(Sorry for linking to this blog twice in one thread, but it seems appropriate.)
When would Mac OS X ship? – Tech Reflect
techreflect.net
So. Uh. That's how you end up with an OS that can't burn CDs.
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Isn't early OSX objectively easier to navigate?
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techreflect.net
So. Uh. That's how you end up with an OS that can't burn CDs.
Amen! Old mac: function first, appearance second. New mac after Jony got his mits into the interface oven: Jony’s preferences in appearance first, function second.
Your posts reflects an understanding that I wholeheartedly agree with, and sounds like (to me at least) one of the first I’ve read who understand the difference between:
1) aspects of skeumorphism that mimic real life (paper-looking calendar, leather-stitching-bounded contacts book with Rolodex chrome rings, green felt on the Poker game screen that apparently stressed out so many), and:
2) aspects of the interface honed after decades of human interface design that recognized the value of colors, textures, contours, contrast, borders, etc., in an app or operating system that aid with intuition and help the user subconsciously understand and navigate things…the “it just works” that Apple used to be known for.
Once Jony Ive led the war on pixels and contrast and added as much minimalism as possible, a certain specialness Apple had dried up and blew away. Jony’s interpretation of things the user doesn’t need is more along the lines of: Now that I know the layout of my house, I don’t always need the lights on. So therefore let’s remove all lights from all houses across the board, because less is better.
Amen. I find certain apps on my fiancé’s 2014 MacBook Air with sierra to be so much more enjoyable to use than the same app in Monterey on my M1 MBA.
I discovered recently in Mac OS 10.1, Alt Tabbing is done through the Dock instead of current alt tab window that pops up. It was kinda confusing because I was like, where are the apps. But it highlights each selected active app in the Dock.
Yes. I still agree completely. Absolutely. It isn't even close. MacOS has been in a decline since the end of Snow Leopard, and iOS has been in a decline since about that same time (I believe it is iOS 7 that *uck** it all up.) (My post earlier in this thread still holds true; nothing has changed for the better, things continue to change for the worse: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...vely-easier-to-navigate.2289256/post-29722611 )
I manage 250+ systems and work extensively, hands-on, end-user-support, with over 300 people from PreK - Elderly (students, staff, education, plus other small business and even individual user support.) 99% of the way the MacOS *and* iOS have been going has been detrimental to our users. Period.
I see it literally (actually literally, not non-literal literally 🤣 ) every single working day. End users of all ages, who used to be able to sit down and use Macs and iThings, now struggle with even the most basic functions (Where are the scroll bars? Why is my scrolling backwards? Can I make my junk-mail icon brown? Why can't I drag with this trackpad? It just goes on and on and on.) It's all hip and flat and low-contrast and grey and you can't see anything or quickly tell what is what, or what does what, or even what the h*ll is a button and what isn't. It's also extremely inconsistent. But that's all just fine, if you look hip, and cool. That's all that matters. Seeing stuff? Being able to understand where stuff is and what it does? Totally for those lame plebs who actually need to be productive. *Pffffftttt,* losers!
And once Apple gave up on their excellent UIs it filtered down quickly to third-party devs. Third-party apps now treat the Apple ecosystem exactly the way they treat Windows; let's design this however the *uck* we want regardless of what it should be. Just look at the "Preferences" section of all the major browsers. Only one (that I know of), still does it the proper way, and that's Apple's own Safari. Every other browser opens a poorly, and randomly designed, 'web page admin' for the browser prefs! What? That kind of **it would never have flown back in the day. A poorly designed app was reason to avoid it. Anyone who works much with Windows knows how this feels; with everything except the most basic controls totally up to the developer. Know one piece of software? In the Windows world that means you know *nothing at all* about another software package. In the MacOS and iOS it used to be *very very* different than that, but not so much anymore.
I've mentioned before that the older MacOS and iOS were way up there around a A or A- in terms of design, visibility, and intuitive usability, whereas the best of Windows versions (even 7, 10 and 11) were down around a C. Now Apple's user interface designs are around a C+. Not much different, and in certain ways much worse than the Windows (or Android, or Chrome, for that matter) solutions.
And that doesn't even get into the complete fustercluck the entire education and small-business ecosystem has become during that same time. Two years ago I could force 200+ Macs to install all latest software updates from Apple just by issuing this: "softwareupdate -i -a --restart" through ARD or a MDM. With AS machines I literally have to touch every machine to get it to do a software update (The only way around this; to even initiate a bulk update:? An MDM paired specifically with Apple's own DEP, and that often still requires admin creds, which means a staff member has to touch them anyway, they just don't have to initiate the process.) It's insanity (and that's only one of a hundred small ways in which management has become worse instead of better.)
So the sad thing; It's not just the outside that's rotten, Apple has gone rotten to the core.
I manage 250+ systems and work extensively, hands-on, end-user-support, with over 300 people from PreK - Elderly (students, staff, education, plus other small business and even individual user support.) 99% of the way the MacOS *and* iOS have been going has been detrimental to our users. Period.
I see it literally (actually literally, not non-literal literally 🤣 ) every single working day. End users of all ages, who used to be able to sit down and use Macs and iThings, now struggle with even the most basic functions (Where are the scroll bars? Why is my scrolling backwards? Can I make my junk-mail icon brown? Why can't I drag with this trackpad? It just goes on and on and on.) It's all hip and flat and low-contrast and grey and you can't see anything or quickly tell what is what, or what does what, or even what the h*ll is a button and what isn't. It's also extremely inconsistent. But that's all just fine, if you look hip, and cool. That's all that matters. Seeing stuff? Being able to understand where stuff is and what it does? Totally for those lame plebs who actually need to be productive. *Pffffftttt,* losers!
And once Apple gave up on their excellent UIs it filtered down quickly to third-party devs. Third-party apps now treat the Apple ecosystem exactly the way they treat Windows; let's design this however the *uck* we want regardless of what it should be. Just look at the "Preferences" section of all the major browsers. Only one (that I know of), still does it the proper way, and that's Apple's own Safari. Every other browser opens a poorly, and randomly designed, 'web page admin' for the browser prefs! What? That kind of **it would never have flown back in the day. A poorly designed app was reason to avoid it. Anyone who works much with Windows knows how this feels; with everything except the most basic controls totally up to the developer. Know one piece of software? In the Windows world that means you know *nothing at all* about another software package. In the MacOS and iOS it used to be *very very* different than that, but not so much anymore.
I've mentioned before that the older MacOS and iOS were way up there around a A or A- in terms of design, visibility, and intuitive usability, whereas the best of Windows versions (even 7, 10 and 11) were down around a C. Now Apple's user interface designs are around a C+. Not much different, and in certain ways much worse than the Windows (or Android, or Chrome, for that matter) solutions.
And that doesn't even get into the complete fustercluck the entire education and small-business ecosystem has become during that same time. Two years ago I could force 200+ Macs to install all latest software updates from Apple just by issuing this: "softwareupdate -i -a --restart" through ARD or a MDM. With AS machines I literally have to touch every machine to get it to do a software update (The only way around this; to even initiate a bulk update:? An MDM paired specifically with Apple's own DEP, and that often still requires admin creds, which means a staff member has to touch them anyway, they just don't have to initiate the process.) It's insanity (and that's only one of a hundred small ways in which management has become worse instead of better.)
So the sad thing; It's not just the outside that's rotten, Apple has gone rotten to the core.
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Couldn't agree more.
I would add to the "many end users of all ages" that's it's also users of all experience levels who are negatively impacted by today's minimized de-buttoned de-contrasted mucho-flattened interfaces. (and maybe you meant that, actually).
It's truly great when technology gets in your way instead of helping make your job easier.
Since Windows 11 has subscribed to the same dumb fad, I love when windows of the borderless, flat, low-contrast, simplified grey/monochromatic Office apps like Outlook, Word, powerpoint are overlaid overtop each other on my work laptop's screen and it takes actual work to find the borders, headers, or scroll bars of each because they all blend in to each other.
Dark Mode (another extremist fad) makes that camouflaging of similar-looking windows even worse. In fact, wouldn't Dark Mode not even be needed if the interfaces weren't so all-white monochromatic? As offered, most dark modes are just 180-degree extreme applications of the white-out mode, with the same shortcomings of "easy Uix" as the white-out modes, just dark.
I've been waiting for a decade to read one good response as to any solid functional advantages of the flat, monochromatic, buttonless, low-contrast, white-out no-border/bezelless fad and have yet to see a single good justification for how the user experience is improved and not just changed (be that for an experienced user who "no longer needs such silly affordances as buttons" or a new user who never spoke to another iPhone-owning human for the first 10 years of their life and is using their i-device for the very first time). I suppose this degradation in Uix was the perfect storm of the industry giving in to feeling customers needed something new, an uber-minimalist supposed hardware design genius being given the keys to Apple's software/interface design offices, and the death of a true design genius with a real vision and who understood the value of trying for the new while maintaining what works.
I just upgraded to Ventura and it seems the Mac mail app is even more Windows 95 white-out monochromatic-simplified than before, or maybe it's just me.
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Preach Brother. I hate monochrome icons and UI, it’s harder to quickly identify things. All in the name of minimalist fashion trends.
File this under “hot take”:
The UX quality for macOS fell as macOS/X stopped being an OS one could actually purchase.
That was probably coincidental — whereas the relationship between macOS’s UX slippage and letting Ive sneeze on the human interface team shares a probable, 1:1 relationship.
Once more, I stick with SL on systems able to run it for a mess of reasons. One of those is its UX/UI is thoroughly intuitive, accommodating, and user-adaptable. There are, in 10.6.8, just enough Marble UI elements to hint at Apple’s move away from a strict Aqua UI (ostensibly to harmonize with iOS) — but not so much as to lose the best, most refined aspects brought to the fore by Aqua.
The UX quality for macOS fell as macOS/X stopped being an OS one could actually purchase.
That was probably coincidental — whereas the relationship between macOS’s UX slippage and letting Ive sneeze on the human interface team shares a probable, 1:1 relationship.
Once more, I stick with SL on systems able to run it for a mess of reasons. One of those is its UX/UI is thoroughly intuitive, accommodating, and user-adaptable. There are, in 10.6.8, just enough Marble UI elements to hint at Apple’s move away from a strict Aqua UI (ostensibly to harmonize with iOS) — but not so much as to lose the best, most refined aspects brought to the fore by Aqua.
Mavericks is my favourite looking OS that Apple has ever released. I found that the few releases looked too "wow look at our new interface", but then Panther refined the look. Leopard and Snow Leopard look really nice apart from the traffic buttons and the boring grey being used in Finder, Safari and iTunes, but that can be fixed with some tweaking. Lion and Mountain Lion were steps in the right direction in some ways, but the overuse of Linen and skeuomorphic design in general provoked the same "wow look at me" feel to me.
Mavericks dulled down the linen, but kept the more mundane refinements from Lion (better traffic lights, gradients and the more square buttons). Certainly the best looking. Yosemite through HS were way too flat, Mojave while brought us Dark Mode still felt like it needed to be refined and Catalina improved the icon design by a long shot
Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura bring back Mavericks feelings for me, especially once the sorted out the horrible mistakes made in the first betas of Big Sur. The shadows and hierarchy are back in a not too different way, but the Finder arrow buttons are still terrible.
Remember when it was easy to distinguish between app and document icons? Apps had irregularly-shaped icons, and docs had tall rectangular icons. Now we have square app icons (with rounded corners) and slightly-taller doc icons. Once Apple started doing it, other developers rushed to copy for seemingly zero actual benefit. In fact, of the 28 apps currently in my Dock, only 2 don't have squared-off icons.
It's typically not the monochromatic nature that makes it difficult, but the lack of contrast. Look at the original 1984 Mac system software. It's monochrome but it's clear at a glance where each UI element begins and ends.
And interestingly, that coincides exactly with when Craig Federighi succeeded Bertrand Serlet as vice president of Mac Software Engineering at Apple. Craig gets a lot of love because he comes across as likeable, but he's responsible for the poor state of macOS.
Gotta love this statement from his Wikipedia entry: "In the following decade, Federighi oversaw a marked decline in the quality and security of Apple's software products."
In order to reflect on that, one must also reflect on the function of icons to serve both a paradigmatic and readily intelligible purpose.
Application icons (long before Apple steered folks toward calling them “apps”) were, for at least the first 25–30 years, literal or readily relatable/intelligible signifiers for what each application delivered in function. Stickies was represented by classic, canary-yellow post-it notes; Photoshop was represented by a digitally stylized eye; and Safari was represented by a compass (itself riffing from when Netscape Navigator, Firefox’s antecedent, was represented by a boat steering wheel).
Document files associated with applications adopted variations on the document base icon being a portrait-oriented page of paper, paired with readily identifiable graphic elements one associated with the application icon. This worked well for Word documents (the blue “W”) and Illustrator files, as these still relied on simple representations of paper.
Frankly, “this just worked” — not solely because of a plain, A-B relationship between application and associated file, but also because these often nodded to their functional origins in an analogue world. This was a kind of pre-skeuromorphism. QuarkXPress was especially good at doing this back during the QXP3 days: application and document icons hinted at pasted layouts from the time when book print, newpapers, and posters were set up on pasteboards.
Some of what changed, as ties to those analogue origins became less relevant, were efforts to develop applications with no direct relationship to analogue antecedents. VLC comes to mind: only an insider within the motion picture industry might make the literal connection between the use of traffic cones (when a production team is filming on set in a public space) and a movie; for everyone else, that cone just became the “VLC icon” — especially so for anyone who’s come of age since VLC became a media player.
Since then, obviously, plenty of applications have emerged for which there’s no way to reach back to an analogue origin, so abstractions became commonplace.
This is also when applications — once standalone binaries/products — came to be known as “apps” and were held in equal stead with “apps” which were little more than springboards for a company’s own web service/portal (without relying on a browser to get there, and also to circumvent any customizations one used on their browser). Basically, this included every social media platform on the planet and any service reliant on front-end springboard tech like electron.
So yah, while this complicated how application — or, “app” — icons were designed, they did manage, for a time (over the last dozen years), to distinguish themselves with a literal icon, shaped however the “app” developer envisioned it. Twitter was a bird; FB was an F (shocker); and Flickr was two circles (one blue, one magenta).
And by and large, this approach still worked as it had since the Xerox PARC, Lisa, and OS 1 era: files reliant or associated with an application took on a “page”-esque shape to denote it was a document dependent on that application. Even so, social media applications — “apps” — don’t generally have associated file icons, so that relationship began to recede, especially as many former applications became cloud and subscription services, in which former “files” no longer have a home on one’s own device.
tl;dr: blah blah blah from a former turnkey art director who got burnt out long ago and switched careers.
The square — or, rather, the square, as softened by Bézier curves — was, I’m guessing, a way to denote that an “app” could be pressed, literally, like a virtual button on a glass UI.
Which, fine, might work when navigating within the kludgy constraints of digits mashing on glass and expecting a haptic response. This can work on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device. But for former icons which came to be before this move to virtual buttons (and forcing a uniformity on the “button” as an interface), it meant shrinking them to fit inside the one-form-for-all button, i.e., that Bézier square.
The biggest problem with shoehorning all GUIs into this paradigm is the all-digital (that is, finger digits) nature of their function doesn’t translate at all to the legacy, cursor-based UI of a laptop or desktop GUI display — at the very least, for those which lack a touch screen. It simply doesn’t work effectively. Moreover, it forces the eyes and the brain to do more work in parsing the bounds of an icon which, as you noted, are now all the same dimensions. This brings up accessibility issues, especially as eyes age.
Frankly, it’s not hard at all to draw a direct evolutionary lineage between the (useful) favicon on web sites — which weren’t really a thing before around 2002, or maybe 2003 — and the uniform, Bézier square icons used across glass UIs and, counterintuitively, on cursor-based UIs. “Neatness” doesn’t, however, translate to “more user-friendly”. UI neatness for its own sake is form without par function.
And this is where, I conjecture, Ive’s muckraking in the human interface design broke application-document relationships: good industrial design principles translate poorly to HID principles. It further constrained application/app designers from producing visually intelligible icons — now reduced to fitting something inside that square which somehow manages to both be legible and not confused with other “app” icons.
(I’ll even be gripey and crusty enough to argue how the MBP’s Touch Bar was another Ive special beset by fundamental questions of form leapfrogging function for sake of superficial aesthetics, in Ive’s eye. Even as Ive was backing away in 2014 and Touch Bar didn’t arrive to production until 2016, it has all the hallmarks of Ive trying to shoehorn industrial design values into human interface design.)
unloved child of tl;dr: This is all a train-wreck, and it exhausts me just to have to think about it (again).
Thanks for explaining that, I've always wondered what the deal was with VLC's icon!
That topic it's getting better and better at each interaction, it's a delightful to read and learn from it.
So, so, so true. One time, Apple software & hardware design seemed clearly focused on how the user used their products, where the design would just work and so importantly: not get in the way.
Someone was clearly focused on function driving the design such that usage and appearance worked together hand in hand, neither “overshadowing” or compromising the other.
Then there was this subtle “cart before the horse” shift that was hardly noticeable at the time, where Apple and their lemming clones gained a certain consciousness about putting “the design” itself on center stage instead of “how the design is used.” Things went downhill IMHO when it was more about daring design departures that users suddenly had to react to (IOS7…butterfly keyboard…touchbar…no ESC key…ports removal) instead design based on “what works” continually being improved and refined.
I love this cartoon I found years ago online. I include both looks and function in the “UIs were once beautiful” sentiment.
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This only came to me fairly recently. I happen to live in a town where filming of stuff happens fairly regularly, so the cones are often out (typically, walling off parking spaces and the bpunds of production areas). I just happened to see one particular cone recently which had two rings of reflective tape on it (instead of the usual, spray-painted initials of the production company), and the gerbil wheel that is my brain began to turn really quickly.
System 7.5.3 Baby, Yes it was. I liked Mavericks. If I could run modern stuff on Mav I would downgrade
...because they only had black, white and precious few pixels to work with.
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And here we are in the world of retina and 4K displays, having to suffer thru often vague and confusing flat design, low- or no-contrast white-out buttonless monochromatic interfaces. Makes sense huh.
I work in IT totally! Nothing is intuitive anymore. My grandmother born in 1916. Turned on a Performa 6400 mac os 7.5.3. She was online reading the new, printing stuff out, e-mailing. Today people younger then me, tech savvy generation, They can't do anything with out IT. Mac os x was a downgrade from Mac os 9. It wasn't pretty, but anyone could use it. Extensions folder easiest way to install a driver or feature.
This is a much much MUCH larger problem than just computing. People can't seem to do ANYTHING now without needing major help.