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Isn't early OSX objectively easier to navigate?
- Thread starter mectojic
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The blog post mentions to ignore the "overdone reflections", presumably the plan was to tone those down.
The one thing I noticed a couple days back that really put me off was that if I hover the mouse over the green window zoom button I get a menu of options. That's bad. Those buttons should not have context to them. That stuff should happily live in the view menu but beyond that no. Also, it isn't in the view menu...
Oh, hello.
Did you interpret this as a reply to you? When I wrote that, I hadn't read either of your posts in this thread, and I'm even not sure "what I did," so I suppose I must be better at it than I thought. ^ ^
Anyway, I went ahead and read them, and I'm not sure I understand your thinking entirely. You seem to associate "texture" and "depth" with an interface that's easier to use, especially for new arrivals to the Mac. I can understand the temptation to make that association.
As far as I can tell, the value of skeumorphism is to leverage the user's prior familiarity with real-world objects for the purpose of explaining a digital phenomenon. For example, prior to the "Wallet" app on iOS, deleting a stored card caused an animated shredder to visually destroy the onscreen image of the card. If you know what a shredder is, you don't even have to know the word "delete" to understand the card had been removed.
A hypothetical example from the opposite side: in TextEdit or Pages, the cursor marks the location where text will be inserted if you type. In the spirit of this intuition-leveraging, the cursor could have been replaced by the image of a poised pencil or pen, or the a readied typewriter's lever cluster in the foreground. Is the omission of this design choice some sort of grave oversight which cost Apple tens of thousands of potential Mac users lost instead to frustration because they couldn't be expected to acquire the concept of a cursor?
When people say skeumorphism was overdone, I think they mean it was added without the aim of leveraging user intuition in this way. For example, around Lion, the login screen's backdrop was a plane of grey linen, like you might find on bedsheets or a jacket. How would linen have helped the user understand their computer was locked, or that they were supposed to enter their password? In the Calendar app, the title bar was textured as though it were distressed leather; I think it was even "stitched" as though to impart the window with a sense of mass and weight. Without this sense of mass, or this appearance of leather, was there any real risk of a new user not understanding the calendar was a calendar?
If not, then the only advantage is taste – you happen to like the linen, or you happen to like the leather, or you happen to like the typewriter cluster. For Apple, that might even be the right choice if 95 percent of their potential users love calendars with leather on the top. But if only 25 percent love leather and the other 75 find it annoying or frivolous, then they should be weighing that design approach among others, which is just what they seemed to have done. Doing extra work to sate the aesthetic whim of the 25 percent is cool too, but it should be a lower priority than a stable and cohesive general appearance. That whim-catering is still present at levels like Pages and iMovie themes, the accent colour, and of course, third-party apps: if you want a leather calendar, I don't even have to look to be reasonably confident you can have it back for a few bucks. I happen to have a free app that does show you a typewriter cage, and looks and sounds like a typewriter as well. "Flexible," emphasis on customizability, is still one of the three guiding themes emphasized in the Human Interface Guidelines for Mac apps.
Is all sense of user-centrism gone from macOS now? Of course not; it's expanded. The "user-centric" Finder Steve Jobs introduced with Panther is still there – that is, your user folder is considered the "home" folder by the entire system. Folders are still folders – everyone still knows that files, and even other folders, go in them. The System Preferences app makes even more sense than it did 15 years ago. The user's identity now dominates that window too, and all the most important account-related stuff is pretty cleanly centralized there.
Anyway, that's my take. I'm glad you still have an earlier Mac for those intermediate versions of the system if you appreciated them; I appreciated them too, but I'm happy to have arrived here. And as many people observed on the system's 20th anniversary yesterday, there's no sign macOS is about to end.
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Everything before 10.2.4 was a beta. It wasn't...but it really was. 😬OS X 10.0 is a steaming pile of crap. Using that should count as torture under UN regulations. To most people here I presume, "early" refers to the Tiger through Snow Leopard period. Everything before that is "really early" to me.
Everything before 10.5 was rough around the edges and not feature complete.
I don't know, while it's definitely a little bare bones I really do like Tiger—more than Leopard actually, which does feel "rough around the edges" to me.
Especially considering that Tiger's contemporary was Windows XP...
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True.
But for those complaining about these icons and being unable to recognize them as button? Try to hover your mouse pointer on them. The background changes and you can recognize it is a button. I think Apple bets that users will think everything with an icon can be a button and will hover them to check it out. To be fair, everything with an icon language like this one, users will tend to think that it is probably a button.
User input fields, though, deserved to have a different color theme to quickly identify them as a field not a button.
EDIT: Actually, while I am using MacRumors forums in dark mode, the form to post a message has the same language - icons on top without backgrounds or borders to identify them as buttons. A clean and minimalist design, though there are blue buttons underneath indicating that there are actions you can take.
I don't understand this. I've used Mac OS X server beta and Mac OS X 10.0 and they were not awful, not good but very OK. This was on a clamshell for a few days though.
Those all run the same defaults write command!
That’s entirely true, but it saves time and energy on having to remember the command from memory!
What would be more ideal is to hire people on the autism spectrum who have a direct hand in UX design. Hiring a team of principally neurotypical, able-bodied UX designers — which may or may not have happened at Apple over the last several years — isn’t exactly a sustainable strategy for broadest accessibility or usability.
You aren't wrong at all, Apple has gone from being one of the best UI designers in the world to hands-down the worst. Big Sur is a travesty.
A repost of a tirade 😂 I went on in another thread:
My biggest concern about Big Sur cements and reinforces the concern I've had for many years now; Apple has gone from a deep understanding of how to build some of the best UIs, to consistently displaying that they have nobody working for them that understands good UI design at all. Note, I am not talking about how "pretty" a UI is, that's subjective and everyone is welcome to like something different in terms of what they think 'looks nice.' I'm talking about usability. Bugs and instability can be fixed, but if a company has fundamentally no idea how to build a good UI, you may be long-term screwed. Just look at Windows over the years; when it has been good it's obviously been purely down to luck, because they immediately screw it all up again with the next release - they have nobody that really understands what they are doing and therefore about half of the time Windows rolls out with a crap UI. So yes, in many ways I too hate Big Sur. I spend easily 50% of my professional life tutoring and teaching users how to use computers, from the very young to the elderly, and I can absolutely guarantee that Big Sur is going to be a disaster for many users. The problem is that these things are key for intuitive and easy use of a computer: 1) UI elements must be CLEARLY LEGIBLE and EASY TO DISTINGUISH. 2) Elements you access repeatedly should move around the screen AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE (this is one of the key differences that makes the MacOS Menu Bar so much better than the way Windows handles it). 3) Critical elements must be EASY TO SEE AND FIND. 4) Active windows and elements must be CLEARLY DISTINGUISHED from inactive windows and elements. If we go back to Snow Leopard, which I would suggest could be held-up as a pinnacle of MacOS UI design, all four of these (assuming you turn dock magnification off) are spot-on perfect. SL (among other revisions of the MacOS) nailed all 4 of these principles. Big Sur fails everything except point 2, and it fails them *spectacularly* well.
Since I wrote that initially I've rolled out 23 M1s with Big Sur in K-8 education and it is universally *loathed* by both students and staff. I've had to go in and tweak many of the settings (like setting them all for "reduced transparency" because students were finding the menu bar hard to read on many desktops). Not a single person likes it; I get nothing but complaints and gripes, and that's not from people who have generally complained about other changes to the MacOS, even ones that have sucked big-time. The tiny-little crap black and white icons in the latest versions of Pages and Keynote (to match Big Sur's moronic hipster 'unusable-by-design' scheme) is another example of a change where I've received nothing but continual complaints.
A repost of a tirade 😂 I went on in another thread:
My biggest concern about Big Sur cements and reinforces the concern I've had for many years now; Apple has gone from a deep understanding of how to build some of the best UIs, to consistently displaying that they have nobody working for them that understands good UI design at all. Note, I am not talking about how "pretty" a UI is, that's subjective and everyone is welcome to like something different in terms of what they think 'looks nice.' I'm talking about usability. Bugs and instability can be fixed, but if a company has fundamentally no idea how to build a good UI, you may be long-term screwed. Just look at Windows over the years; when it has been good it's obviously been purely down to luck, because they immediately screw it all up again with the next release - they have nobody that really understands what they are doing and therefore about half of the time Windows rolls out with a crap UI. So yes, in many ways I too hate Big Sur. I spend easily 50% of my professional life tutoring and teaching users how to use computers, from the very young to the elderly, and I can absolutely guarantee that Big Sur is going to be a disaster for many users. The problem is that these things are key for intuitive and easy use of a computer: 1) UI elements must be CLEARLY LEGIBLE and EASY TO DISTINGUISH. 2) Elements you access repeatedly should move around the screen AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE (this is one of the key differences that makes the MacOS Menu Bar so much better than the way Windows handles it). 3) Critical elements must be EASY TO SEE AND FIND. 4) Active windows and elements must be CLEARLY DISTINGUISHED from inactive windows and elements. If we go back to Snow Leopard, which I would suggest could be held-up as a pinnacle of MacOS UI design, all four of these (assuming you turn dock magnification off) are spot-on perfect. SL (among other revisions of the MacOS) nailed all 4 of these principles. Big Sur fails everything except point 2, and it fails them *spectacularly* well.
Since I wrote that initially I've rolled out 23 M1s with Big Sur in K-8 education and it is universally *loathed* by both students and staff. I've had to go in and tweak many of the settings (like setting them all for "reduced transparency" because students were finding the menu bar hard to read on many desktops). Not a single person likes it; I get nothing but complaints and gripes, and that's not from people who have generally complained about other changes to the MacOS, even ones that have sucked big-time. The tiny-little crap black and white icons in the latest versions of Pages and Keynote (to match Big Sur's moronic hipster 'unusable-by-design' scheme) is another example of a change where I've received nothing but continual complaints.
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But the Menu Bar is actually bigger in BS! It's so easy to see and find now!
Another little thing in BS that drove me crazy last time I used it: If "Do Not Disturb" is on (it always is on my machines - I don't need stupid notifications popping up all the time), the clock changes from white to an almost impossible-to-see gray.
I was joking....based on experience in an IT dept that transitioned from OS 9 to X, and continued to roll out Macs for corporate users. There were a handful of missing features or capabilities that made everything before 10.2.4 very painful to support. As I recall, one of the things was no CUPS for printing. Lots of little things...but if you did not need/use those things, you would not miss them.
Somewhere about 10.5 Apple added ACLs and SMB so Macs could play nice with enterprise file servers. After that, there were many fewer hurdles to Macs on enterprise networks. A big change, though a consumer at home would not know or care.
If folks were more open to change, I would like to see a separate button for each, with no menus. But I expect more than 3 buttons would be a big design risk, and 5 was a button too far. So they did the safe compromise, 3 buttons that won't cause alarm.
I agree...it is a bad compromise.
100% agreed with OP, a perfect example is the hidden proxy icon in Finder windows in Big Sur, I hate it with passion, it's one of the worst UX aspects in Big Sur, 100% objectively wrong to have a moving target like that. Either remove it if you think proxy icons is an unused feature (which I know it's not), or keep them visible, don't hide them.
For the love of Steve Jobs, get your act together Apple.
By the way, the absolute worst offender is the Music app, what a glorious turd of UX is that thing. All. over. the. place.
For the love of Steve Jobs, get your act together Apple.
By the way, the absolute worst offender is the Music app, what a glorious turd of UX is that thing. All. over. the. place.
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Yeah, this covers most of it. I can’t think of anything which is “off” about your assessment.
It’s been incrementally heading this way for a decade, as no Finder/Desktop environment for Mac OS X/macOS since has come as automatically, as second-nature, and as transparently (seamless) to my navigating it as the SL environment. In no other OS X/macOS environment have I been able to move as fast as with SL when ploughing through major-deadline, time-of-essence projects: it’s the closest an OS has ever felt like an extension of my brain and body.
Thank you for re-posting this for this discussion.
It's as if the whole team of Apple UI designers have come straight out of iOS 7 school.
Thanks everyone for the replies. So many things to reflect on about bad design.
Thanks everyone for the replies. So many things to reflect on about bad design.
Pretty sure CD burning was also something missing from 10.0, how did Jobs let that happen with how he usually is.
And DVD playback! And I'd rather ask - how did he allow 10.0 to be even released in its woeful state? It should have been Public Beta 2, and 10.1 the first release.
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Because at the time I went from 9.2.2 to 10.0 public beta, back to 9.2.2, and then skipped up to 10.3.2, with regularized returns back to 10.2.8 (with contracting work), I feel grateful I missed the hair-pulling frustrations of functional teething problems with Cheetah and Puma. I’ve never had the desire to run either of them, just for “the fun of it”.
As it was, I found 10.0 public beta off-putting enough at the time, on a Yikes! G4, to just wait it out until the teething problems were mostly ironed out, until the software I used was written for OS X and could be run in OS X (QuarkXPress being the big one), and until the Aqua UI felt less clunky (which, by late Jaguar and Panther, it did).
Also, someone above mentioned ACL and SMB didn’t arrive until 10.5. SMB was supported as far back as at least 10.2 and had improved quite a bit for Panther.
That was me. ACLs were the big thing...to allow easy permissions management on a Win server without any server hacks or third-party tools required. I thought there was a bump too of SMB compatibility (version update or something), but maybe not.