alt Hacker NewsLook how crisp, professional, and usable it all is.
This is a very good write-up. There's no way this level of testing and dedication could have resulted in the execrable shitshow that is Windows today.
Mac OS is going backward with accelerating speed, too. They had just started to recover from Jony Ive when they put a packaging designer in charge of UI... resulting in the "Liquid Glass" debacle, and all the other incompetent UI changes that accompanied Tahoe's rollout.
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Ranting on UI, I think I might blame MS for this but I feel like many shortcuts for customization in apps and OS are a net negative.
The first example I remember was ~2003ish when MS Office did a big redesign and got much bigger toolbars. That they were big is a matter of taste but that's not where I'm going with this. No, the issue was that they made too easy to ACCIDENTALLY mess up the UI. They added all kinds of customization (which is fine) but then made it so just dragging a little too long an a button would let you move the button somewhere else. So, grandpa drags the button, possible off the bar, deleting it, and now for all intents and purposes the app is unusable to him. IMO, the customization options should be buried deeper where they can't happen by accident.
This "ACCIDENTAL" modification is all the rage now. On iPhone, holding on the lock screen puts the phone in "edit the lock screen mode". Several family members have asked why the image they put on the lock screen was gone. It was because they "butt edited the screen". Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen. AFAIK, almost no one needs this shortcut. It would be fine to just go into Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen or something like that. But, I'm just guessing (1) some UX designer needed something todo (2) someone working on lockscreen options got tired of doing the Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen dance and put in a shortcut that no-one but them needs.
This same issue is all over the place. The iPhone's lockscreen while charging mode has the same issue. The user (me) picks the clock face I want. And, one of 10 times I reach for the phone from the charging stand I accidently touch the screen which changes the face. I NEVER NEED THIS. Again, this should be buried in Settings->Lockscreen->Clock Face. The shortcut a net negative.
There are many more.
To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working, resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.
I hate liquid glass with a burning passion. I've never understood why people get so irritated at design changes until now.
I like to jest that packaging designer would of course wrap things in clear plastic...
GUIs used to be designed by power users, who would start with an advanced design and strip it down to a simple version the average user could use. Now GUIs are designed by average users who have no idea what to do with advanced features, because they're stuck thinking about the GUI as an average user does.
Power users understand many different levels. Beginner/average -> professional -> advanced -> power user. But the average designers nowadays only understand two things: average, and everything beyond that. This is why professional, advanced, and obscure features are all just one long-press away - they literally have no idea which category each feature falls into, so they're all equally valid.