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Comment by brimstedt | Hacker News Reader

I didn't notice the misaligned logo until you pointed it out (but I'm a guy who prefers 'ugly things that work ' rather than 'unusable junk that looks good')

What I did notice though was th first screenshot with the red, yellow, green buttons of osx window titles.

I think this is a really bad design, and I don't understand how people can like this.

Sure, nice round "buttons", but very unclear what their purpose is.

I think this is something of a red line through Mac/iOS: The preference of unclear user interface that "looks good" instead of a clear interface that communicates with the user.

I've used Mac for years, and still don't know what the yellow button does.

I like the idea of this new OS, but please make better design choices that Apple :-)

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> I've used Mac for years, and still don't know what the yellow button does.

Minimize. That’s what the yellow button does. It’s as simple as clicking it once.

or, mousing over it and seeing the little minimize line.

Kind of unrelated to the actual discussion but I just realised that I never minimize things on mac. I know what the yellow bubble does, never once clicked it, neither used the shortcut whatever it is.

Is this common? I used it on windows but for years now, I have a ton of windows on top of each other or I just cmd+w my way out of one.

Maybe this is the idiomatic way and I’m not an outlier though. Is it?

I've been using Macs since 1984 and I almost never minimize a window. I find that I generally don't need to since I can maximize a window properly. In macOS the Maximize function (which you need to use option to get from the green button) makes the window the largest size that makes sense for the content and fits on the screen. On Windows, the maximize button in MDI windows makes the window essentially full-screen which I personally never want. I can have multiple maximized windows on macOS and access them all by either just clicking between them or using Cmd-`. I have no need to minimize unless a window's maximized size is essentially full-screen.

I’d propose going all the way back to NEXTSTEP and taking that as inspiration. It’s similar enough to OS X that it would feel familiar to Mac users, but without the 20 years of being "function follows form"ed to death.

In terms of an interface designed for clarity, I think the epitome was Windows 95.

But that involved portable thousands of hours interviewing and videotaping regular people trying to use Windows and then addressing issues found.

> I think this is a really bad design, and I don't understand how people can like this.

What do you think would be better? Can you give an example?

Widgets that indicates purpose.

It can be tricky to make everything self explanatory, but at least if you use icons or text rather than just colour you give the brain something to help you recognize.

Okay, can you give an example of how that would look?

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