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All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.

I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.

Hilarious. But bad UX.

Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.

For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.

But everything else I pretty much agree with you.

> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that

It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).

> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.

It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.

> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.

> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great

The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.

> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder

The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.

> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.

> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.

I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?

The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.

Red = stop (close)

Yellow = yield (minimize)

Green = go (grow)

Makes sense to me.

It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.

OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!

I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.

They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.

I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.

I remember Tiger. Leopard was such a huge upgrade for it. I mean spaces alone, come on, that was huge. All the trackpad gesture control came after Tiger too with the larger unibody trackpads.