 3y ago
      If the hardware itself doesn't support it, how would the software?
      - jt2190 3y ago
        The issue is that the printer manufacturer needs to provide a printer driver for MacOS that gives MacOS access to that printer capability. (One could argue that Apple should write the driver, and they might for very popular devices.)
      - estebarb 3y ago
        Windows approach: Print even pages first, ask the user to move the printed pages back to the printer and then print the odd pages later. The result is ready to be read. In Mac you need to print first one side, move the pages manually, print the other side. But you have to remember to add an extra page if the page count is odd, have caution if an app tries to be intelligent and sort the pages in a different way... In Windows all those calculations are done by the system. It is easy! Just print and follow instructions. In Mac is painful.
holoduke 3y ago
Or what about the scrollbar hiding automatically so its really hard to manualy grab the scrollbar handle and scroll with your mouse. Specially in long lists super annoying.
- grishka 3y ago
  There's a setting to always show the scrollbars.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Ah, yes, the "Beware of the Leopard" school of design. Everything is possible, nothing is forbidden, but the defaults are terrible and the controls are hidden as well as they could possibly hide them.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    https://www.appsntips.com/keep-scroll-bars-from-disappearing-on-mac/ https://www.appsntips.com/keep-scroll-bars-from-disappearing...
Chris2048 3y ago
Perhaps they are creating a problem to push you onto their solution. When you can't discover things yourself, that annoying AI voice-assistant might become needed.
Yemeth 3y ago
> and way-too-subtle shades of grey MacOS went downhill when Jonathan Ive decided to throw out all colors in favor of the 'content'. To this day I spend too much time deciphering blue-greyish icon shapes in the Finder's side bar.
- eyelidlessness 3y ago
  I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure the monochrome icons began well before Ive had influence on the software. OS X moved towards shape rather than color in eg iconography to support UI scaling (which had been an effort, and a more ambitious one, for years prior); and then eventually to support adaptive theming most recognizable (for its value anyway) in dark mode.
dgb23 3y ago
Somewhat related: As someone who likes working on a single screen I typically like to open things in full-screen mode by default. MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens. You can't turn it off, you can just switch between two similarly slow ones. I can't imagine a good reason for this. What is their model of a user and how did they derive "slow animation when switching windows is good" from that?
- silvestrov 3y ago
  Same with animation when switching to/from full screen. I mostly just want it to happend in an instant.
- Y-bar 3y ago
  It's been a staple Human Interface Guideline that applications should re-open in the layout and position they were when they quit. Personally I barely use full screen at all in Mac OS, but I can see why you want it. It is default in some apps, it should be default in all apps, it isn't.
- jt2190 3y ago
  > MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens... Perhaps: System Settings... Accessibility > Display: Reduce Motion
  - dgb23 3y ago
    That just switches from one slow animation to another.
    - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
      And I don't want or need, for my own use, some Accessibility-defined systemwide setting that tells all apps to try not having motion. It sounds nice to have…should I ever need that. But at least from Apple's description it seems invasive and like it might possibly disable untold things that I don't want to mess with. I want to speed up or eliminate certain decorative things, like this particular animation. Since there's no obvious no-side-effects way, I just grumble and occasionally rediscover UI performance when I use some other system.
aequitas 3y ago
> hiding things behind slow hover effects I can’t for the life of me understand why it’s a good idea to hide the close button for notifications or virtual desktops behind a long mouseover on any spot that is not the actual location of where the close button pops up.
sillywalk 3y ago
Somebody whose name I can't remember said something like Apple Designs a UI that people want to buy - it looks cool in the apple store - not use.

by Y-bar 3y ago

pcurve 3y ago

Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff. IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse. What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.

BruceEel 3y ago
Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on. Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
- ben_w 3y ago
  From just a UI point of view, my preference is MacOS 8 — and I don't mean Mountain Lion, I mean Classic. The rest of the OS would be a nightmare today for so many reasons; but the UI was fantastic.
  - BruceEel 3y ago
    Ah yes, Mac OS 8, I have very, very limited experience with it, mostly in the form of one/two-week bursts on taking over from a coworker whenever he went on holiday. It's loooong time ago but on the negatives I remember getting very annoyed with this app called Toaster, on the positives I remember thinking how extremely pretty everything looked (still does) and being blown away by little things like, to set the icon for a folder or document you could just copy and paste one over from another file :)
  - pcurve 3y ago
    I loved MacOS 8 as well. It was a nice improvement from the System 7.6. The only thing I didn't like about MacOS was occasional system lock-up and application crashes due to real multi-threading. Back then, when your Mac crashed, it crashed hard... like your cursor didn't move. ;-)
- gjvc 3y ago
  This thread correctly identifies "discoverability", perhaps aka "progressive disclosure", or "some form of incrementalism" as the measure by which good user interfaces are evaluated. Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity, and multiple modules, not all of which are necessarily in use by the users at any given time. Therefore, the problem of GUI design becomes one of navigating the complexity/depth-of-knowledge curve, as much as it does creating a usable set of features at each point along it. The most egregious offenders are the latest Windows, 10 and later, IMHO. When I was a kid, (coming from the world of RISC OS which had a much shallower GUI) trying to understand the big deep Windows interface, I joined the dots by telling myself "This is how they put it together. This is how they are trying to make the things work consistently and in concert." I rarely broke out of that story-telling loop. Now, when using Windows 10 or later, and a few clicks brings one to a Windows 2000 and before-era network dialogue box, the "fourth wall" as it were, of GUI design is broken, the story-telling loop above is replaced by a jarring feeling of bewilderment or all-too familiar frustration, and it's obvious they are shipping the org chart, and doing so over time, as much older GUI components are still available. At the risk of sounding nihilistic, I fear that both OS X and Windows have reached their respective local maximas of design, and we won't see any changes for the better (by the above metric) any time soon.
  - Condition1952 3y ago
    >Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity. Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. I do not need unstoppable “gamed” and “studentd” services on my computer. The sealed system implemented by Apple has actually meant the overthrow of the root user by the corporation. Now I can’t reduce complexity, bloatware. The only solution seems to be praying that BSD or Linux become useable one day
    - gjvc 3y ago
      > Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. Yup, updated my comment to clarify that point -- thank you. "the overthrow of the root user by the corporation" -- damn. Good turn of phrase :-(
- Condition1952 3y ago
  I am not afraid of the decadence they’ve made of the settings panel because I use Alfred. I haven’t yet installed Ventura. I had to downgrade from Monterey because the cmd-L keyboard shortcut had stopped working on Contacs.app
  - nntwozz 3y ago
    You can remap cmd-L in settings globally or for each app, did you try that?
didntcheck 3y ago
Yeah. I first started using MacOS seriously for a job a few years ago, and I was amazed at how poor the discoverability was, especially given its reputation. Important functions were hidden behind arcane modifier combinations or only available via "intuitive" gestures that you'd never work out on your own. I don't think this was just a case of unfamiliarity - as a usually-Linux user I've been unfamiliar with Windows functions before, but still managed to work them out without resorting to Google, even in the post-8 era And the window management as a whole seems like a case of form over function, with no way to see what windows are actually open, or switch between several of the same application, without multi-step processes (Expose/MC or cmd-tab cycling) And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, but it seems we're stuck with this space-saving measure from 40 years ago since it's now part of the brand identity
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  > And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, On other hand a menu bar at the corner of the screen has an infinite size if you are using a mouse, a trackball or a touchpad. But it's size is finite if you are using a touch display. Let me explain what I mean with infinite size. You can overshoot arbitrarily far when using the mouse and you would still be inside the menu, since top of the menu is the screen corner. While writing this, I've noticed that in a maximized Firefox under Gnome this isn't true anymore. There is at list one line of pixels above menu. When you click on them nothing happens. Therefore I cannot overshoot anymore. Another failure of modern UIs.

estebarb 3y ago

Recently I bought a MBP and I'm surprised by how hard to use it is. Printing by both sides? Not supported, you must do it by hand. And some apps print the pages in reverse order, so you end up having to sort the pages. Use numberpad . as . instead of ,? You have to download an app to use a sane default. Alt+. in terminal? No luck if you aren't using an English keyboard. Run a downloaded app? Run it, accept failure, settings, security, look for blocked app, enable it. It is even worse than Windows Vista. Give some app permissions? Yeah, you must know which permissions, as you cannot search by app... And so on...

matthew_stone 3y ago
It has been possible to print double-sided since at least Lion/2008…
- estebarb 3y ago
  Only if you have a printer that supports it. Otherwise you have to do it by hand https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-double-sided-on-mac https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-dou...
  - yawaramin 3y ago
    If the hardware itself doesn't support it, how would the software?
    - jt2190 3y ago
      The issue is that the printer manufacturer needs to provide a printer driver for MacOS that gives MacOS access to that printer capability. (One could argue that Apple should write the driver, and they might for very popular devices.)
    - estebarb 3y ago
      Windows approach: Print even pages first, ask the user to move the printed pages back to the printer and then print the odd pages later. The result is ready to be read. In Mac you need to print first one side, move the pages manually, print the other side. But you have to remember to add an extra page if the page count is odd, have caution if an app tries to be intelligent and sort the pages in a different way... In Windows all those calculations are done by the system. It is easy! Just print and follow instructions. In Mac is painful.

holoduke 3y ago

Or what about the scrollbar hiding automatically so its really hard to manualy grab the scrollbar handle and scroll with your mouse. Specially in long lists super annoying.

grishka 3y ago
There's a setting to always show the scrollbars.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Ah, yes, the "Beware of the Leopard" school of design. Everything is possible, nothing is forbidden, but the defaults are terrible and the controls are hidden as well as they could possibly hide them.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  https://www.appsntips.com/keep-scroll-bars-from-disappearing-on-mac/ https://www.appsntips.com/keep-scroll-bars-from-disappearing...

Chris2048 3y ago

Perhaps they are creating a problem to push you onto their solution. When you can't discover things yourself, that annoying AI voice-assistant might become needed.

Yemeth 3y ago

> and way-too-subtle shades of grey MacOS went downhill when Jonathan Ive decided to throw out all colors in favor of the 'content'. To this day I spend too much time deciphering blue-greyish icon shapes in the Finder's side bar.

eyelidlessness 3y ago
I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure the monochrome icons began well before Ive had influence on the software. OS X moved towards shape rather than color in eg iconography to support UI scaling (which had been an effort, and a more ambitious one, for years prior); and then eventually to support adaptive theming most recognizable (for its value anyway) in dark mode.

dgb23 3y ago

Somewhat related: As someone who likes working on a single screen I typically like to open things in full-screen mode by default. MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens. You can't turn it off, you can just switch between two similarly slow ones. I can't imagine a good reason for this. What is their model of a user and how did they derive "slow animation when switching windows is good" from that?

silvestrov 3y ago
Same with animation when switching to/from full screen. I mostly just want it to happend in an instant.
Y-bar 3y ago
It's been a staple Human Interface Guideline that applications should re-open in the layout and position they were when they quit. Personally I barely use full screen at all in Mac OS, but I can see why you want it. It is default in some apps, it should be default in all apps, it isn't.
jt2190 3y ago
> MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens... Perhaps: System Settings... Accessibility > Display: Reduce Motion
- dgb23 3y ago
  That just switches from one slow animation to another.
  - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
    And I don't want or need, for my own use, some Accessibility-defined systemwide setting that tells all apps to try not having motion. It sounds nice to have…should I ever need that. But at least from Apple's description it seems invasive and like it might possibly disable untold things that I don't want to mess with. I want to speed up or eliminate certain decorative things, like this particular animation. Since there's no obvious no-side-effects way, I just grumble and occasionally rediscover UI performance when I use some other system.

aequitas 3y ago

> hiding things behind slow hover effects I can’t for the life of me understand why it’s a good idea to hide the close button for notifications or virtual desktops behind a long mouseover on any spot that is not the actual location of where the close button pops up.

sillywalk 3y ago

Somebody whose name I can't remember said something like Apple Designs a UI that people want to buy - it looks cool in the apple store - not use.