What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional changes in the OS aside from reworking the notification center UI a little- and I like this new version more. It's already been confirmed that they aren't locking down apps to the app store or anything like that.
It seems like people think that because they're taking design cues from iOS they intend to lock it down like iOS and they're transferring that fear into dislike of the new UI itself.
Apple knows that a large percentage of the people who buy its computers are software engineers and if they ever do fully lock their computers down in that way they'd be ceding that marketshare entirely, along with catching quite a bit of heat for it in the press. Maybe eventually that calculus is worth it to them but I don't think that's what this is a step towards. I think they just want users who are fully plugged into their ecosystem to feel like it's a cohesive experience across platforms and this achieves that.
Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them.
If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wouldn't be spending years tip toeing towards it like people seem to think.
Instead, they've rolled back some really unpopular changes like the crappy keyboard in their laptop, they just shipped a new Mac Pro that is clearly designed for professionals. This chip transition will result in Apple's laptops having better battery life, specs and heating than any other laptops available on the market. It won't even be close.
Additionally, they're actively trying to bring a huge swath of developers who currently only develop for their mobile devices into developing for the Mac. If they were trying to turn Macs into something for college students to watch Netflix on they wouldn't be doing any of this.
It's insane to me that people can see a UI refresh as a sign of doom while ignoring that Apple has actually been investing in the platform quite a bit more than they were a few years ago.
"We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback."
-- Corporation 101
Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory.
Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate.
Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm).
And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world.
But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle.
It's not just management -- it's the company culture.
On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc.
On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc.
I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.
I had mine replaced twice, but the third revision (which according to Apple is an improved version) has been reliable (except for the key labels wearing off) though I still greatly prefer the 2012 design.
My biggest issue now is the trackpad and its incredibly broken palm rejection that causes the cursor to jump all over the screen. This isn't a settings issue (settings do not help at all) and it was never a problem on older Apple laptops or on the iPad, which has a huge touchscreen with flawless palm rejection. Unfortunately (for me and for Apple), wearing an Apple watch seems to make the broken palm rejection and random cursor jumping even worse.
And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.
I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked.
Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting.
Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.
I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.
I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.
If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview
But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?
Come on.
And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work.
This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse.
I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.
From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes:
> Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814)
> Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?
PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years.
The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.
Not that I don't think they should support it (they should), but this is almost certainly due to perfectionism and bias, not amateurishness. Apple has an institutional focus on good iconography, and good iconography almost always has different representations for different sizes. The icons scale within a certain size range, then switch to a representation more appropriate for the size. I would be shocked if this is ever completely eliminated from Apple's DNA.
If you are using a precise mouse or trackpad, a menu bar at the top (or edge) of the screen is much easier to than a menu bar anywhere else on the screen, because it has "infinite" extent. This has been known for decades, and is why macOS places the menu bar at the top of the screen and the dock at the bottom or edge.
However, Apple has made remarkable progress rethinking pointer design on the iPad, as seen in this excellent video, "Build for the iPadOS Pointer":
that statement seems perhaps too harsh to both HN crowd and Apple's core fan base, I spend more time on HN than I care to admit and I can assure you that I do not like XFCE desktop experience at all, my desktop is running Debian 10 with Cinnamon on it, but UX is not something that I'd ever list as one of top 5 features of this setup. Similarly I've been using Apple laptops for about 14 years now and do consider myself a part of "core fan base", for the record I hate the butterfly keyboard, despise touchbar with a passion, and am utterly disgusted by the decision to remove MagSafe chargers.
To quote great Dr Tobias Funke - there are dozens of us.
StumpWM, i3 and dwm are also commonly brought up contenders as peak desktop Linux.
If it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you.
In my opinion height of desktop experience was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - I still miss workspaces, and TotalSpaces2 is a valiant effort but less likely to work with each new update.
Simple minimalism is certainly preferable to whatever macOS can be described as by many, sure. I don’t see a problem with that.
MATE and LXQt are two other comparably simple desktop environments that I like.
I get comments from my bewildered MacOS-using friends when they see that my 400$ Linux machine is faster than anything they've ever tried.
You new-fangled San Berdoo OSXI users get off my lawn.
.... Yeah, that's pretty much true, and for very good reason. Every time an interface changes, it forces people to stop using the system and figure out the new interface. As such, while it is possible to make changes that are beneficial enough to justify the cost, UI changes are very expensive and you'd better have a very good reason to justify breaking everyone's workflow. And by that standard, yes; XFCE is nearly perfect. It's been on the 4.x series since 2003, and going by screenshots I strongly suspect that even a user from XFCE 3.x would find the very latest version to be a drop-in replacement. And it does have decent quality, which combined with its general "get out of the way and let me work" vibe and 20 years of continuity makes it easily one of the best options available.
(You can hold down Option and use the green button as its old "Zoom" function, but I think there should be a system preference to reverse that so it's zoom by default and you hold down Option to go into full screen.)
Optimizing things where the primary focus of attention is what I am looking at mostly is more relevant to me than a shifting design languages. But, I know others will have different views on this and this is based on what people are actually happy with.
I think it's more that (visual) UI Design has the same cyclical property of most other "visual design" like clothing fashion, interior design,... Things look fresh when they're new, after a few years people get bored of the look, and what was once considered modern now looks dated.
Especially for a company like Apple that has built part of its reputation on having the best UI, they can't afford looking behind on the competition. Calling it "change for the sake of change" is partly correct if we were purely talking about products, but it ignores the fact that Apple is as much a marketing company as it is a product company.
Aside from that I think there's also a strong functional argument to be made. iOS and iPad share the same OS, so it makes sense for those to be consistent. As the iPad has matured it's approaching desktop levels of productivity. So now we're in a situation where the iPad is becoming like a Macbook without the keyboard. With so much overlap in functionality, it also makes more sense for those 2 experience to converge rather than diverge. So we're hearing complaints about the "iOSification of the macbook" but they are ignoring the missing link; iOS = iPadOS = macOS
Both have a classic theme.
There are those of us who will have to choose a new DE because Big Sur apparently won't run on our perfectly capable pre-2013 MBPs, and have to choose the least clunky. In that group, Xfce is indeed the bees knees.
I'm more likely to prefer XFCE than Gnome, for example
That being said, I also use and like desktop Apple products so there's that
People are taking the UI / ARM change as apple taking away more control, but macOS is THE development platform of the entire apple ecosystem.
So yeah, the ecosystem may be tighter knitted, but they sure as hell will not lock down macOS like they do iOS, they have so many mac users who are developers and apple are absolutely aware of that.
People complain about features in catalina and other recent versions of macOS 'locking things down' - it's incredibly easy to bypass the stuff that makes a difference using the terminal.
In a world where every company in the world wants to track and harvest your data, we've somehow got to the point where people bash apple for actually taking privacy and security seriously.
Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I personally decided to stop buying their computers because of it.
https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...
At what point do we stop saying "he was so prescient, look we're almost there," and just admit things haven't turned out as badly as people feared? DRM has turned out be more of a nuisance than an apocalypse, and general purpose computing is at least as available today as it was in 2011.
In some ways it is even easier; for example anyone with an email address can get access to a cloud-hosted computer for free.
Finding parties that would benefit is a trivial exercise one has only to look towards app store revenue, Intels idea of selling "upgrades" to your cpu via software unlocks, or Verizons ability to rent you access to your gps for $10 a month.
Others have been pouring water on a fire that would have already filled your kitchen with smoke by now otherwise and you have merely failed to attend to this fact.
Could you explain some of these incremental lock downs? I honestly can't think of any that are genuine restrictions, but that might just be because I don't encounter them with what I do.
That alone has stopped me moving my Macs to the latest OS after testing.
It's almost as if they've been actively devesting in OS X.
At least we now understand why.
Mac's are no longer machines fit for professional development. It's a damn shame, but it's true in my mind.
Would you buy a house without any locks since it's convenient? As long as you have the key it's paranoid not to buy Apple because of some restrictions since any PC also has a lot of these (secure boot, DRM etc).
Not my experience. It took a couple weeks of noodling to get parts of my environment moved over, and some of my automation I just moved to a linux box because I got sick of it.
> we've somehow got to the point where people bash apple for actually taking privacy and security seriously
Wow.
On the planet I use a Mac on, the complaints are about a set of non-manageable, opaque and somewhat buggy security changes that arbitrarily changed semantics on big chunks of the filesystem and broke a bunch of things is hard to figure out ways.
Add in that there is no sensible mechanism for cleaning up any of these magic permissions paths, and I don't even know what permissions are active on the machine I'm typing on.
I've loved OS X for being a decent gui on a real Unix. It had a decent run, but my next laptop will be a Linux box.
Lately, I've been doing most of my dev work on a Windows 10 machine using WSL. It's come a long way and is very usable now.
Having said that: I agree, WSL is pretty amazing.
Try running dtrace without having to configure a bunch of settings and restarting your Mac. Then you have to change the settings back and restart again to go back to the way it was.
It's a pain in the hole, and for basically no reason.
I still don't believe Apple on the privacy front. Yes, they are better than competitors. Anyway, I would like freedom and privacy and don't see them as contradictory. And you won't get more privacy if a manufacturer locks down environments.
We had OS without any privacy intrusion without any form of lock down. MS drops the ball constantly, agreed, but that isn't a metric anyone should look for.
Freedom and privacy are at odds. If I give any app the freedom to access my messages or call list, does it increase or decrease privacy?
I have an app(lication) that has access to my messages. It doesn't do anything with them aside from showing them to me on request. It doesn't affect my privacy at all because doing so is far beyond its scope. If I had shitty apps, I would agree, but until now those seem mostly restricted to shitty app stores. But if they cannot be trusted, they cannot be trusted to see my messages at all.
> People are drawing, creating music, making movies, editing photos on their mobile OSes
True, they are not completely useless, just mostly. I can do that on other OS with far more freedom. Artists generally don't like restraints too much and I do actually paint digitally. Wouldn't know how to connect it to a mobile device, nevermind the atrocious software selection.
The cameras on mobile devices are nice though. Don't think the common mobile OS makes handling image date easy at all. Even most normal users want images on their desktop as soon as possible.
It is sort of like scrolling through Dribbble app mockups. The layouts look amazing as a mockup, but when you actually go to make or use the app it isn't as practical as you want.
On a desktop, with a mouse, I have near-perfect precision. I don't need overly-padded icons and windows because I have the precision of a mouse. The extra padding just wastes screen real-estate and makes me move the mouse more to get between tools or options in the menu.
I would much rather have less padding, which might not look as beautiful, and use the extra space for the content of my application as opposed to the toolbars.
You do, but not everyone does. Consider the accessibility needs of people with motor-degenerative diseases like Parkinson's or Huntington's. Won't they be better-served by larger click-targets?
In such cases, it makes a lot of sense to just give the change to everybody, so that you can design the UX once, with the change in place.
See also: modern TV shows and films that make sure to not put anything important where closed-captions would appear—they're designing once, assuming captioning.
Complete BS --- it absolutely slows down those who don't need elephantine UI elements to use a computer.
At the cost of shrinking everyone's effective screen size.
Although 930k individuals in the US suffer from Parkinsons given the economic cost including medication, lose of income etc which averages about 24k per individual it seems likely that few of them are enjoying mac laptops even compared to the general population that is 10 times more likely to run windows.
https://www.michaeljfox.org/sites/default/files/media/docume...
Indeed this recent article is replete with references to cheap and budget not retina and style
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2020/jan/23/w...
I would note that many people with disabilities use iOS devices. The layer-stack of iOS APIs has been top-to-bottom engineered with accessibility considerations in mind, rather than it being worked in after-the-fact; so accessibility features on iOS are a lot more “universal” than ones on other OSes. iPhones are basically “the” phone for the blind, for one thing.
Not saying that rebuts your other points. Just pointing out that when you have a disability, “cost” becomes just a matter of how long you need to save up for it; while “has the particular benefit” is the difference between the device being at all useful for you, vs. not. There’s no point in buying something that’s half the price if you can’t use it.
I suspect a large percentage of software engineers buy their computers, but I'm skeptical at the assertion that a large percentage of people who buy their computers are software engineers.
Or have things changed since I left the Apple ecosystem? I'm assuming you don't need to be a registered developer to use things like "make" or download IntelliJ IDEA?
If you're doing web dev you don't need to be a registered Apple developer.
The US and big tech companies are outliers regarding Mac usage.
One of these days I'll write a todo list manager to replace OmniFocus and then be able to switch platforms.
Either way, software engineers build the applications that drive your platforms popularity, meaning developer adoption of a platform is incredibly important and thus they probably have a larger influence on Apples decision making than other demographics would with similar percentages.
They need to continue sell more to keep share holders happy.
It's a calculated shift.
If I can fix one thing from the new UI, I think it should have borders or at least a different background color, like pre-iOS 13 with button shapes. The current iOS buttons (and the new macOS design) doesn't give any visual cue for the user to know whether this is an icon label or a button. That's a problem, and one that macOS has solved elegantly by having different textures (like the toolbar).
It's now... more like Windows 10 where everything is on a flat surface without any differences.
For one thing, it’s not like cohesion was achieved by bringing in the best parts of OSX and the best parts of iOS. Cohesion has been achieved by transforming the OSX UI into iOS’s to the extent possible. Apple has been clever to do it bit by bit but using OSX from 10 years ago to today, you can feel the alienation.
The other part is that until a few years ago Apple was the biggest proponent of the idea that a Mac, with its pixel perfect input mechanism, and a keyboard, and iOS whose input was fingers, should not have a similar UI. Their execs scoffed at Microsoft’s attempts to make a device which when in laptop mode ran traditional windows but in tablet mode ran a version of windows optimized for touch. Somehow those UI concerns have evaporated for no good reason.
That said, the user experience of Mac OS still has plenty of low hanging fruit:
- Window management and app switching could be much better. The "app switching system" I liked the most was in Gnome 2 / MATE - I could just quickly move the cursor to the bottom task bar and scroll. It was so effortless, fast and easy.
- When I download an app (.dmg) and click it, it shows up as a new disk. WTF?
- The file manager could be made much better. Again, MATE had (probably still has) the best file manager I've ever used in terms of UX.
So download (or provide for download) a .pkg instead of a, you know, Apple Disk Image file
Normal people don't know and don't want to know what are apple disk images and what's the difference between .pkg and .dmg.
My understanding is that it's done this way so that there's a consistent experience installing software from a CD/DVD or from a download online.
But I think you're right, Apple should've rethought the software installation process the moment they dropped the optical drive from their computers.
It's only a "UX fail" if you're of the opinion that all platforms should work exactly the same way, and/or that UX paradigms that aren't what you already know are inherently wrong.
How do you think it should show up?
I don't know the exact purpose behind the "mount a virtual drive to install an app" model, but it seems far too deliberate to not have a purpose.
1) Delete spotlight, Siri and 'look up,' make alt-tab handle multiple windows of the same app, fix searching within folders and also separately fix whole-filesystem search.
Levelling your UI to the lowest common denominator is a sure fire way of making it worse and reduces the efficiency and ability of everyone in the long run. macOS and iOS should be entirely distinct UI wise.
The new one looks like a broken stop/play button (the play is backwards).
I know the old one was "skeuomorphic", but it was useful. This one burns brain calories just trying to figure out if it's a stop/play button or not.
</rant>
Why not? I think its a distinct possibility.
Put together a touch-friendly new OS UI with the ability to run a zillion apps designed-for-touch in a context where all your competition has touch-enabled devices and it's hard to believe they'd hold out any longer.
I could be wrong, it's just my instinct.
This, and increased font sizes. Do any of you know how to change the font size of the window title bar in macOS 11?
(To be clear, I'm not insinuating anything, just interested in the dynamic.)
This has been the fear for the last 10 or so years, maybe longer. It hasn't strictly happened yet. Maybe someday, but this definitely isn't it.
as a UI geek these kinds of updates in Mac OS updates are some of my favorite - they impact everything you do in a small but substantial way
More cohesive brand experience is not to be undervalued either both in terms of cost to produce assets and perception by users.
It's been fairly obvious that this was their plan. Now it's been categorically confirmed.
So much has to be inferred from the way things used to be, makes it harder to argue that it's the "simpler" operating system designed for Humans with a keen eye on UX design..
FWIW I also think the flat UI on iPhone (which has been prevelant for >6y now) is a horror show.
Steve Jobs famously once said (while working at NeXt): "There are two kinds of people at Apple: Those that want to push computing forward, and those that want to be the Sony of computers.. and the Sony guys are winning"
macOS moving to ARM is the biggest leap for developers in recent years - Amazon are also developing their own ARM chips and cloud services running linux ARM is the future.
Having a mac with a unix-like terminal environment & support to run linux arm natively when devloping for those services is a huge deal.
on the same note; the"decreasing information density" I don't think would be a problem if you're switching between the "terminal/IDE/browser/excel". the "table views" still seem fairly "compact" so..? /shrug
I'm glad is isn't a polished XFCE, there are a lot of options for people who like this sort of thing already, just run Linux. In its current state, Linux on the desktop is definitely not for me, but then, I like the touchbar (as a software engineer, even), I like their new keyboard better than the pre-USB-C one (the butterfly one was terrible though), I'm fine with four TB3/USB-C ports, I don't miss MagSafe much. I like not having to bother with a myriad settings, because the defaults are usually just fine and most things can't be fine-tuned anyway.
Big Sur seems to be a really interesting spin on a desktop iOS that embraces and extends the security and UX concepts from iOS, but for keyboard/mouse and without being so locked-down and constrained. From what they've shown so far, I like it.
Now please have iPadOS become more like MacOS – that would be terriffic.
What's much more likely is that they'll find some new form factor of sensors and projectors (keys, screens, pointers, loudspeakers, data i/o) that does away with "computers" and "tablets" entirely. And that'll have its own widgetOS.
EDIT: punctuation.
But instead they explicitly mentioned virtualization support for Linux. There seem to be no additional measures like Gatekeeper and Notarization. The security measures introduced in Catalina have carefully-placed gaps to not break terminal workflows, and unless I'm mistaken they can be disabled. Notarization is a bit of a mixed bag; I get the security benefits, but it does give them quite a lot of control.
I may be totally naive and utterly wrong, but the vibes I get from all of this isn't that Apple is currently pursuing a strategy of forcing MacOS into the iOS mold and turning it into a two-apps-side-by-side, fully locked down, anti-productivity, content consumption and light Excel, iPad-with-permanently-attached-keyboard device.
Rather, they seem so be trying to build a nice and coherent user experience across phone, tablet, laptop/desktop on the UX front that works for a wide audience with little customization, and to find a security compromise between hundreds of millions of (potential) users and organizations who need an ecosystem that keeps them as safe as possible vs. developers, researchers etc. who want their systems to be very open and unrestricted and safeguards to be very lax. I imagine it is kinda hard to build a product that serves both of these well while remaining coherent and fun to use.
With that in mind, I think they did a decent job at this with Catalina and the lastest iOS. Big Sur seems to be a continuation of that; it remains to be seen what it'll actually be like in the beta, but right now, I'm optimistic.
And making toolbar buttons all monochrome outlines does make toolbars have a more consistent appearance, but that actually makes finding the button you need more difficult. The differences are what we notice, and later what our brains automatically key on when we need to actually use the interface.
Less than half of these changes are arguably worth having. The rest seem like marketing saying, "We need to be fresher, guys!"
Using a new interface can be fun because of the change, but that fun quickly wears off. Then we're left with the realities of the interface. That Finder window is going to be much less useful in the real world with real file/folder names that are longer than 12 characters wide.
This is a UI for casual users. It might be good for grandma, but it's less good for people who need to get work done.
* Putting the title (folder name) before the controls introduces a fundamental instability, much like OS X did with the menu bar by placing the named app menu before any other menus. Also, the amount of available space for displaying a longer title/file name seems limited.
* It seems, the proxy icon is gone. I can't see which element could bear the functionality in place. The title is already editable, making it dragable as well might be too much. Is this the beginning of the end of the drag-and-drop paradigm? (Notably, it doesn't suit touch interfaces well. Many aspects of these changes seem to prepare "touchability".)
Wish every other OS would replicate it already.
That's a good point I hadn't thought of -- I love the proxy icon. I'm glad it's still there, but this kind of feels like Apple is implicitly saying, "Look, for the ten of you who knew what this was, you still do it, but we're just hiding it from everyone else, sorry."
I love the proxy icon, too, by the way. But it's always been a badly documented, surprising, quirky feature. I found it by accident, by slipping and dragging a folder onto the menubar. That's not even useful; I didn't understand what I'd done. Eventually, after reading blogs and manuals, I use the proxy icon (and the brilliant Finder<->save dialog tricks) all the time.
I don't think we gain much by framing the argument around "discoverability" any more. I think it's much more useful to talk in terms of the overall interface paradigm. The proxy icon kind fitted into the "desktop" paradigm - i.e. a scatter of media and tools strewn across a desk. But Apple are moving away from that, and into a new paradigm of "surfaces for interaction". The i-devices have been in that space for years. The "mac" devices are now going there. Both are gonna change again, bit by bit, in the future as humans develop new ways to interact with this weird networked functional data thing they've created, and Apple try to provide novel tooling for novel technology. They do seem to be going faster, and breaking more things, than they did in the 80s and early 90s when they lead the desktop paradigm. They're possibly experimenting with ideas on the wider user base, rather than doing closed door research. A big part of that is due to the wider user base being MUCH more comfortable with computing than before. People with very little "computing" training are contributing daily to the development of digital culture.
Command/Ctrl + F for: "align different subsets of toolbar items"
The pictures above the paragraph that phrase appears in exemplify the problem perfectly. One certainly looks nicer, being all uniform and monochrome, but the other provides visual feedback that is far quicker to parse than text or hieroglyphics.
I have to explain to my 70 year old aunt why I won't be updating her Macbook to Big Sur, because she'll never be able to cope with this change. Yeah, she's 70 and not that great at all this, but that's exactly who this interface should be for. We can bitch and moan but we'll deal, because we have to. At 70 years old you just want your fucking email to work and you want to know what buttons to click on.
Apple decided to add depth to the glyphs on the Dock, but no where else apparently. I'm so fucking tired of this flat monochrome bullshit.
I wouldn't mind it so much if it wasn't that every sucker and his dog will take this as definitive proof that all the bad UI fads of late are actually good.
Was that guy actually on acid when he introduced the name ? This was so out of place compared to the usual Apple tone. At least I had a good laugh
(Interfaces are to be printed out and to be discussed while looking at them mounted onto presentation boards. This is their primary purpose nowadays. – API's have still a way to go in order to catch up. E.g., we're still using calls like "Performance.measure()", where it really should be low contrast "Pink.mint()", which is also much prettier in a printed list of calls.)
Apple has "razor-sharp focus on a user many of us often fail to even consider: The potential user, the buyer", ignoring the needs of people who already paid their money.
If that's the way they are thinking about "the potential user," all they're saying is "we'd prefer to do our marketing ourselves, please; don't go around recommending our products."
The new header bars and merged controls are almost exact matches... I wonder if they'll contribute anything back upstream
we could only wish that
elementaryOS is probably pretty close already...
- Some of the windows look like they look now (Safari, Maps, ...) [1]
- Settings are skinnier [2]
- Finder is bulkier [2]
I might be a bit autistic in this hurts my eyes.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-introduces-maco...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Descrip...
Being able to see content is a feature.
Every new update brings more uniform, less visually distinctive buttons. When we went from black and white silhouettes of the original Macintosh System to colourful, pictographic icons of the Mac OS 9 era it was obviously an improvement in usability. Now we're back to monochrome silhouettes again.
Being able to find UI elements quickly is a feature.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
I assume this is a breaking change then?
I like that this time they lined up design changes + hardware -- and that this time hardware was the reason to bump the version.
Like, we saw Intel transition in 10.3-ish, no more Rosetta in 10.7, entirely new design + Swift in 10.10, Catalyst and SwiftUI (brand new frameworks) in 10.15, but new design + ARM was the push for 11.
I like this trend of hardware being the "major" version bump but now I'm curious what kinda space-age paradigm macOS 12 will be breaking. "real" 3D touch? Brain-computer interfaces? I can dream, okay?!
anyone else remember tactus technology?
most of my time on my Mac is browser (Chrome), terminal, and Electron apps. Even my IDE is just Electron.
The new Finder and menus look ugly, but frankly, in the age of Electron everything, the OS UX doesn't matter that much, as every app has its own one, reimplemented in JavaScript and React.
Slack still looks like Slack in Big Sur, in Catalina, in Windows 10.
It's horrible. It's fast, unlike the web app, but otherwise horrible
Modern-day Apple is focused on form, neglecting function.
My 2013 MacBook Pro Retina Finally bucked the kicket, so I’m waiting for the new ARM based range with the new OS before I make any decision.
But design is all fads, so sadly it wasn’t allowed to last.
Is this an OS or a wine-tasting?
> use an increased corner radius
What was wrong with lower radius? Were Apple designers too ignorant to try larger radious in the past?
> Within an alert, most content is center aligned.
center-aligned paragraph text? It's 90s HTML throwback!
Consistency is much more important especially when reaching the phone- and tablet-raised crop of people who don't really know how a computer works nor do they care. Same with many people, they simply need a computer for their various duties. A more tech-oriented person will never have problems adapting to even radically different UI paradigms and degrees of chrome but less techy people will.
Add more functionality to the OS, fix the ancient packages, do SOMETHING for the more advanced users, Apple. Please?
Wake me up when they use less glue to hold their computers together : (
But that’s exactly the catalyst you need to motivate the more capable of that bunch to cut through the noise with powerful applications specifically tailored to desktop — and a very healthy App Store for desktop begins to emerge (just like the one we have for iPhone now). But faster, because now there are so many people who suddenly know how to create for Mac.
Well…
The marriage is over Apple. We're headed for divorce and no promises you make now will convince me to stay. I'm leaving. In reality, it's been over for awhile, but of course, having invested so many years in this relationship, it's been hard to make the mental leap needed to let go. Well - now I'm there. While I'm sure your new hardware will indeed be magical with industry leading battery life and performance, that performance is only as good as the OS that runs on it. Who cares if you get an extra 6 hours battery life, when I have to restore from TM yet again and walk away overnight while 200+GB of storage gets re-installed? I loved you, and will think of you fondly from a distance. All the best.