The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore.
My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.
Why not? People always complained about accidentally activating Force Touch when trying to long press. Long press has a precedent in iOS; 3D/Force Touch never did.
See: right click.
I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable.
So every Mac menu conceivably had (has?) 7 sets of contents, 6 of which are essentially secret. Idiotic.
edit: with my post I in no way wanted to indicate that Apple's UI is the pinnacle of design - just that they IMO made the right choice at first by avoiding context menus, or at least keep them optional.
If you really need it, you will discover it. Otherwise, you can still go to the trash and really delete the file from there. It's safer than having the really delete item by default, and it's there if you need it.
Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.
I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...
Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.
¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...
Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.
That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.
At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.
Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.
The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.
A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.
I think it's quite a myth that Jobs knew good design. Jobs had a fetish for minimalism. For simple, single use, UIs that's often a good choice. I think that's what made iPods and the first generations of iPhones so well designed. But as smartphones have transitioned into being primary use devices with greater abilities, hidden UIs and extreme minimalism because a worse choice.
On mobile, and particularly on screens the size of the original iPhone, hiding the scrollbar is a necessary tradeoff for screen real-estate. It also doesn't necessarily hurt usability if you know the exact screen size you're designing for, and can ensure elements are never fully cut off on your initial view.
How would you propose doing that on a 3.5" screen without a mouse or stylus?
> Nor can you use it as an instant reference to determine how long the document is.
You scroll the screen a tiny bit and the scrollbar pops up. Again, keep the size of the screen in mind—making the scrollbar persistent would be a poor use of space.
I know it’s still there - that’s why I said “instant”. It’s a very minor concern, I’ll grant you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_button#Number_of_buttons