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

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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "Beginning in macOS 11, the track of a slider with tick marks aligns with the center of the thumb."

Ha, very good spot! Seems like another fairly strong hint (along with the padding and the iOS app support) that touch screen Macs are coming

Though someone on twitter pointed out that they believe “thumb” refers to the element that slides along the slider and it was always referred to as this, heh

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

#262

I really wish there were consistent title-bars. Windows 95 nailed this. It's really nice to immediately know where to click to move something out of your way.

There is so much that Windows 95 got right that the snoots coming out of design college with funny haircuts have been trying their darnedest to get wrong.

Much of it was built on the foundation that was CUA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Descrip...

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

#263
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…

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.

XFCE is obviously not the height, but it is very well executed

I'm more likely to prefer XFCE than Gnome, for example

That being said, I also use and like desktop Apple products so there's that

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

man synthetic.conf:

> synthetic.conf describes virtual symbolic links and empty directories to be created at the root mount point.

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

#266
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t mind the stoplight. I do mind Apple repurposing the god damned zoom button for fullscreen, requiring I hold option every time or having to install third party tools for what should be at worst a freaking plist change.

A circle given the same height provides a smaller pointer target than a square. The stoplight was also a downgrade over the shapes, positioning and functionality of the Mac OS 9 window controls. Stickies still uses these controls by the way, if you want to see what it is like. Close is all the way over on the left and its a box, I would prefer an X ("batsu"), but it's a box. WindowShade-style minimize is all the way over on the right, and Zoom, well it's the triangle but its been degraded in functionality. At this point it's maximize and revert, provided you don't resize it from its maximized state.

Re: Zoom. Maybe you already know this, but just in case you don't, double click the titlebar. Even works in Safari, although there's less "titlebar" to work with. If you already know all that, well, maybe it will help someone else reading through the thread.

That said I did use BetterTouchTool to modify its behavior because I too was frustrated with changing functional behavior and I recently bought a three button mouse to use in addition to my other input methods, but I decided to make it default Zoom, but middle click Full Screen.

You can also set a keyboard shortcut if you like in the Keyboard settings (no third party software required) within System Preferences. Just go to App Shortcuts, All Applications, add a shortcut, for the Menu Title type Zoom and then just record your shortcut.

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

#267
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's a macOS keybinding theme? I'm curious as the macOS workflow is totally alien to me.

Well, you start with the meta key.

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

#268

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. .... Yeah, that's pretty much true, and for very good reason. Every time an interface changes, it forces people to stop using the system and figure out the new interface. As such, while it is possible to make changes that are beneficial enough to…

It doesn't look like macOS 11's new UI is going to need macOS 10 users to "stop and figure out" the interface in the way switching from macOS 10 to Xfce (or vice-versa) would. The buttons aren't all moving around to strange places. The functionality isn't materially changing. What they're changing is the design language, not the fundamental UX.

Well, as an occasional MacOS user, it still pisses me off when I discover that maximize button is in fact full screen button.

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

#269
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not going to defend Apple's work on this front, it's just they decided to consolidate the title bar and toolbar to free up some vertical screen real estate pressure and they're leaning hard on these slide animations to hide some of the UI elements so as to not overload the toolbar/titlebar thing. That to me looks like a botched attempt to make it more space efficient, although I do at least like the bit with the search bar.

John Siracusa has a different theory though, and having had time to go through and examine to changes in the HIG in more detail, I'm inclined to agree. The spacing and layout and sizing appears to make Mac OS XI more "touchable", i.e. we should expect Macs with touch screens at some point.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's your machine, although I hadn't tested this until now because I almost never use shuffle. :) I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by togg…

Where do you set accent colour?

It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences
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