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killion | 3 years ago

The Alan Dye era at Apple has been the worst for me. Basic UX concepts like Fitts Law are ignored for the sake of "simplification". Finder notifications with tiny click targets that only appear on hover are something that wouldn't have stayed around for multiple OS revisions. Discoverability is lacking everywhere.

Having close buttons on the left side and the right side of tabs depending on state (like the number of tabs in Safari) is something that following the Human Interface Guidelines wouldn't have allowed.

I love innovation and trying new things – but the styling improvements shouldn't ignore the basics. There will always be new users who need to see what is possible in order to navigate.

discuss

72deluxe|3 years ago

The Finder titlebar now is in a massive font and truncates at the END of the file path and ellipses the text at the END. It should be at the beginning or middle.

Eg. in directory /Users/rich/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Caches/dyld/21G115/com.apple.CoreSimulator.SimRuntime.iOS-13-2.17B102 I have no idea what path I am in because it truncates it to /Users/rich/Library/Developer/CoreSimu... and when I click on the title bar it shows the path as /Users/rich/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Caches/dyld/21G115/co... so I still have no idea what directory I am in.

Utter crap.

amatecha|3 years ago

Oh yeah, I had to use a brand new MacBook for work stuff, and I was literally yelling at the Desktop Picture settings (for example). Buttons that are just a floating text label? I didn't even realize it was a button until I randomly guessed it _might_ be, secretly hoping it wasn't because it didn't look like a clickable element whatsoever... spoiler alert: it was a button. Like, come ON. It's 2022, stuff like "a button should look like a button" was something Apple themselves standardized on like, 30 years ago?

It's so glaring. What are these buttons in the FaceTime dropdown at the top right of this[0] screenshot? Why are there four different shades of buttons? Again, why don't they look like buttons? The flatness reduces meaning - maybe they're just status indicators? Actually, looking at the screenshot I'm not even sure they are buttons now?!

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220712084619im_/https://www.ap...

LtWorf|3 years ago

Companies have a need to randomly change designs so that the new version looks different and people understand "it's new".

amatecha|3 years ago

I miss Apple's confidence in their OS design. System 6 - Mac OS 8 (maybe even 9) are so similar in design, like all they really did for 7 and 8 was add a bit of shading/depth. Seriously, here's a screenshot of System 4 "Open File" dialog vs. Mac OS 9's "Open File" dialog:

System 4.2: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/open...

OS 9: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/open...

(and here's System 7's, somewhere in the middle: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/open... )