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This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keepi

• wmf 1y ago
  Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.
  • basisword 1y ago
    Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?
    • anonymars 1y ago
      Windows Mojave strikes again. Vista really got the short end of the stick
  • llm_nerd 1y ago
    I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect. Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable. But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
    • llm_nerd 1y ago
      As a followup on this, it's notable that Apple has changed the title of the linked post to "Apple introduces a delightful and elegant new software design", making the subtitle "A universal design across platforms brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality while maintaining the familiarity of Apple’s software" Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.
  • kej 1y ago
    I was referring to the idea of having a universal design across mobile and desktop, which was one of the goals of Metro, rather than the specific visual style.
• jmkni 1y ago
  Definitely in the minority here but I liked Metro, I always felt it was just a decade ahead of it's time (as was Windows 8 generally)
  • bowsamic 1y ago
    I really liked metro on windows phone but I did not understand it on desktop. It didn’t help that they took away the usual UI
    • jmkni 1y ago
      Right but go a decade ahead when many more people use their phones as their primary computer, much less of a problem
      • bowsamic 1y ago
        Then they should have waited for a decade? Literally what does that have to do with anything. No shit, design decisions are very different when teleported literally a decade later
      • pseudalopex 1y ago
        Familiarity was not the only problem. A good UI for a small touch screen is a bad UI for a large screen, keyboard, and mouse.
  • jhickok 1y ago
    The issue with Metro, imo, is that it was dizzying to use as you were swept away into new interfaces and for many tasks we lost a lot of usability.
    • herbturbo 1y ago
      Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.
• grishka 1y ago
  They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.
  • n42 1y ago
    one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
    • BoorishBears 1y ago
      Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
      • grishka 1y ago
        Different people may approach the same UI differently. A good practice in UX design is to put things where people expect to find them — and duplicate them if different people go looking in different places. So a working search function doesn't absolve you of having to make the structure of your screens/menus/whatever make sense.
      • thewebguyd 1y ago
        > Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way? Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy. I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people. I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around. So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
• gherkinnn 1y ago
  Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops. As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
  • kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.
• bluSCALE4 1y ago
  Window's problem has always been their legacy systems. I believe to this day you can bring up windows 95 era dialogs somehow in Windows 11?
  • whatever1 1y ago
    It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros
    • amlib 1y ago
      You seem out of touch with the current trends, as it is right now you have to open a command line window during the installation of windows and run some commands just so you have the privillege of being able to install the system without the requirement of an online account. (And it's now a mandatory procedure if you have no internet access! You are locked up from even proceeding with installation until supplying access to the internet, unless you do that CLI kung-fu) Also, make sure you have the correct incantation because Microsoft keeps changing it from time to time! I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system. Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)
      • bluSCALE4 1y ago
        Very meandering comment. You've highlighted a very stupid reason for introducing CLI at install albeit a real situation. Didn't know there was a command for bypassing it and I freely admit, it made me see red. The true difference between Windows and other OSes is that the CLI was thought out. I imagine there are still people out there running headless OSes. The UI is optional. Though this isn't the case for macOS, it tries to pretend it is IMO.
• whiteboardr 1y ago
  It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right. Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote. Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time. What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience. A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
  • out-of-ideas 1y ago
    > It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right. except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar; what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better) edit: more newlines
• cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist. If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
  • max51 1y ago
    > It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that. For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
    • cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.
      • max51 1y ago
        Apple is a lot better at eating their own dogfood than microsoft. They had UI designers working on macbooks at the Microsoft office, that alone probably explains a lot of issues with the OS
      • saratogacx 1y ago
        It isn't quite as simple as that. The guy that ran the windows org during that time thought himself the Steve Jobs of Microsoft and didn't hear anything different (to the point of having multi-page public blog posts about how much the launched windows 8 US was the best thing ever and if you didn't agree, you were just wrong). During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus. The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.
• satvikpendem 1y ago
  Not Metro, which was flat, but their newer Fluent UI, shown in their design videos [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
• al_borland 1y ago
  It doesn’t look like Apple changed how the desktop fundamentally works. Microsoft put a touch-first UI on the server, and replaced the start button with a hot corner. Using that with RDP was a horrible experience. If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.
• ilt 1y ago
  Metro never had this much transparency ingrained in the UX - and where it had, it was tastefully done with no/minimal accessibility concerns - doesn't seem like a valid comparison. Windows 8, especially 8.1 was a very pretty piece of software, the whole gesture- and card-based interface fiasco ruined its good name.
  • kej 1y ago
    I didn't mean the visual style so much as the "let's use the same design on phones and on giant desktop monitors" philosophy.