I don't mind it on the whole, but there are strange decisions. Like this - all that space being unused, and settings hidden in an "i" info icon. I would expect that would simply show help info, but no - it holds even more setting controls in an overlay, when there is plenty of space for it to be in the main window where it wouldn't need to be "discovered." This is decidedly unintuitive.
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Do you like the MacOS Ventura System settings? [MERGED]
- Thread starter the8thark
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While I disagree with statement that people will leave the Mac because of the system preferences, if they continue to change the MacOS so it looks more and more like iOS or iPadOS, I do think they (Apple) will start to lose long time Mac Users (not necessarily people who bought into the Apple ecosystem via the iPhone).
I don't want my Mac to look like my iPhone just as much as I don't want my iPhone to look like a Mac. I just does not make sense to me to port iOS over to the Mac, I use my Mac with a mouse, not by touching the screen, my Mac display is horizontal for the most part and the the iPhone for the most part is used vertically, I store many TB's of information on my Mac, I don't store very much at all on my iPhone. Totally different use cases, so why should the operating system look the same or act the same.
I think Ventura's System Settings looks nothing like iOS actually, so I regard that as a trope that got inserted early into this discussion and it simply isn't true.
What it is, though, is a uniform, structured, multi-level design, as opposed to a bunch of mini-apps hooked up to a scatter-shot collection of bitmap icons. The old version must have been a nightmare to maintain. But I'm a developer, so what would I know.
And before anyone starts with "Ah, but <something or other> doesn't work", it's new software, a rewrite of something that should have been rewritten years ago. Bugs get fixed, and it's perfectly useable in its current state.
What it is, though, is a uniform, structured, multi-level design, as opposed to a bunch of mini-apps hooked up to a scatter-shot collection of bitmap icons. The old version must have been a nightmare to maintain. But I'm a developer, so what would I know.
And before anyone starts with "Ah, but <something or other> doesn't work", it's new software, a rewrite of something that should have been rewritten years ago. Bugs get fixed, and it's perfectly useable in its current state.
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personally, i never had an issue with the previous system preferences; i have no issue with the new system settings. this is how it is now, and will be (at least for a long time). so... i use settings on those few occasions when i need to, and i get on with my life and my work.
it amazes me how worked up some people get over change. and whether it's better or worse is entirely subjective. but the fact remains... settings is the new preferences.
it amazes me how worked up some people get over change. and whether it's better or worse is entirely subjective. but the fact remains... settings is the new preferences.
I reluctantly admit I’ve never contracted soyjack that I know of. Perhaps my parents vaccine inoculation regimen in my youth protected me against this.
I agree there are questionable UI decisions. For someone who is inquisitive/exploitative and knows how to poke around I don’t think it’s that difficult to figure out how to find most things eventually, but for the average user there will be things that aren’t going to be very intuitive. I think familiarity with iOS Settings is a big plus, but how many iPhone users spend much time poking around there?
I think it does, at least in the main level settings menus. The way it’s organized feels very similar which is why I found it pretty easy to navigate. But there are subtle differences especially when you dig down in the menus more.
If you actually read my messages, I say that apple is making Mac OS more and more like iOS and many people are saying that they are glad, that Mac OS is looking more like iOS because it is easier for them to us since they are used to they way iOS works. Lot's of comments about how the new System Settings in Mac OS are just like the System Settings are in iOS.
Many people are saying a lot of things. That doesn't make them facts. Ventura looks nothing like iOS, except to the extent that it uses software ideas common to any current computer design. It's just plain common sense.
Whatever, you're stuck with something you dislike and a supporting conspiracy theory about what Apple might be thinking. Meanwhile most users are perfectly happy with it. C'est la vie!
(Thanks for the correction fisher king... maybe it was a freudian slip...)
Whatever, you're stuck with something you dislike and a supporting conspiracy theory about what Apple might be thinking. Meanwhile most users are perfectly happy with it. C'est la vie!
(Thanks for the correction fisher king... maybe it was a freudian slip...)
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am assuming you meant 'ios'! but agreed...Many people are saying a lot of things. That doesn't make them facts. Ventura looks nothing like macOS, except to the extent that it uses software ideas common to any current computer design. It's just plain common sense.
Whatever, you're stuck with something you dislike and a supporting conspiracy theory about what Apple might be thinking. Meanwhile most users are perfectly happy with it. C'est la vie!
I love Mac, have since 1984 and the very first Mac operating system. I have made a very good living owning Mac Based business so I have a lot of time, sweat, money, etc. invested in Apple and the Mac, been through good times and bad times with the company.Many people are saying a lot of things. That doesn't make them facts. Ventura looks nothing like macOS, except to the extent that it uses software ideas common to any current computer design. It's just plain common sense.
Whatever, you're stuck with something you dislike and a supporting conspiracy theory about what Apple might be thinking. Meanwhile most users are perfectly happy with it. C'est la vie!
It does not take a genius to figure out where Apple is taking the Mac OS, the iPhone is Apple's cash cow, the Mac is a small part of their business now, they are going to do everything they can to make the Mac look as much like the iPhone as they can, in many ways that makes good business sense, so I know why they are doing it, it's not a conspiracy theory, I don't think little green men are making changes to the MacOS just to piss me off.
But I don't have to like it, like I have said, I don't mind changes if the changes improve the product, but if they are just changes for the sake of making the product look more like another product, yes, I have a problem with that since those changes are not necessarily improvements. All that said, I hate the new systems settings for many reasons, it does not make good use of displays, they moved a lot of stuff around to areas that don't make sense to me (if nothing else the MacOS has always made sense to me, I could figures things out on my own without a manual, using search to find a command or just where something is located), there is no consistency to the visual elements in Systems Settings, different sized buttons, items not aligned. But, except for the system settings, Ventura is fine, though I don't have any use for Stage Manager, I don't use most of Apple's apps such as safari, messages, mail, contacts, etc. so changes they make to those don't impact me at all.
your opinions are noted (altho not sure what most of that has to do with the topic at hand).
things change, and you may not like all the changes. that doesn't make them wrong, just... wrong for you.
meanwhile, i get accused of saying the same things over & over (true, i guess); you seem to be here doing the same. so it goes...
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Please don't respond to my posts and I will respond to yours. I was responding to rehkram not to you. I have no interest in your views whatsoever.
anyone can respond to anyone on the forum (as long as we're not overly rude). and am 100% sure you meant 'I will not respond to yours'.
i will make you a deal. stop repeating the same things over & over, and i will do the same. would that work?
dogface1956, OK OK OK. Just hear me out. You are Apple. You have a key, I would say 'crucial', piece of software on the Mac that is overdue for an update. Why is changing it suddenly on the front burner I ask myself.
One reason it became a high priority could be security, and its cousin, liability. I say 'could be' because there's a lot of speculation going on here about why they implemented a new system so I'm gonna speculate myself. I'm not privy to the code of Sys Prefs, or Sys Settings either.
I always thought it weird how some kext/driver level objects that you can download and install from 3rd party developers found their way into sys prefs, icon and all. I'm referring to MIDI device drivers, MySQL, SwitchResX, and so on. It just always seemed strange to find those icons within what should have been (IMO) a secure Apple enclave. It was almost as if Apple were providing a guarantee of fitness, and I noted that they were always at the bottom, separated by... a line.
If you think about it the admin involved in qualifying 3rd party applets, including the sized bitmap icon, not to mention detailed code reviews and integration testing with each macOS- and/or 3rd party app iteration, must have been intense. We still have the 3rd party sys apps showing up in Ventura System Settings at this point, but no need for a lame icon at least.
If I were Apple, I would implement a database-driven app that required a) a relational (hierarchical) database, and b) tight security to allow adding, changing or deleting anything in it. I believe that is what we now have in System Settings. The drill-down hierarchical structure is a dead giveaway, to me anyway.
This structure creates opportunities to exclude- or include those 3rd party items from Sys Settings. A simple flag in the database could be used to exclude 3rd party apps showing up with the Apple settings. Likewise, you could select on that flag to make them show up in another panel using the exact same software, but called using a different selection parameter value. Brilliant. It could even bring up a big disclaimer notice when in 3rd party mode.
At a stroke Apple would have created the (correct) perception of the clear separation between its system-level apps and 3rd party sys level apps.
End of speculation.
So my question is this. If what I'm saying might have any grain of truth to it, what would you have designed and implemented? Currently I've only heard a lot of criticism and only a one-dimensional presumption of 'why?'
How about some alternative theories, solutions, and design ideas, rather than just banging-on about the supposed iOS-ification of macOS?
One reason it became a high priority could be security, and its cousin, liability. I say 'could be' because there's a lot of speculation going on here about why they implemented a new system so I'm gonna speculate myself. I'm not privy to the code of Sys Prefs, or Sys Settings either.
I always thought it weird how some kext/driver level objects that you can download and install from 3rd party developers found their way into sys prefs, icon and all. I'm referring to MIDI device drivers, MySQL, SwitchResX, and so on. It just always seemed strange to find those icons within what should have been (IMO) a secure Apple enclave. It was almost as if Apple were providing a guarantee of fitness, and I noted that they were always at the bottom, separated by... a line.
If you think about it the admin involved in qualifying 3rd party applets, including the sized bitmap icon, not to mention detailed code reviews and integration testing with each macOS- and/or 3rd party app iteration, must have been intense. We still have the 3rd party sys apps showing up in Ventura System Settings at this point, but no need for a lame icon at least.
If I were Apple, I would implement a database-driven app that required a) a relational (hierarchical) database, and b) tight security to allow adding, changing or deleting anything in it. I believe that is what we now have in System Settings. The drill-down hierarchical structure is a dead giveaway, to me anyway.
This structure creates opportunities to exclude- or include those 3rd party items from Sys Settings. A simple flag in the database could be used to exclude 3rd party apps showing up with the Apple settings. Likewise, you could select on that flag to make them show up in another panel using the exact same software, but called using a different selection parameter value. Brilliant. It could even bring up a big disclaimer notice when in 3rd party mode.
At a stroke Apple would have created the (correct) perception of the clear separation between its system-level apps and 3rd party sys level apps.
End of speculation.
So my question is this. If what I'm saying might have any grain of truth to it, what would you have designed and implemented? Currently I've only heard a lot of criticism and only a one-dimensional presumption of 'why?'
How about some alternative theories, solutions, and design ideas, rather than just banging-on about the supposed iOS-ification of macOS?
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Solid questions, I am more visual so something that did at least have the option of larger icons so some kind of view options would be nice, the ability to go either vertical or horizontal would be nice since my screens are set up to go wide. It all comes to options, I like the option of making things work the way I work, forcing me into one way of looking items is not the apple way to me.
So if I was Apple, I would design things to be flexible, to be able to be changed to reflect the way I want things to work for me. If I want icons, I should be able to change pretty much any view to show icons, if I want to view things in a list by last date used, I should be able to do that. One thing that I really miss is Window Shade from the days of OS 8 and OS 9. Why was that removed? Even if I was the only one who used it, I used the hell out of it. Sometimes apple removes stuff and it just does not make sense, you don't have to remove something if you add something, let people choose the way they want things to work.
But the most important to me if I was Apple would be to make sure that every was stable, why does Apple has to release (what amounts to be a major) upgrade every year. Why not take some time between major upgrades to release versions of the OS that clean up bugs, optimize, the code, clean up little interface glitches, make sure security is as tight as possible. I don't really see people screaming for constant new features, for the Mac was their a huge demand for a feature like Stage Manager, when there were so many other options to manage windows both within Mac OS and 3rd party products, I don't think so. Hell I can't even get Stage Manager to work on my Mac Studio Ultra, with 3 displays, the option to turn it on is dimmed (I will admit to spending next to no time to figure out what is the problem), but I turned it on MacBook M1 Pro and after playing with it for about 20 minutes and I turned it off, for opening and closing windows I will continue to use Launchbar.
what was 'window shade'? just curious.
apple does what it chooses to do, as alwaus, including giving us a new OS every year. then we can upgrade... or not.
one thing also true about apple (at least for a long time) is... they're not much for customization. i bought a google nexus years ago, just to check out android. while i overall preferred ios, i was amazed at how much i could customize the experience on android.
i think that what you want is not unreasonable, but apple can't make everyone happy. and since they don't provide a lot of options, we adapt, or don't upgrade. there really isn't much else.
but again, finally... it's just settings; not a place anyone needs to spend a lot of time in. so perhaps, accept what it is, and move forward. but that's up to you... of course 👍
apple does what it chooses to do, as alwaus, including giving us a new OS every year. then we can upgrade... or not.
one thing also true about apple (at least for a long time) is... they're not much for customization. i bought a google nexus years ago, just to check out android. while i overall preferred ios, i was amazed at how much i could customize the experience on android.
i think that what you want is not unreasonable, but apple can't make everyone happy. and since they don't provide a lot of options, we adapt, or don't upgrade. there really isn't much else.
but again, finally... it's just settings; not a place anyone needs to spend a lot of time in. so perhaps, accept what it is, and move forward. but that's up to you... of course 👍
Solid answers dogface1956 👍
Such view flexibility would be relatively easy to achieve with a data driven model. Given the right data design, it would just involve calling up a number of different views of the database and writing their respective presentation layers. My perception of the old, unchangeable prefs pane is that there was a bunch of legacy hard-coding involved, which pretty much always leads to inertia.
It will be interesting to see how it evolves in coming releases. I'm optimistic, personally.
Such view flexibility would be relatively easy to achieve with a data driven model. Given the right data design, it would just involve calling up a number of different views of the database and writing their respective presentation layers. My perception of the old, unchangeable prefs pane is that there was a bunch of legacy hard-coding involved, which pretty much always leads to inertia.
It will be interesting to see how it evolves in coming releases. I'm optimistic, personally.
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WindowShade does just what it sounds like, you double click in the a windows title bar and the window will roll up into the title bar leaving just the title bar visible, you could clear a lot of windows just by double clicking on the title bar, then open the window you want with another double click, easy peezy. That was back in the days before their were easy ways to manage windows, there was a Haxie when OS X was first released in 2001 replicated that feature, but Apple closed whatever hole there was in the OS that allowed Haxie's and it went away and as far as I know no developer has released anything similar. It was awesome and a great way to manage a lot of windows just double click and up it goes, double click and down it drops the same size and position it was in. Even today sometimes when I really tired I will try to double click on a windows title bar, from muscle memory of doing it so much even 20 years ago.
I could use that feature. Sounds like a lot of coding and cpu cycles to make that happen though, maybe why they dropped it? I don't know, just a wild guess.
I don't see the issue tbh. I remember the feature, essentially it wasn't all that different from using zoom (green/+ window control button) to automatically resize a window to fit content. The end result was just different: the window got resized to the point only the titlebar was visible. If a 90s Macintosh running Mac OS 9 could pull it off, it should be a breeze for current hardware. That said, many of today's app windows lack a title bar so I could see how at the very least that might be a bit problematic.
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Totally a terrible change. One of the many reasons I am sticking with Montery and not upgrading to Ventura.
