4 ms·

>Your computer changing where things are on every update is not inevitable. This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the

by cons0le 10mo ago

>Your computer changing where things are on every update is not inevitable. This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the internet now. I don't care about your "U""X" front end garbage. I highly prefer text based sites like this

titzer 10mo ago
It's been driving me nuts for at least a decade. I can't remember which MacOS update it was, but when they reorganized the settings to better align with iOS, it absolutely infuriated me. Nothing will hit my thunder button like taking my skills and knowledge away. I thought I might swear off Mac forever. I've been avoiding upgrading from 13 now. In the past couple of updates, the settings for displays is completely different for no reason. That's a dialog that one doesn't use very often, except for example, when giving a presentation. It's pretty jarring to plug in on stage in front of dozens or even hundreds of people and suddenly you have to figure out a completely unfamiliar and unintuitive way of setting up mirroring. I blame GUIs. They disempower users and put them at mercy of UX "experts" who just rearrange the deck chairs when they get bored and then tell themselves how important they are. https://suno.com/song/797be726-c1b5-4a85-b14a-d67363cd90e9 https://suno.com/song/797be726-c1b5-4a85-b14a-d67363cd90e9
- dpedu 10mo ago
  The MacOs settings redesign really bothered me too. Maybe it's the 20+ years of muscle memory, or maybe the new one really is that bad, but I find myself clicking around excessively and eventually giving up and using search. I'm with you here.
  - the_other 10mo ago
    It's got a bunch of problems. - some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one - loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck - following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges - it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags - they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird. - don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel
    - dpedu 10mo ago
      These are all pretty bad! I'm not on liquid glass yet, and am not looking forward to it. I'm actually a fan of the "reduce transparency" accessibility option. Hopefully it's sill available. The weirdest issue I've ran into is on the sound settings page. Sometimes, the first column of the list of audio devices is super narrow, and since you can't drag it bigger, you can only see the first couple characters of each audio device's name, and have to guess which is the one you want. ... but if I open system preferences normally (via spotlight or apple menu) it doesn't happen. It only happens if I use the keyboard shortcut (option + any of the 3 volume keys)! I cannot imagine what kind of spaghetti code could be behind something like this. Clicking to another section and back to the sound section fixes it but... Very weird.
- vegadw 10mo ago
  ... Did you just complain about modern technology taking power away from users only to post an AI generated song about it? You know, the thing taking away power from musicians and filling up all modern digital music libraries with garbage? There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.
  - titzer 10mo ago
    > Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it? Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools. I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended.
    - titzer 10mo ago
      And for the record, I could write a multi-page rant about how Suno is not actually what I want; its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs how I want. We should instead be integrating these new music creation models into both professional tools and also making the AI tools less of a push-button one-stop shop, but giving better control rather than just meakly pawing in the direction of what you want with prompts.
      - BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
        Yes! I want my AI music generator to spit out stems and sheet music I can rearrange, not finished mp3 files.
        titzer 10mo ago
        Suno's stem extraction is miserable. MIDI transcription is totally fubar'd.
        10mo ago
- white_dragon88 10mo ago
  [dead]
- eszed 10mo ago
  I personally agree with everything you say, and am equally frustrated with (years later) not being able to find MacOS settings quickly - though part of that's due to searching within settings being terrible. Screen mirroring is the worst offender for me, too. However, I support ~80 non-technical users for whom that update was a huge benefit. They're familiar with iOS on their phones, so the new interface is (whaddya know) intuitive for them. (I get fewer support calls, so it's of indirect benefit to me, too.) I try to let go of my frustration by reminding myself that learning new technology is (literally) part of my job description, but it's not theirs. That doesn't excuse all the "moving the deck chairs" changes - Tahoe re-design: why? - but I think Apple's broad philosophy of ignoring power users like us and aligning settings interfaces was broadly correct. Funny story: when my family first got a Windows computer (3.1, so... 1992 or '93?) my first reaction was "this sucks. Why can't I just tell the computer what to do anymore?" But, obviously, GUIs are the only way the vast majority will ever be able to interact with a device - and, you know, there are lots of tasks for which a visual interface is objectively better. I'd appreciate better CLI access to MacOS settings: a one-liner that mirrors to the most recently-connected display would save me so much fumbling. Maybe that's AppleScript-able? If I can figure it out I'll share here.
alnwlsn 10mo ago
As my family's computer guy, my dad complains to me about this. And there's no satisfactory answer I can give him. My mom told me last year she is "done learning new technology" which seems like a fair goal but maybe not a choice one can make. You ever see those "dementia simulator" videos where the camera spins around and suddenly all the grocery store aisles are different? That's what it must be like to be less tech literate.

by cons0le 10mo ago

titzer 10mo ago

It's been driving me nuts for at least a decade. I can't remember which MacOS update it was, but when they reorganized the settings to better align with iOS, it absolutely infuriated me. Nothing will hit my thunder button like taking my skills and knowledge away. I thought I might swear off Mac forever. I've been avoiding upgrading from 13 now. In the past couple of updates, the settings for displays is completely different for no reason. That's a dialog that one doesn't use very often, except for example, when giving a presentation. It's pretty jarring to plug in on stage in front of dozens or even hundreds of people and suddenly you have to figure out a completely unfamiliar and unintuitive way of setting up mirroring. I blame GUIs. They disempower users and put them at mercy of UX "experts" who just rearrange the deck chairs when they get bored and then tell themselves how important they are. https://suno.com/song/797be726-c1b5-4a85-b14a-d67363cd90e9 https://suno.com/song/797be726-c1b5-4a85-b14a-d67363cd90e9

dpedu 10mo ago
The MacOs settings redesign really bothered me too. Maybe it's the 20+ years of muscle memory, or maybe the new one really is that bad, but I find myself clicking around excessively and eventually giving up and using search. I'm with you here.
- the_other 10mo ago
  It's got a bunch of problems. - some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one - loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck - following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges - it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags - they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird. - don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel
  - dpedu 10mo ago
    These are all pretty bad! I'm not on liquid glass yet, and am not looking forward to it. I'm actually a fan of the "reduce transparency" accessibility option. Hopefully it's sill available. The weirdest issue I've ran into is on the sound settings page. Sometimes, the first column of the list of audio devices is super narrow, and since you can't drag it bigger, you can only see the first couple characters of each audio device's name, and have to guess which is the one you want. ... but if I open system preferences normally (via spotlight or apple menu) it doesn't happen. It only happens if I use the keyboard shortcut (option + any of the 3 volume keys)! I cannot imagine what kind of spaghetti code could be behind something like this. Clicking to another section and back to the sound section fixes it but... Very weird.
vegadw 10mo ago
... Did you just complain about modern technology taking power away from users only to post an AI generated song about it? You know, the thing taking away power from musicians and filling up all modern digital music libraries with garbage? There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.
- titzer 10mo ago
  > Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it? Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools. I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended.
  - titzer 10mo ago
    And for the record, I could write a multi-page rant about how Suno is not actually what I want; its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs how I want. We should instead be integrating these new music creation models into both professional tools and also making the AI tools less of a push-button one-stop shop, but giving better control rather than just meakly pawing in the direction of what you want with prompts.
    - BeFlatXIII 10mo ago
      Yes! I want my AI music generator to spit out stems and sheet music I can rearrange, not finished mp3 files.
      - titzer 10mo ago
        Suno's stem extraction is miserable. MIDI transcription is totally fubar'd.
      - 10mo ago
white_dragon88 10mo ago
[dead]
eszed 10mo ago
I personally agree with everything you say, and am equally frustrated with (years later) not being able to find MacOS settings quickly - though part of that's due to searching within settings being terrible. Screen mirroring is the worst offender for me, too. However, I support ~80 non-technical users for whom that update was a huge benefit. They're familiar with iOS on their phones, so the new interface is (whaddya know) intuitive for them. (I get fewer support calls, so it's of indirect benefit to me, too.) I try to let go of my frustration by reminding myself that learning new technology is (literally) part of my job description, but it's not theirs. That doesn't excuse all the "moving the deck chairs" changes - Tahoe re-design: why? - but I think Apple's broad philosophy of ignoring power users like us and aligning settings interfaces was broadly correct. Funny story: when my family first got a Windows computer (3.1, so... 1992 or '93?) my first reaction was "this sucks. Why can't I just tell the computer what to do anymore?" But, obviously, GUIs are the only way the vast majority will ever be able to interact with a device - and, you know, there are lots of tasks for which a visual interface is objectively better. I'd appreciate better CLI access to MacOS settings: a one-liner that mirrors to the most recently-connected display would save me so much fumbling. Maybe that's AppleScript-able? If I can figure it out I'll share here.

alnwlsn 10mo ago

As my family's computer guy, my dad complains to me about this. And there's no satisfactory answer I can give him. My mom told me last year she is "done learning new technology" which seems like a fair goal but maybe not a choice one can make. You ever see those "dementia simulator" videos where the camera spins around and suddenly all the grocery store aisles are different? That's what it must be like to be less tech literate.