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

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181–190 of 379 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the non-modifiable hidden system partition? Inability to create directories under / That alone has stopped me moving my Macs to the latest OS after testing.

I'm genuinely curious: why do you want to create new directories at the root level? Is this something you're just used to doing and it breaks your customary way of working? Is it a "general principle" thing (which I suspect is a lot of the objection the HN crowd really has at the root, no pun intended)? I've been using OS X-based Macs since 2002 and used Linux and FreeBSD for a decade before that, and I don't recall…

> why do you want to create new directories at the root level?

Why not? It's his system, he should be able to do whatever he likes. On most Linux I can rm -rf / all day long and nobody cares. What's the problem with creating root level directories?

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that and the fact that tech website users basically complain about every UI change. Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. This is fundamentally different than apple’s core fan base who seem to like any change just for the sake of change.

I feel exposed :D. I really enjoy using XFCE and run it on all my machines.

You should feel proud. I pull in some XFCE packages to compliment my i3 desktop and it's absolutely great.

MATE and LXQt are two other comparably simple desktop environments that I like.

I get comments from my bewildered MacOS-using friends when they see that my 400$ Linux machine is faster than anything they've ever tried.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel exposed :D. I really enjoy using XFCE and run it on all my machines.

Why are they hating on or even mentioning XFCE? XFCE can both act and look like Berdoo / San Bernadino, the last OS11 release, what's the problem with it? You new-fangled San Berdoo OSXI users get off my lawn.

Cause they're going to be $5,000 poorer the next time they buy a laptop.

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

#186
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the case of the proxy icon, the types of interactions you could perform with it were mostly undiscoverable and unknown to a lot of users. That's a good point I hadn't thought of -- I love the proxy icon. I'm glad it's still there, but this kind of feels like Apple is implicitly saying, "Look, for the ten of you who knew what this was, you still do it, but we're just hiding it from everyone else, sorry."

It’s easy to take every UI change as an affront, particularly when somebody changes something we liked. Just from what I’ve seen though, it appears the goal is a simply a more space efficient UI. It’s not a bad goal, even though I still want to beat them over the head with the Dock which functioned better under NeXTSTEP than it ever did under Mac OS X, and the stoplight isn’t doing anyone any favors over the Mac OS 9…

The problem is, it seems to be not so much about space efficiency, but about streamlined appearance (e.g., there's now less horizontal space and fewer controls are shown at once), which translates to low semantic contrast, wich again translates to lower work efficiency. And it's the latter, which causes most of the criticism, as not all users want to trade personal time and usability for looks (or prettier printouts of the UI).

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

#187
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, any change will be frowned upon. It just annoys me that I feel like they're drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them. If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wou…

I don't see it as a sign of "doom," but rather more regression. It took YEARS for Apple to admit that their keyboards were shit, and they still haven't admitted that the emoji bar on their so-called "pro" computers is an embarrassing and failed gimmick. In fact, they've doubled down on it and now don't offer ANY proper laptop keyboard. But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some…

> Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF?

From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes:

> Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814)

> Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?

PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years.

The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.

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

#188
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect that MacOS 11.2 will be iPadOS.

strong disagree. MacOS and iPadOS will take cues from each other, but they will remain fundamentally different. MacOS for the old-timey folks who want root access and to be able to browse the file system, iPadOS for people who like having all for that abstracted away from them a-la iOS. neither is right or wrong, just caters to different kinds of people who prefer different ways of working.

There's also the fact that macOS's UI isn't touch-based, which is a distinction that apple follows religiously. As long as they keep that distinction, there will always be a need for both UIs.

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

#189
Didn't see anyone mention this, but one of the main reasons for making macOS look more like iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS is because at some point we will be able to run apps written for the other systems natively in macOS. Seems like an obvious move, why is everyone so surprised? It just means less duplicated interface code for multiplatform products.

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

#190
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, any change will be frowned upon. It just annoys me that I feel like they're drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them. If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wou…

I still don't understand how anyone with hundreds of billions of dollars ships really crappy anything. Like do hundreds of people just pretend that a crappy keyboard isn't garbage or is it so siloed that most people never get an opportunity to register an opinion?

"Hey dev, you don't like that new keyboard pushed by your director/VP? Here's your termination notice!"

"We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback."

-- Corporation 101

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