Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

macOS Big Sur Preview

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 391 posts

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#351

Post by zapzupnz »

1propionyl wrote: post #248
riazrizvi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I especially liked the extension of complications in Apple Watch. The ability for developers to define the 'home screen' appearance of the watch is an important advancement that enables users to control their own technological identity. The Watch is the most important place for consumers to define their own 'GUI brand'.

When you put it that way, I want to throw my Apple Watch in a river. Technological identity? Consumer defined 'GUI brand'? Yikes.

You'd throw your watch in the river because someone used a few buzzwords?

Apple harps on every year about how their Apple Watch is the most personal device they sell. Personal. Intimate. Love. Magical.

Yet, we still buy the things because we find our own sense of value in it.

Clearly, we don't pay much attention to buzzwords in the marketing. I don't know why you'd start now with some random comment on HN.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#352

Post by zapzupnz »

ravedave5 wrote: post #207
SenHeng wrote: post #84

I’m surprised at all the negative takes. I thought it was refreshing, they’re reintroducing colours and icons, cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms, and introducing new, well tested convenience features.

I don't consider design language across platforms a positive nessisarly. I want my laptop to be a laptop and tablet to be a tablet. They don't need to share UI. That's why windows 8 was such a disaster.

"Consistent design language" doesn't mean "behave exactly the same".

That's exactly what Catalyst is for — to take iPad apps and make them good macOS citizens. Is that not exactly what you want?

A consistent design language makes it easier for iPadOS apps to come to macOS via Catalyst without having to be almost completely restyled whilst also preserving everything makes the Mac a Mac.

Your laptop remains a laptop. Your desktop remains a desktop. Ported apps respect the form factor, not force it to become a tablet.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#353

Post by zapzupnz »

aylmao wrote: post #225
SenHeng wrote: post #84

I’m surprised at all the negative takes. I thought it was refreshing, they’re reintroducing colours and icons, cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms, and introducing new, well tested convenience features.

In general I think all these are positives, but these two worry me: > "using a consistent design language across platforms" Apple famously refrained from doing this at first, because for platforms with fundamentally different form factors, use cases and input methods it doesn't make much sense. I do appreciate some parts of the redesign, but others like reducing the information density make things look nicer but make…

> - I use those buttons that seem to be MIA in the screen of the new Finder though (to switch between views, the sort menu, the cog icon with extra actions). Will I have to change my workflow?

No, because those icons are all still there. The cog button has become a … button, but it's the same menu.

> - I use a lot of items in the macOS sidebar. In the current Finder, my sidebar can show 12.5 items without scrolling. In the screenshots, it's showing 9. Am I going to have to alter my workflow here too?

No, just use smaller sidebar icons. System Preferences -> General.

> 3. It was in general unnecessary.

Depends what you consider necessary. I really think Apple wants to start pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst apps.

One issue with both of these is that apps written in either make completely different looking apps for Catalina and iOS 13.

In Big Sur and iOS 14, they'll look less different, which may help adoption. A Catalyst app with no specific changes made to be a good macOS citizen looks naff on Catalina but looks acceptable on Big Sur — so this helps lower the barrier for iPadOS developers to adopt proper macOS design language.

> I sure hope Apple hasn't gotten rid of these with the introduction of the Control Center

The Control Center demo showed dragging those items out to the menu bar so that they could work just like they did before.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#354

Post by pjmlp »

fareesh wrote: post #210
GeekyBear wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Honestly, every time Apple has done anything with the Mac the past couple of years, they've screwed it up. Compared to what OS? The latest Windows 10 update buggers up Storage Spaces and printing, hard on the heels of another Windows 10 Update that deleted the user's files.

Is it uncommon for folks to use a Linux desktop as their primary OS? I've been doing so for about 10 years and I've had no complaints. Whenever I need some specific software I boot to Windows or use Virtualbox. I also have a Macbook Pro 2015

Yes, I gave up on Linux for anything desktop related about 15 years ago.

Still have an ASUS Netbook with Ubuntu LTS, which allows me to validate the "progress" of Desktop Linux on laptops.

Naturally I occasionally get to deal with it via VMs and server deployments, however for my choice of languages the OS hardly matters anyway.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#355

Post by pjmlp »

irshadshalu wrote: post #215
GeekyBear wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Honestly, every time Apple has done anything with the Mac the past couple of years, they've screwed it up. Compared to what OS? The latest Windows 10 update buggers up Storage Spaces and printing, hard on the heels of another Windows 10 Update that deleted the user's files.

can't speak about the very recent updates, but windows have been consistent and adamant on keeping the backward compatibility. they still use reserved file names for io devices so that 30+ year old printers can still work, and you can still open a 2000s doc file in office 365. (I'm looking at you Apple, who made many of the 32 bit apps I loved useless) relevant video: https://youtu.be/bC6tngl0PTI (Tom Scott: Why you…

Even the, now official, merge of UWP with Win32 is planned to take years as they don't want to introduced hard breaks for those that decided to bet on WinRT.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#356

Post by pjmlp »

dcchambers wrote: post #77

I'm not sure why I continue to look forward to new Mac OS announcements every year when Apple continues to focus on consumer apps/features and not pro/developer features. Literally nothing in that preview page excites me as someone that uses Mac OS mainly for developing software. I wish they would use WWDC to announce developer and pro features and not consumer OS features. I don't really care for the UI changes, but…

As a developer I cannot care less about UNIX, I see lots of interesting features.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#357

Post by jbverschoor »

tarsinge wrote: post #294
jbverschoor wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have biweekly kernel panics on macOS... somewhere in the io sub system. Luckily vscode etc store their state

I had maybe one or two kernel panics since OS 10.1 more than 15 years ago, even with hackintoshes or water damaged MacBooks, so that would be a real shame if that’s due to Catalina and it’s not a hardware problem.

I never reboot my laptop

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#358

Post by Corrado »

Chazprime wrote: post #111
AnonC wrote: post #34

The UI and UX seem to be getting worse on macOS with the “iOSification” of the OS. I thought Jony Ive’s exit would stop that trend. It’ll be interesting to read perspectives from John Gruber, M J Tsai, Marco Arment, etc. I still haven’t upgraded from Mojave to Catalina because of serious bugs reported by other people (including data loss issues in Mail). I’ll see if Big Sur shows improvements (reported by others) and…

Hopefully they'll have an option to reduce the corner radius of windows & views... it looks a bit too bubbly for my taste. Brings back memories of the "candy" widgets of the first OSX release. Otherwise, it actually looks okay to me.

I kinda agree with you on the "bubbly" look. However, I'm pretty excited about the Widgets stuff. I really like(d) the Widgets in OS X and even built one to show weather radar. Even though it's kinda silly and not super useful it was nice to be able to hit one button and get an image of any storms in my area. I was really bummed when they removed that functionality in Catalina and it's been one of the reasons I haven't updated yet.

However, it looks like this functionality is back, albeit in a different form. You have to do a bit more work to build it in Swift vs Javascript but I don't think that's too bad. Plus it might actually work on iOS as well.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#359

Post by beyondcompute »

beyondcompute wrote: post #241

I hope, they’ll fix the annoying problem in Safari that when pausing/unpausing a Youtube video it skips half a second or so of audio.

Why was this downvoted?

I’ve been using Safari for a long time because of its relative resource efficiency and nicer design. But lack of good ad blocking and this annoying glitch in Youtube are the two problems that really make me consider switching to Chromium.

Re: macOS Big Sur Preview

#360

Post by ironmagma »

jki275 wrote: post #261
fareesh wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it uncommon for folks to use a Linux desktop as their primary OS? I've been doing so for about 10 years and I've had no complaints. Whenever I need some specific software I boot to Windows or use Virtualbox. I also have a Macbook Pro 2015

Uncommon? Yes. Very few people run Linux as a their primary OS.

Not sure why this is downvoted, it’s objective truth. I’ll go one farther though and say that Linux sucks, and in fact we must admit that if we want it to ever be good. It requires constant investment by the community to remain competitive with the other big players, who are constantly reshaping and making advances we need to keep up with. This is spoken as a desktop Linux user.
Post reply on HN