The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline

> icons still dont make sense

Couldn't agree more, My last IOS device was the Iphone 3G, so I kind of lost touch with IOS. Recently found myself trying to help my mom print an email on her Ipad, and felt quiet disarmed as none of those icons made any sense at all! Ended up clicking icons to see what happens, one in particular, was apparently deleting messages, and I have yet to understand what the icon symbol was all about :P

Sounds like you picked the wrong tool tbh

I'm not a fan of the 12 inch Macbook but you knew it only had one port and no active cooling when you bought it.

It's not like it suddenly lost a bunch of ports and throttling under load is not really unexpected either.

Absolutely right.

The article misses the mark IMHO by focusing on skeuomorphic(sp?) icons.

Yes, usability has degraded during the recent 'flat design' craze, but not so much because skeuomorphism was tossed out, but because the many little visual design changes that kill discoverability.

The mobile operating systems started this trend where a lot of advanced functionality was hidden behind 'magic' touch and swipe gestures that go way beyond the simple and intuitive tap, zoom and rotate gestures, like 2-, 3- and 4-finger swipes, long and short touches, etc..., important features cannot be visually discovered (how do I close an application again, on iOS, Android and Windows8? how do I flip between applications? how do I take a screenshot?).

It's the many small things that kill usability for the sake of visual design:

- the famous shift-key on iOS, what the hell were they thinking?

- buttons are often indistinguishable from non-interactive label, leading to idiotic trial and error clicking to find out which UI elements do something

- scroll-bars that are hidden by default, loosing the information how far I am into a document (OSX)

- changing and moving things around just for the sake of confusing existing users, not making anything more intuitive (especially Windows is guilty of this)

And so on and on... the icon design is the least of the problems (and every OS worth its salt should allow to replace the icon theme anyway).

One important reason I'm going back to the command line more and more is because UIs have become so unusable for anything that goes beyond browsing an image collection. Change itself is only good if it results in improvements, but in the area of UI design, things that have been working just fine for 20 years have been broken for superficial visual effects.

It's like 90's web designers took over and are building operating system UIs now (and may be there's a bit of truth in it).

It's not like the past was perfect of course, I mean... Alt-F4, Alt-TAB, ... but that was on Windows which was always laughed at for its poor usability (at least from view of AmigaOS and MacOS users).

I think the main problem with UI is the movement towards scalable graphics fitting all types of displays which unfortunately can't be as complex as raster graphics with the same size constraints. Hence flatness and overly abstract, "simple-gradiented" shapes everywhere. I think once people realize that 8K will be the final resolution of displays, raster will come back as the number of display formats that need to be supported will be limited and graphics could be rescaled on the go. For now we have to suffer through the "modernism" phase of UI design which like in art makes only around 5% of people inspired, rest is underwhelmed; or stick to the last bearable OSes like Win 7, Mavericks, iOS6...