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

developer.apple.com

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

#211

Post by curioussavage »

monadic2 wrote: post #74
1_player wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay for a well engineered macOS 11 theme for GNOME. Perhaps when GTK4 is out end of this year with support for blurred transparency shaders. Though I got to say Adwaita improved a lot recently.

I’d pay for a decent macOS keybinding theme for gnome, any price. Who gives a damn about the look, app marketers?

I don't have the link on hand but I saw a project recently where someone did this. Themes have been around but this guy did keyboard shortcuts and a few other tweaks all packaged up.

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

#212

Post by kyawzazaw »

filleduchaos wrote: post #206
RivieraKid wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I download a popular app and it shows up as a disk image, it's not really my fault. This is a UX fail. Apple has the power to fix this. Normal people don't know and don't want to know what are apple disk images and what's the difference between .pkg and .dmg.

I highly doubt "normal people" are losing much sleep over a virtual drive showing up in their Finder sidebars. It's only a "UX fail" if you're of the opinion that all platforms should work exactly the same way, and/or that UX paradigms that aren't what you already know are inherently wrong.

Yup, normal people just don’t care about it showing up as a virtual drive.

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

#213

Post by eyelidlessness »

PostThisTooFast wrote: post #81
dimmke wrote: 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…

> But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support?

Not that I don't think they should support it (they should), but this is almost certainly due to perfectionism and bias, not amateurishness. Apple has an institutional focus on good iconography, and good iconography almost always has different representations for different sizes. The icons scale within a certain size range, then switch to a representation more appropriate for the size. I would be shocked if this is ever completely eliminated from Apple's DNA.

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

#214

Post by Apofis »

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.

They can simply get rid of the close/minimize/maximize buttons at this point. I wonder just how many people actually ever use them.

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

#215

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ghaff wrote: post #209
donw wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory. Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to…

>On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc. When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things. Apple does a ton of things wrong and arguably forces some changes before a lot of the world is ready for them. But they've never prioritized supporting…

> When the iPad first came out: "OMG, you can't print! How insane." Probably forgetting other things.

I very much don't recall anyone complaining about printer support. The primary jab at launch was "it's just a big iPhone". Which was in fact true—it just turned out that "a big iPhone" was pretty damn good, especially when actual iPhones had 3.5" screens.

I'd say most of these sorts of complaints are basically legitimate. When the iPhone came out, it didn't have copy and paste, and that was in fact extremely annoying!

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

#216

Post by johnisgood »

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 extra padding in all of the UI is the only thing that I chafe at a little bit

This, and increased font sizes. Do any of you know how to change the font size of the window title bar in macOS 11?

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

#217

Post by wpm »

avree wrote: post #34
jtbayly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Command/Ctrl + F for: "align different subsets of toolbar items"

The pictures above the paragraph that phrase appears in exemplify the problem perfectly. One certainly looks nicer, being all uniform and monochrome, but the other provides visual feedback that is far quicker to parse than text or hieroglyphics.

I have to explain to my 70 year old aunt why I won't be updating her Macbook to Big Sur, because she'll never be able to cope with this change. Yeah, she's 70 and not that great at all this, but that's exactly who this interface should be for. We can bitch and moan but we'll deal, because we have to. At 70 years old you just want your fucking email to work and you want to know what buttons to click on.

Apple decided to add depth to the glyphs on the Dock, but no where else apparently. I'm so fucking tired of this flat monochrome bullshit.

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

#219

Post by snowwrestler »

dane-pgp wrote: post #151
henriquez wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cory Doctorow talked about these worries quite eloquently back in his 2011 keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress, titled "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation". https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...

I mean, that was nearly a decade ago and we're still doing just fine for general purpose computation.

At what point do we stop saying "he was so prescient, look we're almost there," and just admit things haven't turned out as badly as people feared? DRM has turned out be more of a nuisance than an apocalypse, and general purpose computing is at least as available today as it was in 2011.

In some ways it is even easier; for example anyone with an email address can get access to a cloud-hosted computer for free.

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

#220

Post by turndown »

_fzslm wrote: post #174
AlexandrB wrote: post #150

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.

IMO you vastly overestimate the care Apple has for "old-timey folks who want root access." They will remove your usecase in due time, when they decide to merge the two(MacOS and iPadOS).
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