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Comment by ar9av | Hacker News Reader

My favorite old UNIX UIs are 4Dwm, Rhapsody, and NEXTSTEP's for sure. However I do think working in modern macOS is pretty nice; I honestly like the Ventura redesign a lot, though that may be an unpopular opinion(?).

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This kind of window decoration is my favorite, too.

Modern UIs look more elegant. But I find it easier to conceptualize different contexts on my screen with thicker, embossed, brutal border indicators.

I also simply like the aesthetics for their own sake.

Worth noting that, from what I gathered, a lot of dislike towards Ventura's new UI is often less the style and more just various inconsistencies / strange behavior in their execution of it.

The new criticisms directed at Ventura are less about the style because the style criticisms date back to Big Sur and have been talked to death. The lack of contrast and the over-generous menu spacing isn’t any better today than it was in November 2020.

It’s fine except for the Settings app.

As a frequent iPad user, I love the new settings app in Ventura.

I can see though why long time Mac users would hate it though, it’s a massive change and it moved everything.

Do you think it's an improvement over the old one? Why?

I do just for consistency within the overall Apple ecosystem.

I think it is. The organization isn't quite right, and definitely needs to be worked on, but I like the sidebar approach.

For a user with the whole ecosystem, it is far more consistent with iPhone and iPad. From that angle it is so much better it is silly.

Having to type by poking away at an onscreen keyboard would be consistent too but we can all agree that it would suck.

Even the Settings app is OK with me... speaking as a Mac user (almost) continuously since the original Mac Plus (although I use Linux for servers):

I really just couldn't care less about the change in the settings app. I usually typed something into the Spotlight search area to find what I wanted in the old version, and I do the same thing now. I just didn't have to change settings enough to have remembered their old locations.

I can’t stand search in the settings app. The results are in decipherable to me. It seems like I get 15 results that have almost identical text and have to click through them to figure out which was the right one.

Part of this extends from how Apple is implementing security. There are at Lear half a dozen security and accessibility options that all hide similar app lists.

The old Settings UI was nice, but it had a really bad scaling problem as more preferences were added, making it badly organized. I like the new one, better, though it did come into the world roughly and still needs work.

Mostly, though, I'm just happy that they're dog-fooding SwiftUI with it. I look forward to WWDC this year.

I like Stage Manager, it brings back the single window mode from early versions of Mac OS X and removes the need for a defaults hack to get it working.

I have not found it especially useful on my MBP, but it is a huge improvement for me on the iPad with keyboard and mouse. It feels much more natural now to have two windows open and quickly switch between apps. I used my iPad for about 80% of my work now, up from 10-15%.

I hate it with a passion. Harder to user, less accessible and intuitive.

It hurts me as the Mac is my main work tool and has been for almost 40 years. It’s hard to watch it drift into stupidity.

agree - it is the gravitational pull of iPhone revenues

NeWS, OpenWindows, Indigo Magic Desktop, CDE, NeXTSTEP, on my case.

Nowadays I get by with XFCE when still doing Linux desktop session.

>However I do think working in modern macOS is pretty nice

I have hated the Mac interface from day 1, for very simple reasons:

1. I want my file-edit-windows menu on every window, not sharing the top of the screen (the whole promise of the personal computer was that I could have what I want, why can't I have this? fuck Jobs and Jony and anybody who substitutes their own preferences for yours and then claims to be a high priest)

The reason is, I have multiple app windows open, and I routinely look from one app to another, and then I look where I want to click, simultaneously moving the mouse and clic... if my app does not have the focus, the whole eye and arm movement was a wasted expensive set of motions, now i'm even forgetting what I wanted to do while figuring out where I have to go click to get the focus moved.

the icing on my UI cake is using focus-follows-mouse. I don't require it, but I like it and it is antithetical to the one-size-fits-all everybody-must-conform Apple way.

2. I want a three button mouse. period. I don't want to learn gestures, click in special places, and I don't want my different OSes to be different in ways that don't need to be. Would it really hurt Apple's feelings if I could have menus where i want them? Yeah, and if you like where Apple's menus are, why can't you have them? UX designers are so narrow in their thinking.

The whole promise of personal computers was... F J & J

There’s no helping with your first complaint (UI philosophy difference), but fwiw you can both have focus-follows-mouse (for either the whole OS or just Terminal, both work great) and multiple button support (I use a 4-button trackball with other fancy bits).

That said, despite being able to hack lots about the system, it would definitely be nice to have deeper modifications allowed. Alternate kinds of menus, pointers and windows would be nice, where users could experiment with new UI concepts, etc.

I personally really miss NeXTSTEP’s tear off menus, which were in early OS X builds until Aqua got rid of them.

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