What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#31

Post by breakfastduck » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #23

yssrn wrote: post #13

Virtually all of these changes reduce contrast and differentiation between controls while simultaneously decreasing information density. All bad news for people who work on their computers for a living.

I like borders on my buttons to know what is a button and what isn't, this feels.. backwards... So much has to be inferred from the way things used to be, makes it harder to argue that it's the "simpler" operating system designed for Humans with a keen eye on UX design.. FWIW I also think the flat UI on iPhone (which has been prevelant for >6y now) is a horror show. Steve Jobs famously once said (while working at NeX…

How on earth is moving to a the ARM architecture not pushing computing forward?

macOS moving to ARM is the biggest leap for developers in recent years - Amazon are also developing their own ARM chips and cloud services running linux ARM is the future.

Having a mac with a unix-like terminal environment & support to run linux arm natively when devloping for those services is a huge deal.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#32

Post by jacurtis » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #18

I have to be honest and go completely against the crowd here - but I think the UI updates are very good. They make the two OSes look cohesive but in a tasteful way. The extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit, it feels unnecessary. I really don't think they're going to put out touch screen Macs. So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional chan…

I agree completely. The only real gripe I feel is that excessive padding.

It is sort of like scrolling through Dribbble app mockups. The layouts look amazing as a mockup, but when you actually go to make or use the app it isn't as practical as you want.

On a desktop, with a mouse, I have near-perfect precision. I don't need overly-padded icons and windows because I have the precision of a mouse. The extra padding just wastes screen real-estate and makes me move the mouse more to get between tools or options in the menu.

I would much rather have less padding, which might not look as beautiful, and use the extra space for the content of my application as opposed to the toolbars.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#33

Post by lwhi » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #18

I have to be honest and go completely against the crowd here - but I think the UI updates are very good. They make the two OSes look cohesive but in a tasteful way. The extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit, it feels unnecessary. I really don't think they're going to put out touch screen Macs. So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional chan…

The problem is, Apple have chosen consumers above professionals.

It's been fairly obvious that this was their plan. Now it's been categorically confirmed.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#34

Post by avree » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #14

Synaesthesia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure the usual reduce transparency and increase contrast options will still be there.

Yes, but color is such a helpful distinguishing feature that contrast can never make up for it disappearing. I can squint until I can’t distinguish any of the symbols and still tell which is which when they are colored.

Which menus generally have color as an element in Mac OS today that don't in the new Mac OS? Serious question—I can't find one.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#35

Post by seumars » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #18

I have to be honest and go completely against the crowd here - but I think the UI updates are very good. They make the two OSes look cohesive but in a tasteful way. The extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit, it feels unnecessary. I really don't think they're going to put out touch screen Macs. So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional chan…

Even judging by that first screenshot, you can see that white text with very smooth shadow on a semi-transparent menubar is not at all pleasant or readable. For all the talk about "human interface" you'd think they would at least get the whole black-text-on-white-background principle.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#36

Post by dang » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

welearnednothng wrote: post #16

The title is misleading as it implies everything new in macOS, when the linked page is limited to human interface guidelines. Perhaps this should be retitled something like "What's new in MacOS Big Sur (UX|HIG|Human Interace Guidelines)"?

Good point. We've narrowed the scope in the title above. Thanks!

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#37

Post by henriquez » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

breakfastduck wrote: post #29

dimmke wrote: post #18

I have to be honest and go completely against the crowd here - but I think the UI updates are very good. They make the two OSes look cohesive but in a tasteful way. The extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit, it feels unnecessary. I really don't think they're going to put out touch screen Macs. So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional chan…

I agree, I think the new UI looks great. People are taking the UI / ARM change as apple taking away more control, but macOS is THE development platform of the entire apple ecosystem. So yeah, the ecosystem may be tighter knitted, but they sure as hell will not lock down macOS like they do iOS, they have so many mac users who are developers and apple are absolutely aware of that. People complain about features in cata…

Apple locks down MacOS more and more with each major release. Some of it seems well justified but the totality of it is concerning to me. Being able to defeat some of it in the console doesn’t change what is an increasingly abusive relationship. I feel like we’re rapidly approaching a point where Apple enforces the same strict control over MacOS that they do over the iOS App Store and they’re softening people up towards that in baby steps with each incremental restriction they implement.

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I personally decided to stop buying their computers because of it.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#38

Post by breakfastduck » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

loughnane wrote: post #24

dimmke wrote: post #18

I have to be honest and go completely against the crowd here - but I think the UI updates are very good. They make the two OSes look cohesive but in a tasteful way. The extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit, it feels unnecessary. I really don't think they're going to put out touch screen Macs. So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional chan…

>Apple knows that a large percentage of the people who buy its computers are software engineers I suspect a large percentage of software engineers buy their computers, but I'm skeptical at the assertion that a large percentage of people who buy their computers are software engineers.

That's probably true - although there are a LOT of iOS developers out there who can now essentially program for macOS because of catalyst.

Either way, software engineers build the applications that drive your platforms popularity, meaning developer adoption of a platform is incredibly important and thus they probably have a larger influence on Apples decision making than other demographics would with similar percentages.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#39

Post by _jal » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

breakfastduck wrote: post #29

dimmke wrote: post #18

I have to be honest and go completely against the crowd here - but I think the UI updates are very good. They make the two OSes look cohesive but in a tasteful way. The extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit, it feels unnecessary. I really don't think they're going to put out touch screen Macs. So I'm not sure what there is to get upset about. I don't see any big functional chan…

I agree, I think the new UI looks great. People are taking the UI / ARM change as apple taking away more control, but macOS is THE development platform of the entire apple ecosystem. So yeah, the ecosystem may be tighter knitted, but they sure as hell will not lock down macOS like they do iOS, they have so many mac users who are developers and apple are absolutely aware of that. People complain about features in cata…

> it's incredibly easy to bypass the stuff that makes a difference using the terminal

Not my experience. It took a couple weeks of noodling to get parts of my environment moved over, and some of my automation I just moved to a linux box because I got sick of it.

> we've somehow got to the point where people bash apple for actually taking privacy and security seriously

Wow.

On the planet I use a Mac on, the complaints are about a set of non-manageable, opaque and somewhat buggy security changes that arbitrarily changed semantics on big chunks of the filesystem and broke a bunch of things is hard to figure out ways.

Add in that there is no sensible mechanism for cleaning up any of these magic permissions paths, and I don't even know what permissions are active on the machine I'm typing on.

I've loved OS X for being a decent gui on a real Unix. It had a decent run, but my next laptop will be a Linux box.

Re: What’s New in macOS Big Sur: Human Interface Guidelines

#40

Post by breakfastduck » Mon, Jun 22, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

henriquez wrote: post #37

breakfastduck wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I think the new UI looks great. People are taking the UI / ARM change as apple taking away more control, but macOS is THE development platform of the entire apple ecosystem. So yeah, the ecosystem may be tighter knitted, but they sure as hell will not lock down macOS like they do iOS, they have so many mac users who are developers and apple are absolutely aware of that. People complain about features in cata…

Apple locks down MacOS more and more with each major release. Some of it seems well justified but the totality of it is concerning to me. Being able to defeat some of it in the console doesn’t change what is an increasingly abusive relationship. I feel like we’re rapidly approaching a point where Apple enforces the same strict control over MacOS that they do over the iOS App Store and they’re softening people up towa…

I disagree, I don't think they're anywhere near locking down to the iOS level.

Could you explain some of these incremental lock downs? I honestly can't think of any that are genuine restrictions, but that might just be because I don't encounter them with what I do.