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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

#281

Post by fnordsensei »

wpm wrote: post #217
avree wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The state of accessibility (as a design goal; as, finding the point where it critically improves the situation for some, yet is beneficial for everyone) in tech is generally awful.

It's sad that this doesn't look like it's a priority to Apple.

My only hope is that I'm wrong, that the affordances are actually more than OK once you use it, and that they've done loads of usage testing and found that it works better for the majority of people, as well as those with greater needs.

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

#282

Post by RivieraKid »

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.

I'm not saying people are losing sleep over it but it's just bad UX. If you download and install an app, it shouldn't have the side-effect of a new disk appearing on your desktop. It's obvious, ask any UX designer if you don't believe me.

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

#283

Post by neuronic »

fnord123 wrote: post #248
woah wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keyboard isn't that bad. It had reliability issues which suggest a failure of their stress testing, but it wasn't somehow obviously broken when it shipped

The 2019 MacBook keyboards are ok. The ones before were worthless. The ones in 2005 had jitter resulting pro keyboards in double key presses rendering them also total garbage.

I am typing on a 2017 MBP keyboard that never broke. While I generally share the criticism it is neither garbage nor worthless. These unnecessary juvenile hyperbolisms are so boring.

The keyboards had a higher fault rate and many other issues and Apple has corrected its mistake, albeit 1-2 years too late from a consumer perspective. That's all there is to the story and the only semi-relevant competition to MBPs was STILL just ThinkPads and XPS, even with the main input device being significantly worse than previous iterations.

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

#284

Post by neuronic »

3131s wrote: post #184
XFCEqueUE wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least we don't have to manually adjust fan speed every time WLAN resets after sleep <3

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

#285

Post by raxxorrax »

rimliu wrote: post #273
raxxorrax wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to bypass was also an argument for locked down mobile OS. Software on these platforms is mostly useless aside from 2-3 social apps if you like that. I think locking down features is a mistake and does only draw in certain developers. The reason the pushback might not be as large is that competitors for desktop seem to be sleeping, or worse, try to do the same. I still don't believe Apple on the privacy front. Ye…

People are drawing, creating music, making movies, editing photos on their mobile OSes. Saying that they are "mostly uses" does not make them so. Freedom and privacy are at odds. If I give any app the freedom to access my messages or call list, does it increase or decrease privacy?

> If I give any app the freedom to access my messages or call list, does it increase or decrease privacy?

I have an app(lication) that has access to my messages. It doesn't do anything with them aside from showing them to me on request. It doesn't affect my privacy at all because doing so is far beyond its scope. If I had shitty apps, I would agree, but until now those seem mostly restricted to shitty app stores. But if they cannot be trusted, they cannot be trusted to see my messages at all.

> People are drawing, creating music, making movies, editing photos on their mobile OSes

True, they are not completely useless, just mostly. I can do that on other OS with far more freedom. Artists generally don't like restraints too much and I do actually paint digitally. Wouldn't know how to connect it to a mobile device, nevermind the atrocious software selection.

The cameras on mobile devices are nice though. Don't think the common mobile OS makes handling image date easy at all. Even most normal users want images on their desktop as soon as possible.

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

#286

Post by fnordsensei »

gowld wrote: post #147
config_yml wrote: post #28

Loss of affordance, density and contrast. Why do designers hate these 3 things? It's pretty, yes.

Apple's original human interface designer says that Apple has "razor-sharp focus on a user many of us often fail to even consider: The potential user, the buyer", ignoring the needs of people who already paid their money. https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/

It seems short-sighted to ignore the person who has used a product or service, loved it and keeps loving it, and will persistently recommend it to others during its lifetime. It's hard to think of a better marketing channel when it works at scale.

If that's the way they are thinking about "the potential user," all they're saying is "we'd prefer to do our marketing ourselves, please; don't go around recommending our products."

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

#287

Post by fnord123 »

neuronic wrote: post #283
fnord123 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2019 MacBook keyboards are ok. The ones before were worthless. The ones in 2005 had jitter resulting pro keyboards in double key presses rendering them also total garbage.

I am typing on a 2017 MBP keyboard that never broke. While I generally share the criticism it is neither garbage nor worthless. These unnecessary juvenile hyperbolisms are so boring. The keyboards had a higher fault rate and many other issues and Apple has corrected its mistake, albeit 1-2 years too late from a consumer perspective. That's all there is to the story and the only semi-relevant competition to MBPs was S…

I eventually threw away my apple keyboards from 2005 so they are literally garbage.

Regarding the 2017 keyboards, I'm not even talking about the fault rate. They had no escape key and the key travel was too small so it was like typing on a touch screen.

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

#289

Post by 72deluxe »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #149
72deluxe wrote: post #121

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…

I put all developer libraries that I do not want to put into a system path into /DevelopLibs. On Windows I put them in C:\DeveloperLibs. That way I can build supporting libraries of different versions software under there, eg. /DeveloperLibs/abc-1, /DeveloperLibs/abc-2 and test that I have a self-contained executable that runs on my development system without relying on anything in $PATH.

It was a habit on macOS since /Developer used to be where xcode lived until they moved it to /Applications.

It also makes it easy to look in the /DeveloperLibs directory and see if I've got all libraries I need on this machine (I have different development machines under different OSes).

Removing ability to create directories under the root seems draconian for no good reason, other than the iOS-ification of my machine. Not Apple's machine - my machine.

I don't understand why people would ask "why would you want to do that?" because everybody used to defend the ability to only resize windows from the bottom right corner under macOS until a few versions ago, when it became obvious that resizing a window from any edge was a good idea and always had been. But people oddly defended it for decades before that.

What if they now remove the ability to change your desktop wallpaper? Would we all say "but why would you want to change your wallpaper?"? We seem to accept the gradual lock-down of our own machines. Apple users (and I am one) seem to be the most defensive of the company's behaviours and it doesn't make sense - we just have to accept it.

If Microsoft removed the ability to create a directory under C:\, what would the result be? Would we be asking "but why would you want to create a directory under C:\?"? I think not. It'd be the apocalypse.

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

#290

Post by 72deluxe »

filleduchaos wrote: post #148
thoughtsimple wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn off System Integrity Protection. Not a good idea but it will let you make unnecessary changes to /.

All they really did was make it harder to thoughtlessly do. If you can't cope with the procedure needed to make changes to the write-protected folders, maybe whatever it is you wanted to write there isn't actually that important.

That doesn't make sense. What is in / that is dangerous?

Finder hides all of /etc and /bin and /usr for the "protection" of normal users, just like the default view for Windows Explorer under C:\Windows\System. But you can still change the contents on Windows, or see the directories in Terminal on macOS.

Should they hide those directories when you use Terminal too? After all, /etc is important. Your reasoning would also stand up there - perhaps whatever files you were attempting to modify under /etc wasn't actually that important.

When does the "you cannot easily modify files on your own machine" stop?

Would you also accept the inability to change your wallpaper with such glee? Perhaps the wallpaper you wanted wasn't actually that important.

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