To be fair, it's also a good, cohesive amalgamation of UI interaction concepts as well. If someone did realize this design, I'd be on-board for trying it out.
Could you elaborate on this? I don't feel that way at all when using any modern OS/device, but maybe I just haven't thought about it in the same way.
Using Apple devices requires a great deal of memorisation. For power users this is a relatively minor burden, but it is a serious issue for inexperienced users, or those with problems in cognition or memory.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
People spend hours a day interacting with a computer in one form or another, they will memorize things.
PS: Remember getting annoyed when Microsoft when gaga over the 'ribbon' concept? I bet you don't think about that one much anymore.
Many of Apple's UI interactions can only be discovered through guesswork or reading the docs. If you open Launchpad often, nothing alerts you to the fact that there's a touchpad gesture for that. Unlabeled icons are rife in iOS and there is no discovery mechanism equivalent to a tooltip.
You can. And I do. And given your post, I assume you do too.
But did you know that most people don't?
I teach people computer skills (a lot of children, ages 8-12, but other ages as well). Only the very clever ones (those we can expect to welcome on HN in a couple of years ;-) ) figure it out by themselves. You'd be surprised of the in-your-face stuff people simply do not read on the screen. I then point it out, but it's about 50/50 whether they'll pick up the habit.
And it's the same thing with this interface the author has designed. It's all intuitions about how he uses computers, how people like him use computers, and how the self-selected group of feedback-providers use computers. Nothing about the general public. No research, no tests, no reference to classic UX textbooks and theory.
Now if he had stated upfront that those three categories are actually the only intended target audience, then at least he would have acknowledged that this is a possible problem, up-front. Not doing so, it appears he hasn't given much thought to it.
So, sorry but what I see is not a user interaction designer, but a graphics designer with a cute hobby.
If you think that's harsh, imagine he'd have redesigned the user interface of your car. Would you trust the ideas reading only about mockups and "intuitive" justifications? Wouldn't you think, mm-mm yes nice ideas but until you actually tested them on a focus group they could go anywhere and further effort is pretty much wasted until you do. What if you assume his driving style is rather different from yours?
Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard
Settings > Trackpad > ...
OS X actually allows a lot of customization. You assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts.
This was invaluable when working on complex documents. Post ribbon all that's forcibly broken up across multiple tabs. Instead I get giant buttons for functions I don't use permanently taking up space, rather the. An efficient array of those I do.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Customize-the-ribbo...
The shortcuts are consistent across all Mac apps, are discoverable (and completely modifiable) from System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts, or from Help -> Search in any app.
Trackpad and mouse gestures are shown, with videos in fact, in System -> Trackpad and System -> Mouse.
When I look at Apple's UI design, a lot of it seems to be about interacting with the device and not interacting with my task. Partly this is due, I think, to the amount and types of integration of apps into the environment (via Cocoa.) And partly, it's the fact that Apple's UIs/APIs aren't as generalized and engineered as Microsoft's -- which is to say, as an end user, you can do what you need to do, but there's generally fewer ways to do it and when you do it's much more defined.
In many ways, it owes more to the Metro interface than it does OS X or iOS, for better or worse.