Comment by Falkon1313 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Falkon1313 | Hacker News Reader

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Alas, Mac is one of the biggest offenders of crappy design and anti-usability.

When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline?

Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all).

And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.

Their 'magic' mouse was a magic louse, that didn't work very well, ate batteries like they thought they were in a hotdog eating contest, and just randomly did stuff you didn't want based on where your finger happened to touch them.

I hope someday they hire a designer that has used a computer before and can upgrade their UI/UX standards to at least the Windows 95 level.

Old MacOS was good, until they started gradually making it phonelike. The original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines¹ was solid work. (The big flaw, as usual, forced on the professionals from above: the form-over-function one-button mouse, requiring the undiscoverable double-click — it's almost forgotten now, but originally people had to be trained to double click ‘correctly’.)

¹ https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/573097

> Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default

They are if you use the touchpad, and appear whenever you scroll. The logic is that as you are scrolling with the touchpad, you will not click on the scrollbar, so in that case it is a useless appendage.

> Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all)

I am not sure what you mean by “editing keys”, but Apple takes painstaking effort to make sure most shortcuts are global, and in text entry fields, Emacs shortcuts always work.

> And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.

Sorry but this is just a laughable complaint. Apple’s touchpad and accompanying gestures are considered best-in-class and have been so for more than a decade. Microsoft and various Linux distributions have tried to catch up during that decade+ and still aren’t close.

There are many things one can complain about with macOS ever since Lion started the iOS-ification, and I’d be right with you, but saying the old Mac OS X UI was lower standards than Windows 95 (and I assume XP) is a supremely contrarian statement that few people of that era would have made.

Mac OS 10.7 was a downward turning point. That’s when the iOSification started.

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