The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by tjl » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

jshevek wrote: post #324

marbletiles wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little. This just seems weird to me. Contacts books were replaced in a very limited way by PDAs for early adopters, but it wasn't until smartphones and their easy address books that they really started to die off. So post-2008, really. Were you not in professional settings until your late 20s? Still be surprised if you are both 35 and genui…

Not the parent, but I agree with them: Many tech savvy people abandoned contact books decades ago. Contact books serve two needs - long term storage and quick reference to frequently used numbers. Computers have provided the long term storage, and various other facilities provided the quick reference, even before smart phones: human memory, print outs, sticky notes, pdas, basic cell phones. In the 90s I knew people w…

My parents had a contact book when I was little (back in the 80s), but they eventually went to a system of cards standing up in a tray separated by last letter. It made it easy to pull it out when you wanted to make a call. They now have a mixed system where their most used phone numbers are in their iPhone contacts, but they have still have that tray for everybody else.

I had a contacts section in my DayTimer back in the 90s, but I've used a contacts program ever since I switched to using a computer-based calendar.

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

#342

Post by micv » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #275

tomtheelder wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I see a colleague using command line to do git operations I get itchy and think to myself "oh, come on! I could've done this in gui in seconds". What operation could you possibly perform significantly faster in a gui than on the command line? I can think of tons that would be far, far slower in a gui. > to me using a GUI is more of a mark of valuing one's time than that of a novice I would argue the exac…

> What operation could you possibly perform significantly faster in a gui than on the command line? I can think of tons that would be far, far slower in a gui. Sticking to the Git example: - visualising history (in gui it is just there) - opening old versions of files - visualising a complete log of a file and then jumping to individual diffs/commits The fact that in a decent GUI everything that could possibly be a l…

I couldn't agree more with this. I generally prefer command-line tools like vim and gdb, but for getting a view on things like file history or browsing the output of tools like callgrind? GUIs are the way to go. Horses for courses.

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

#343

Post by eddieh » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

WayneBro wrote: post #260

eddieh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the old window zoom, as it was called, was the best. I know Windows user hate it, and so many of the recent changes seem to have been to placate Windows user complaints. I liked my Mac the way it was. We don't need to appeal to Windows users.

People who really like Windows (including me) generally seem to dislike the full-screen button in OS X though, so how is that placating anyone? Everywhere I look I find people saying that window management in Windows is miles ahead of OS X. Even from people who wouldn't want to use Windows. If Apple wanted to placate those people, they would make the green button maximize by default, get rid of that ghastly global me…

All that stuff sounds awful, please stick to using Windows.

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

#344

Post by comex » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #299

collyw wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone should be using the command line if that argument were true. Its much more efficient for most purposes once you know it well.

> Everyone should be using the command line if that argument were true. Well, yes — they should. Would you rather communicate with speech or by pointing and grunting? We do need better languages for conversing with our computers, but we can't get rid of the need for language.

They should... and they do, in the form of Siri! I hope someday it outgrows its current limitation to relatively simple tasks.

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

#345

Post by Unbeliever69 » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

The abandonment of skeuomorphism was part rebellion and part caving to the ebbs and flows of popular design. When you move away from tactility and recognizability (familiarity), there is a greater burden on the user to interpret the intent of the designer. This is one of the reasons there has been a big surge in the use of animations in UI; because flat designs aren't as effective at communication as recognizable, tactile ones. Younger users of unique UIs and gestures have proven that you can adapt to new visual conventions and forms of interaction. The problem is that this is not Apple's ONLY audience. The Mac has always been attractive to people who want a more approachable, simple, user-friendly, less virus prone computer. This audience is typically less tech savvy and probably not a millennial. I further argue that the visual style of Steve Jobs was more in alignment with the innate desires of this archetype.

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

#346

Post by tjl » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

Sylos wrote: post #20

Angostura wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People just get it now without all that clutter. That's certainly what the proponents of flat design contend. In terms of measuring usability, I'm not so sure that's true. I've seen people hunting for buttons that didn't quite look like buttons

The Stock-Android Contacts-app has a pretty big design-flaw like that. When you open up a contact, it shows you a list of the ways that you can talk to this person. So, either call them, write an SMS, write an e-mail etc. And the Call-button is for whatever reason merged with the SMS-button. It's just one big button of which 4/5 is for calling and 1/5 to the right opens up the SMS-app. There is an icon representing S…

Really? That's odd. The iOS Contacts app merges Facetime and phone calls, but at least that's somewhat reasonable as that's still a call. CallKit in iOS 10 is standardizing it so all VOIP calls will be treated the same as FaceTime and phone calls.

iOS Contacts has a set of icons that look like the symbols on the app icons. That makes sense to me.

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

#347

Post by notatoad » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

jpalomaki wrote: post #237

The camera icon is not just a picture of the physical world object. It is pretty universal symbol for taking pictures. When the same symbol is used in so many places, even people who have never used the physical object resembling the icon, will recognize its meaning. In my view the reason behind many of these user interface changes is not really improved usability. The simple reason is that no matter how good interfa…

>The camera icon is not just a picture of the physical world object. It is pretty universal symbol for taking pictures.

Which is why it makes no sense as the icon for a photo management application. The iOS Camera icon still looks like a camera, but having a camera as the icon for a gallery application that isn't actually capable of taking pictures is a confusing concept to many users.

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

#348

Post by tjl » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #25

I think the greatness of OSXs past UIs is a bit over hyped. I changed from Windows 7 to Mavericks a couple of years ago and still find 7 more intuitive. You can see at a glance which programs are running from the bar in 7 unlike OSX, I still have not figured out the Finder very well and so on. On the other hand OSX seems better engineered in many ways, more stable, faster to respond and so on.

In the Dock Preferences, click the box "Show indicators for open applications". You should get a black dot under (or to the side) of the app icon. I've used this setting for years.

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

#349

Post by makecheck » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 6:01 PM UTC

tcfunk wrote: post #209

For me, the biggest issue with the past 2 or 3 OS X updates hasn't been the interface at all. I can get used to a new interface, that's not a problem. The real problem (imo) is the lack of meaningful updates to the OS. EVERYTHING is an aesthetic change, or some new Siri or iPhone integration. Does anyone actually start an email on their phone and finish it on their desktop? Anyone? Where's updates like better window…

That may be true of recent OS releases but it would be unfair to exclude what is planned for Sierra.

Additions like picture-in-picture look very useful. They definitely are adding more window management: a “guiding” mechanism to let windows glue together pretty easily, and tabbed windows in any application. Even if they didn’t, you can’t blame Apple for not rushing to provide features like tiling, etc. when there are multiple “tiling” and other window-management apps available on the App Store alone for a few bucks or less. Just go get one, and fix your desktop.

And remember, features “never used by you” does not equal “never used by anyone”. Can you not imagine someone starting a message on the couch from an iPad, realizing they need to attach a document that’s on a Mac, and wanting to go get it? Continuity is quite valuable, even if it isn’t used all the time.

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

#350

Post by makecheck » Tue, Jul 26, 2016, 6:06 PM UTC

The thing that bothers me most about the direction of icons is the sameness of all their shapes, ignoring the rest of their appearance.

This is a problem in both the Dock (where it seems everything is a circle nowadays) and in toolbars (where everything has an ugly white rounded-rectangle behind it, and is really tiny).

There used to be explicit mention of the importance of varying shapes in toolbars, as part of Apple’s own interface guidelines. At a glance, it’s far easier to find things when there’s a triangle-like icon next to a round icon next to a square icon next to a home-plate-shaped icon, etc. If every icon has the same shape, and has been shrunk into that shape to leave even less space for meaningful details, it‘s almost not worth having an icon at all.