Quick Takes: Apple Celebrating Women's Week, The Road to Swift 5, and New macOS 11 Concept

[MacRumors]

In addition to our standalone articles covering the latest Apple news and rumors at MacRumors, this Quick Takes column provides a bite-sized recap of other headlines about Apple and its competitors on weekdays.

Thursday, March 1

Apple celebrating International Women's Day and Women's Week with in-store events: Apple Orchard Road in Singapore will be hosting Today at Apple sessions over the next week in celebration of women who inspire the community. Apple Marché Saint-Germain in France will be hosting a recruiting event on March 8, billed as an evening of inspiration, participation, and celebration.

Commentary: International Women's Day is observed on March 8 to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. Apple has honored the day in previous years with featured content in iTunes and Apple Music.

macOS 11 concept reimagines Apple's desktop operating system: Spanish graphic designer and University of Navarra student Álvaro Pabesion has shared a macOS 11 concept on Behance. The mockups visualize how Apple's desktop operating system could look with a simpler design.

Commentary: While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it's hard not to drool over the idea of a more systemwide dark mode and iTunes being easier to navigate. macOS last received a major redesign as part of OS X Yosemite in 2014.

"Apple Is Going to Be the First Trillion-Dollar Company": A bold headline from Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz, who believes Apple will achieve the milestone at some point this year. He considers share repurchases, continued investments from Warren Buffett, index buyers, and several new products being on the horizon as four factors key to Apple's continued upward momentum.

Commentary: Apple is certainly leading the race to a trillion dollar valuation, with a market capitalization hovering around the $900 billion mark. Google parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are next closest, each with market caps approaching the $750 billion mark. AAPL is down nearly two percent today.

Apple outlines release process for Swift 4.2, introduces SwiftNIO: Apple has shared a blog post that describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.2. Apple has also introduced SwiftNIO at a conference in Tokyo, described as a low-level tool for building high-performance networking applications in Swift.

Commentary: A couple of notable items for developers who use Apple's open source programming language. Today is also the cutoff date for proposing ideas for Swift 5.0, expected to be released in late 2018.

For more Apple news and rumors coverage, visit our Front Page, Mac Blog, and iOS Blog. Also visit our forums to join in the discussion.

Article Link: Quick Takes: Apple Celebrating Women's Week, The Road to Swift 5, and New macOS 11 Concept

 

[Mefisto]

Ooh, that system wide dark mode does look sexy. Here's hoping something will come of that!

EDIT: Crud, I thought it was something a bit more "official", not just an artist's view of what would be cool. Still cool, though.

 

[opeter]

Hmmm ... in that mockup of macOS 11, he also changed the folder icons? The rounded corners are much smaller now.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Here's a silly concept that has nothing to do with what macOS 11 will actually look like.

 

[apb89]

Why is the woman in the middle pictured wearing a fitbit? LOL gtfo fitbit

 

[TMRJIJ]

Here's a silly concept that has nothing to do with what macOS 11 will actually look like.

Do you know what macOS 11 will actually look like?

 

[0958400]

Love the concept of macOS 11.

 

[Shasterball]

Apple celebrates Women’s Day with picture of guy smirking behind the backs of women.

 

[TMRJIJ]

I like certain things about this concept better than the other one I saw two years ago.
https://medium.com/swlh/macos-it-s-time-to-take-the-next-step-ee7871ccd3c7

These guys should totally collaborate. Just wish Apple would actually look at these and play around with it.

 

[Netman]

neat n great macOS 11 newlook concept, like it so much !

 

[pier]

Removing the system bar on macOS would be a huge usability mistake.

 

[jgbr]

He’s obviously not an OS X power user. Hiding the menu bar would be a stupid mistake.

 

[Internet Enzyme]

In addition to our standalone articles covering the latest Apple news and rumors at MacRumors, this Quick Takes column provides a bite-sized recap of other headlines about Apple and its competitors on weekdays.

Thursday, March 1

Apple celebrating International Women's Day and Women's Week with in-store events: Apple Orchard Road in Singapore will be hosting Today at Apple sessions over the next week in celebration of women who inspire the community. Apple Marché Saint-Germain in France will be hosting a recruiting event on March 8, billed as an evening of inspiration, participation, and celebration.

Commentary: International Women's Day is observed on March 8 to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. Apple has honored the day in previous years with featured content in iTunes and Apple Music.

macOS 11 concept reimagines Apple's desktop operating system: Spanish graphic designer and University of Navarra student Álvaro Pabesion has shared a macOS 11 concept on Behance. The mockups visualize how Apple's desktop operating system could look with a simpler design.

Commentary: While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it's hard not to drool over the idea of a more systemwide dark mode and iTunes being easier to navigate. macOS last received a major redesign as part of OS X Yosemite in 2014.

"Apple Is Going to Be the First Trillion-Dollar Company": A bold headline from Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz, who believes Apple will achieve the milestone at some point this year. He considers share repurchases, continued investments from Warren Buffett, index buyers, and several new products being on the horizon as four factors key to Apple's continued upward momentum.

Commentary: Apple is certainly leading the race to a trillion dollar valuation, with a market capitalization hovering around the $900 billion mark. Google parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are next closest, each with market caps approaching the $750 billion mark. AAPL is down nearly two percent today.

Apple outlines release process for Swift 4.2, introduces SwiftNIO: Apple has shared a blog post that describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.2. Apple has also introduced SwiftNIO at a conference in Tokyo, described as a low-level tool for building high-performance networking applications in Swift.

Commentary: A couple of notable items for developers who use Apple's open source programming language. Today is also the cutoff date for proposing ideas for Swift 5.0, expected to be released in late 2018.

For more Apple news and rumors coverage, visit our Front Page, Mac Blog, and iOS Blog. Also visit our forums to join in the discussion.

Article Link: Quick Takes: Apple Celebrating Women's Week, The Road to Swift 5, and New macOS 11 Concept

At this point, redesigning mac os to that level would be a multi-year absolutely monumental task that would piss of a lot of people, since they would guaranteed remove a lot of beloved “legacy features”. They probably should redesign it, but they would have to do it incrementally

 

[FightTheFuture]

He’s obviously not an OS X power user. Hiding the menu bar would be a stupid mistake.

Removing the system bar on macOS would be a huge usability mistake.

Imagine using photoshop with that menubar. Doesn't work. Otherwise, I like the concept of more real estate.

 

[fairuz]

I've never used Go (the language), but I've heard it's straight up better than Swift. And I've used Swift and don't like it. I think it's good considering all the compatibility they're trying to keep with ObjC stuff, but that's also holding it back severely.

 

[coolfactor]

Removing the system bar on macOS would be a huge usability mistake.

He’s obviously not an OS X power user. Hiding the menu bar would be a stupid mistake.

Yes, he does not understand some of the basic reasons *why* the Mac menu bar is better than operating systems that attach the menu bar to individual windows. On a Mac, you just slam your mouse to the top of the screen and you can quickly get to the menu that you want. In that macOS 11 mockup, the menubar becomes a difficult-to-use widget separate from the geographic dimensions of the screen.

 

[jecowa]

Using the name "MacOS 11" worried me at first. My initial thought for the change from "X" to "11" is that they were ditching x86 for Apple's iOS processors. But it was just a fan-made concept dark theme.

 

[AutisticGuy]

Apple celebrates Women’s Day with picture of guy smirking behind the backs of women.

His expression is totally, "Yeah, look at them hotties." Um, they might want to pick a different image?

 

[fairuz]

Yes, he does not understand some of the basic reasons *why* the Mac menu bar is better than operating systems that attach the menu bar to individual windows. On a Mac, you just slam your mouse to the top of the screen and you can quickly get to the menu that you want. In that macOS 11 mockup, the menubar becomes a difficult-to-use widget separate from the geographic dimensions of the screen.

One of the reasons it's more usable than Windows, where every user program builds its own menu bar that annoyingly floats with the window or sometimes sits at the top and always looks different.

 

[DocMultimedia]

I'm still pissed about the sidebar icons going grayscale. It used to be so much easier to pick things out. Now it's little icons that all look about the same. Downloads, Music, Dropbox,... All little gray things.

Says the old man.

 

[fairuz]

I'm still pissed about the sidebar icons going grayscale. It used to be so much easier to pick things out. Now it's little icons that all look about the same. Downloads, Music, Dropbox,... All little gray things.

Says the old man.

I agree, but I'm 21 and don't have eyesight problems. I used to read the color before I'd read the label or discern the shape of the icon.

 

[lunarworks]

I'm still pissed about the sidebar icons going grayscale. It used to be so much easier to pick things out. Now it's little icons that all look about the same. Downloads, Music, Dropbox,... All little gray things.

Says the old man.

Absolutely. Spotting things by colour is much quicker than spotting things by (low-contrast) shape. This is one of those cases where usability wasn't taken into consideration.

 

[csurfr]

Says the old man.

I got you.

 

[bladerunner2000]

That new Mac OS interface is a pipedream. Apple's too busy making boneheaded decisions on projects with the iPhone like removing headphone jacks. Even if we did get a proper update to Mac OS, we wouldn't see Apple do away with the dumb green button crap that makes windows fullscreen, hiding the file menu and the dock which are essential to multi-task and bring down tools to WORK with the window in front of you. Hell, Apple won't even let give you the OPTION to change this behaviour and it's been years of people being psychotically annoyed by this.

... NOT TO MENTION, the dumb 'cmd+c' and 'cmd+opt+v' to MOVE files in the finder.

Holy god how backwards Apple has become.

 

[robbyx]

Yes, he does not understand some of the basic reasons *why* the Mac menu bar is better than operating systems that attach the menu bar to individual windows. On a Mac, you just slam your mouse to the top of the screen and you can quickly get to the menu that you want. In that macOS 11 mockup, the menubar becomes a difficult-to-use widget separate from the geographic dimensions of the screen.

This concept is definitely a step in the wrong direction as far as the menu bar is concerned. I hate all this hide-and-seek UI stuff we're seeing these days. I sincerely hope that Apple does not go in that direction.

While I like the Mac menu bar, I really wish Apple had kept the NeXT menu block instead. The menu block could be placed anywhere on the screen and menus could be torn off to become floating palettes.