Hacker News Reader

Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

Little of what he says is a problem on MacOS fwiw. I can resize my Slack by dragging anywhere on the toolbar, for example.

View on HN

Using just resizing as an example: there are no visual queues you can resize any macosx window without hovering over an edge; the edge is visually 0 pixels wide; the resizable area extends outward from the window a few pixels which means you're clicking on the window underneath to resize the top most window (unless it is near the edge of the window underneath, then all bets are off); The resize cursor is unreliable, sometimes it does not show but clicking and dragging do resize the window; resizable windows are visually indistinguishable from nonresizable windows, and the same relative pixel that resizes one window either moves the nonreziable window or brings forward the window underneath.

The author does mention that:

What about Apple?

I can't comment on the current state of MacOS since the time I've spent actually using a Mac during the last 8 years or so probably totals to a few hours. Apple used to be good at this, and I hear they still do a decent job at keeping things sane, even post-Jobs.

But yes: that consistency, though still flawed in many ways (looking at you, iTunes^W Music.app) is what has kept me on this platform, unbroken from System 6.0.7 thru macOS 10.15.4.

Disclaimer: I've been in enough flame wars over this UI that I fully acknowlege that this is a matter of preference. You're not a bad person for preferring otherwise.

The fact that MacOS shows the menu at the top of the display all the time used to bother me but I've long since come around. As more and more cross platform Electron apps take over the desktop, I'm even more thankful that it's there, keeping a lot of this nonsense at bay.

Microsoft has been going downhill for a loooong time, the stupid Ribbon Bar drove me off of MS Office 15+ years ago. The control panel in Windows XP was a mess and it's only gotten worse as far as I can tell.

The ribbon bar was when I started noticing this mess. I liked the extended tab concept but the UI was inconsistent because some things were accessible through the tabs but others you had to go through the button, in a way that has never made sense to me.

I do blame monopolies for this in part. When some single thing dominates (office suite, web browser, whatever it is) the comparator shifts. It's no longer "how do these 6 things compare", it's "is what's new here entertaining enough and not too much of an inconvenience to cause me the pain of abandoning an entrenched tool?" So then users convince themselves the improvements are progress because it's always implicitly compared to the alternative of struggling against the lack of choice of other products.

That's not all of it by any means, but I do think it created a context for what's deemed acceptable ux-wise.

MacOS isn't all it's cracked up to be though and is maybe another historical source of this mess. I use osx daily and it's much, much, much too easy to lose track of open windows. Dialogs open and you don't even know they're there, and you find windows open that you thought were closed weeks ago.

This doesn't happen with a lot of other OSs, or at least used to not happen.

My favorite UX has always been through KDE, although I haven't had the opportunity to as much as I used to because of work reasons.

I was just thinking this. It sort of gives you a home base to return to, regardless of how weird/spiffy the rest of application is. Additionally "Help" is always to the right of the other menu items. And there's a search box under "Help" that you can use to search menu items. Which can be extraordinarily useful, especially in applications like Photoshop that have complex menus and panel systems.

Slacks design does look quite goofy in Safari, though, since Slack's toolbar design matches the browsers so it looks doubled-up…

Full screen mode would alleviate that issue though, right? <eye roll>

Huh. Slack's MacOS UI is the first thing I thought of when reading this article. No titlebar with standard icons. Bizarre mechanisms for popping up dialogs. It could be a poster-child for inconsistency with every "normal" mac app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com