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The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
111–120 of 440 posts
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book once when I was little. It doesn't make sense to have a skeuomorphic contact book as an icon for Contacts. There was a rhetoric not too long ago where OSx fanboys would make fun of Windows' interfaces for still using the disk icon as the "save" button. Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer an…
> Now that guy is complaining that the photos app icon doesn't look like a Point And Shoot camera, when fewer and fewer people use those. The old icon also had a photo on it though which made it clear it was the Photo's app, even if you don't know what the other thing is in the icon at all.
I know a few people who still print photos, but most of my friends never do. So a photo on a screen would maybe be a better metaphor if you need one.
It's a really difficult problem. So many of the things we do today are done on a rectangle with a screen. That doesn't make a good icon. Maybe icons are obsolete altogether?
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#113It’s not that important a point, but legal pads are a very US phenomena. I’m German and I have never ever seen a yellow pad like that in person. The current notes icon (with white paper) is much more in line with the note pads you would encounter in Germany. Paper people write on to take notes is typically just white. Maybe bound with a spiral on the left or top (and perforated paper to tear off), maybe glued togethe…
We don't do yellow pads in my country either, but I still find the yellow icon with writing on it ('notes') more evocative than the white icon with no writing ('lack of notes'). If you were to show me the flat white icon without any context, I might not even get it right.
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you buy your notebooks? I've never come across yellow paper except in US media. I'd always assumed it was dyed yellow to hide poor quality paper. Is there any truth in this?
Never seen yellow notebooks, but yellow paper, sure. That yellow looks like the colour of the A4 pads I bought at the university bookshop in Norway.
The only yellow paper I remember seeing was when I did a dunning cycle application for accounts dept. Depending on the age of the debt, it would either be white, fluorescent yellow or florescent orange. I remember thinking this was a clever way to get your invoice noticed.
Perhaps yellow pads are the future.
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#115I have to disagree with the author. I understand his frustration with some of the icon choices(Photos, Game center, etc.) but most of the things he's grieving for are just tacky. The leopard pattern on the OSX box and the overly cluttered illustration with the galaxy background, glassy surfaced "X", icons and lens flare would look especially stupid in 2016. I'm glad they removed all the silly shadows, 3d effects and…
Case in point, just below the article you can find this: http://imgur.com/a/iQe0Z
The puzzle background goes contrarian to the text label and makes my eyes/mind jump while trying to read the labels.
The first button makes me think of Wikipedia, the second one of Facebook. It's precisely that kind of cognitive dissonance where you read "blue" written in red and get asked to say the color or the word.
The last button has embossed text for some reason, possibly in an attempt to make it readable in face of the noisy background, but in turn it makes it stand apart from the other buttons.
The whole theme of the design reminds me precisely of the design language of Mac OS X from its origins to Leopard. It's not bad per se, but people don't need as much no-so-subtle hints as before in the UI, which get perceived as distracting noise. It's not zeitgeist anymore.
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#116Very funny to see Apple playing catch up on design to Google in the area of flat style design. Google are the ones who pushed flat design into UI and everyone else is following their lead.
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#117It’s not that important a point, but legal pads are a very US phenomena. I’m German and I have never ever seen a yellow pad like that in person. The current notes icon (with white paper) is much more in line with the note pads you would encounter in Germany. Paper people write on to take notes is typically just white. Maybe bound with a spiral on the left or top (and perforated paper to tear off), maybe glued togethe…
France here, and the new one feels so much better. I definitely viewed the old one as a U.S. centric thing (similar to units).
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#118Ios is just as bad, still need about a minute to figure out how to add a reminder if i can't use siri. icons still dont make sense (serious travesty, my compass icon is actually safari, while my compass app has a cross icon). And the sheer stupidity of flatness everywhere makes it slow to read the interface.
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My computer is a tool, it's not an artwork I turn on to look at Things looking better actually has a positive effect on usability.
Hmm, not sure on that one. A beautiful interface can be better but I suspect it's better to have an uglier consistent and intuitive interface. I'm a long-term Inkscape user, they recently 'improved' the icons; it all looks wrong (but handsome in a minimalistic, low-visibility of chrome, sort of way) and disturbs my workflow considerably.
A beautiful interface can be better but I suspect it's better to have an uglier consistent and intuitive interface.
I'm not sure why the parent comment was downvoted. If the above statement was intended to mean that being consistent and intuitive is more important than aesthetics then that is almost certainly true, in my experience designing and testing UIs. Of course, the ideal is to have it all by using the aesthetics to support the functionality. Being attractive and being functional aren't mutually exclusive.
This is where, IMHO, a lot of generic minimalist/flat designs following the current trend go wrong: they sacrifice so much detail and so many possible ways to be visually distinctive or interactive that what remains inevitably all looks very similar and loses some of the visual cues that could help to guide the user in how the system works.
Re: The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline
#120Currently, on the same front page on HN there is an article: Humans once opposed coffee and refrigeration: why we often hate new stuff. This applies perfectly to you, dear self-righteous blog author.
By the same logic you can dismiss every critique. Not everything new is an improvement.
Change for change's sake disgusts me. It is rampant in Apple's macos, iOS, as well as Google's Android.