> Apple does UX well.
I hear people say this often enough to question my own sanity, because I don't find Apple's UX to be very good at all. I find it confusing and it makes things difficult to figure out.
I hear people say this often enough to question my own sanity, because I don't find Apple's UX to be very good at all. I find it confusing and it makes things difficult to figure out.
This is even worse on Apple smartphones, because a lot of stuff is done using mystery gestures that you have to already have memorized.
Skeuomorphism used to provide a small amount of relief, but since that's gone out of fashion, it eliminated even those clues.
In short, I find Apple's user interfaces to be very opaque. In fairness to Apple, this is also true of Android, Windows, and Gnome. But in the case of Android, it feels intuitive to me simply because I've internalized how to do the stuff that it gives no hint as to how to do.
What system(s) do you find more discoverable, and how? I’m honestly curious because I love checking our new systems or window managers and it’s bugged me not to have some of this elsewhere for a while.
The search bar in the menu is fine if there is a menu to search. IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
To your point about trackpads though, I agree. I can’t stand a mouse on macOS, it loses too much convenience, especially with BTT available.
That said, is there any system today that you find more discoverable? I mean serenityOS actually fits that bill, and classics like older macOS or windows 98, but anything modern?
The Dock also works, although you have to move the pointer downwars to show it. In a lot of ways Clicking on Icons is MacOS foundation mode and everything else is superfluous. I, as a Poweruser, forget that sometimes.
> IIRC or at least last time I used it the screenshot tool had no menus and was extremely unclear as to how to save a screenshot as a file in the location you actually want.
The Screenshot tool btw. is also an App under Applications → Utilities. If you use that, you’ll get a floating palette with different options including for different locations. Those options then get also used by the Poweruser ⇧⌘n shortcuts.
(I don’t necessary disagree with you, there is too much invisible navigation.)
As for where to save that screenshot, that is available in the Options section of the floating menu.
You don't. They are hidden. If you are supposed to see them they shouldn't be hidden.
I understand that other operating systems make a different choice about this, but that doesn't make their choice is the correct one.
Did you know that you can hold the spacebar to move your cursor around on iOS? Without my friend telling me about that feature, I also found text selection in iOS to be deeply frustrating as compared to Android
I just tested this on my phone (albeit it is an iPhone 8, so a bit older model perhaps without as many features). A short tap is sufficient to turn it on and off. A longer tap brings up the intensity slider. I was unable to tap the icon quickly enough so as not to register the tap and toggle the flashlight.
Upon retesting a couple times, I did notice that on the first tap the icon is illuminated but it did take a split second more for the actual flashlight to turn on. But waiting the split second was sufficient instead of further tapping.
I’m using the menu that is pulled up while the phone is unlocked (by dragging from the bottom of the screen, on my model), for reference.
For the flashlight in particular, the button inside the control center can do a few different things—including closing the control center entirely—if you fumble the tap even slightly with an upward push of the thumb. With the Lock Screen, a sliding motion of any kind will just not turn the light on if your slide doesn't begin and end inside of the UI element that you're entirely obscuring the view of with your enormous fingers. You can accidentally open the Lock Screen customizer. It's even possible to get haptic feedback from the lockscreen flashlight button without actually turning it on.
While I don't have any of these problems, I am familiar with them and have observed others struggle. There are accessibility settings that are designed to help (repeated input filters and such) but they all slow the UI down and somehow make it more confusing because the phone is just more likely to do nothing rather than the wrong thing.
On a multi monitor setup, why is it impossible to drag a window over to a monitor where another window is fullscreened?
How do you select a specific resolution or refresh rate when you're plugged into an older meeting room projector?
I had to use an iPhone for a few weeks when mine broke. That was enough to convince me to never touch any of their products again. I'd love to tell you more about it but it's been 4 years and I just don't remember all of of details. The main thing I remember is that it was anything but intuitive to use and it was an entirely frustrating experience. Easily the worst phone experience I've ever had
My 70-80+ year old parents can use iOS abd ipados mostly fine but get lots of things wrong on their Mac, so it seems to be a net improvement.
For the life of him he can't he can't look at a text message while in a phone call and then get back to the call menu.
He unknowingly mutes notifications for contacts and has no chance of figuring out how to unmute them.
He accidentally calls his contacts all the time.
Those 9 sections are all unlabeled for some insane reason (I suppose maybe this type of plain table view thing has never had a UI element to make headings?), so even the intent of the designer is unknown. If you want a certain setting, you just have to keep scrolling. There is Search in here, though the search is mediocre and it’s still hard to find things.
Oh, and Settings has a junk drawer too called General, which seems to mostly mean “someone was forced to pull 15 or so items into a subfolder, and it also uses the “random groups without headings” method of organization.
All of this seems low-effort and like the designers didn’t learn even basic lessons from 40 years of GUI design (or like the ones calling the shots are fine art majors more concerned with words like “uncluttered” and “elegant” than “usability” and “discoverable.”
I have many examples, but I'll just pick one. When having multiple instances of an app, the doc adds a "dot" by the app icon. This dot is present no matter whether I have 2 instances or 10 instances. Oftentimes I forget instances there (which can open due to many reasons, including for instance private browsing) because it's not easy to tell that I have 3, instead of my usual 2 instances.
Additionally, switching instances is unnecessary slow and requires more clicks than the older Windows taskbar (which is hopefully coming back as MSFT imitated Apple's terrible UX). Maybe you love this but I objectively lose productivity with this UX decision.
This is why open windows are represented on the second level, e.g. listed in the context menu that appears when you right click a dock icon. Programs and windows are not synonymous, and in fact windows belong to programs.
Macs have used this model since they first gained multitasking decades ago.
That's simply not the case.
The dock adds a dot to the application icon if the application is running.
If you have multiple instance of the application running, there will be multiple icons (each with a dot) in the dock. This is fairly difficult to do, the only way I know how is by starting the application again from the command line. Well, or when you're running an application you are developing from Xcode.
So not 100% sure what you mean with "multiple instances", but almost certainly not actual multiple instances. I am guessing you mean an application with multiple documents open.
So basically, what you regard as "bad UX" is simply you trying to map assumptions from one environment onto a different environment, and finding that your assumptions don't reflect reality.
And yes, the application will be running (showing a dot) whenever you have 1 or more documents open in the app.
To switch between documents of an application, you can either go to the application's "Window" menu and chose one from there, or to the dock icon and choose one from there.
Anyway, I'm using Chrome and that's what happens.
Alt-Tab (erm... Cmd-Tab) switching through applications instead of windows (and then having a separate hotkey to tab through windows, but only within one application), and that mess combined with the fact that there can be UI applications that just have a menu bar but no open windows is just incredibly bizarre (and even though I'm now a primary Mac user for more than a decade it still feels incredibly clunky - at least there's this gesture-controlled 'exploded-desktop-view' as a workaround).
...and when it comes to the new stuff:
- hiding the scroll bar, what a completely non-sensical decision from a UX point of view, I now need to wiggle the touchpad to see where I am in a document, and how much of the document I'm currently viewing (yes I know that this can be disabled, and that's the first thing I do on a new Mac, along with inverting the scrolling direction)
- arranging buttons vertically in popup dialogs on macOS devices with landscape display orientation (arguably it makes sense on an iPhone with portrait display orientation, but in either case the vertical arrangement makes it a lot more likely to accidentally hit the wrong button)
- the new settings panel is just a massive step back from the old one (which wasn't all that great either)
- don't even get me started on iOS, if you don't know the 'magic gestures' nothing makes sense (same shit on Android though)
I’m assuming you came to macOS from some years using Windows?
...but I was also exposed to 90's Macs somewhat. I remember that my switch from the Amiga UI to Windows was fairly smooth, but I never got quite used to the Mac UI (not that it matters all that much though because I mostly switched back to the command line anyway, that's the only way to keep sane when switching regularly between Mac, Windows and Linux).
Visual Studio on Windows does drive me crazy for exactly this reason, especially as each instance can only have one top-level document (solution) open at a time.
I think the app vs window centric model really comes down to user preference - I think I could get used to window again but I had Chrome, Audacity, and the windows explorer open last night with maybe five windows and was alt-tabbing to all the wrong places. My brain just makes sense of “get to application, then find the window” better than a list of windows I have to sift through across disparate apps.
I agree with the scroll bars and settings getting worse. Buttons are either way, but - like app vs window switching - could be remedied with a setting to change the behavior.
Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys?
Or why is the USB drive in the back of an Apple monitor?
Or why is everything so opinionated?
Or that mouse that could only be charged with the cable plugged into the bottom so you couldn't use it?
Or in earlier versions of OSX, you had to upgrade the OS by starting iTunes (wtf?) ...
> Or why don't we have Copy and Paste keys on our keyboards. Or Undo and Redo keys?
Copy: Cmd+c
Paste: Cmd+v
Undo: Cmd+z
Redo: Cmd+Shift+z or maybe Cmd+y if the devs do windows stuff too
Also Apple just killed some of my app notifs with the update and despite all of my settings being proper some apps like Instagram just don’t work.
20 years later, given an Android and an iPhone, they were equally difficult (or easy) to use. Furthermore, after having used Android for years finding stuff on an iPhone was definitely difficult. Probably the other way around is true.
It's probably invisible to most Apple users but it's a bit puzzling to anybody coming from anywhere else.
I too thought Apple UIs were confoundingly bad, but one day I decided to take a step back and approach it as any ordinary man would. I pretended I knew nothing and cared nothing about computers.
You know what happened? It was intuitive. It was consistent. It was harmonious. My mind was blown.
Apple UIs are made for the ordinary man, not for tech nerds and professionals like us. Forget alt-tabbing and window managing, the vast majority of people on the planet don't know and don't care about computers; and it's those people Apple caters to.
Apple at least designs their UIs to accomodate how normal people use computers, which is why their stuff doesn't mesh well with tech nerds and professionals without a mindset change. We are not normal people.