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

Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

shadowfacts.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 145 posts

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#81

Post by dmitriid »

Klonoar wrote: post #60
grishka wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They clearly are regressions because they confuse many people and make a worse use of the same screen area. Also what are the problems being solved by these redesigns and rearrangements? What was solved by going flat in 10.9 -> 10.10? What was solved by going even flatter, and using the dreaded SF Symbols icons everywhere, in 10.15 -> 11.0? It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop m…

People who complain are loud. Just because they’re loud doesn’t make the UI changes bad. I find I legitimately prefer the newer UI of Big Sur onwards. I just don’t feel the need to shout it from the heavens. An alternative take: you’re really going to suggest that one of the richest companies in the world doesn’t do extensive UI/UX testing before putting things out the door? They’re not just saying “yeah, this looks…

IIRC Apple doesn't do user testing because they know better.

I have 20/20 vision and I had to turn on contrast and button shapes, the new design is so bland and unreadable.

Macs have large screens and that's why... they changed all dialogs to be tall narrow boxes with center-aligned text?

Properly labeled color-differentiated icons are now indistinguishable grays crowding the title bar removing all affordances (from being recognizable to being able where you can drag the window).

Keyboard access is being removed or broken across all first-party apps.

Desktop metaphors like multiple columns, tabs etc. are removed in favor of tall narrow strips of gray text that surely look great on a screen that fits your palm. But that's not the screen Mac OS operates on.

The new designs break Apple's own HIGs and other recommendations like WCAG.

So please tell me what it is you like about new designs and, more importantly, what the hell is their purpose?

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#82

Post by thewebcount »

als0 wrote: post #69
grishka wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They clearly are regressions because they confuse many people and make a worse use of the same screen area. Also what are the problems being solved by these redesigns and rearrangements? What was solved by going flat in 10.9 -> 10.10? What was solved by going even flatter, and using the dreaded SF Symbols icons everywhere, in 10.15 -> 11.0? It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop m…

> It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop meddling with the UX already and maybe rewrite their PDF parser in a memory-safe language instead? Can't wait for this. And the same for the e-mail app. Even just a Swift rewrite of the 'hairy' parser code would be a reasonable starting point.

Can you elaborate on what problem you have that this rewrite would solve? (Serious question, not trying to be combative.) I can't remember ever having any problem displaying a PDF in macOS, though I don't do anything particularly outlandish with PDFs these days. Does Preview crash frequently for you? (Or does displaying PDFs from within your own apps crash?) I haven't heard of this issue, so just curious what the problem is.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#83

Post by jeffkeen »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #61
lxgr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had a Mac in the 90s/early 2000s, but a lot of this still sounds pretty familiar as a passionate Palm OS user at the time: No memory protection, no multitasking (not even threads!), more minimalistic than the competition at the time in many ways in its core features – but on the flip side, extremely extensible in almost every way. As I later learned, PalmOS was heavily inspired by Mac OS!

https://jcs.org/system6c

Incredible! I have a couple of old Macs lying around and it's a dream of mine to write a native app for them that does something modern, like a way to control spotify of something. Thanks for linking

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#84

Post by dmitriid »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #63
grishka wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the people in charge of the Mac are now people who _grew up with it_, who love it, and who have that same nostalgia as (some) of us outside Apple. So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? Th…

If you can run the beta you should complain about it to feedback but the new UI is harder to navigate. It seems like they are incrementally changing the UI to be the same across the product line though….

> If you can run the beta you should complain about it to feedback

On the WWDC talk show Craig Federighi said that the new settings have been "carefully crafted".

This is what "carefully crafted" is in Apple parlance these days.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#85

Post by dmitriid »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #57
grishka wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be labeled categories that made sense. Then they removed the labels, and then they merged some of the categories.

I've not tried out Ventura myself yet, but from the footage I've seen, the new settings app seems like an upgrade to me. I've never really found my way around the icon grid, none of the iterations since Leopard worked well for me (and I've probably used all of them), so good riddance, happy to see them they try something new. Those lists may break some people's muscle memory, but I'm way faster skimming through a lis…

The new settings forget that desktop OSes are desktop OSes and have a rich library of controls that have interaction modes distinct from touch.

See this: https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649

Instead of distinct readable controls with clear interactions it's a sea of gray upon gray upon gray.

It breaks Apple's own HIGs which says not to (over)use switches, and use checkboxes instead. The drop downs no longer look like they can be interacted with.

Where you'd have settings that can easily fit on a single pane in multicolumn view, you now have lists upon lists upon lists that are entirely alien to the Mac OS https://twitter.com/oskargroth/status/1534133558817742848

Interface consistency is a bullshit goal: https://twitter.com/MarioGuzman/status/1534585939971801088

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#86

Post by danudey »

jeffkeen wrote: post #16

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…

> After Dark!

I would pay a frankly distressing amount of money for reproductions of After Dark screensavers, even if it was just videos I can set my TV to play when it gets tired.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#87

Post by inasmuch »

jeffkeen wrote: post #16

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…

> This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today.

What's so strange about this is that, as that playfulness has been lost, the software has, in many ways, moved in a direction that feels more childishly cartoonish. It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly (even when it perhaps ought to be more serious or economical), which has, ironically, stripped all the charm out of the experience by inundating us with bright colors and childsafe corners.

Small, unexpected, thoughtful moments and Easter eggs like those described in this thread are like a small piece of chocolate after a healthy meal. What we have in most software now (Apple is by no means the only company guilty of this) is more like a diet comprised entirely of candy.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#88

Post by fragmede »

danudey wrote: post #86
jeffkeen wrote: post #16

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…

> After Dark! I would pay a frankly distressing amount of money for reproductions of After Dark screensavers, even if it was just videos I can set my TV to play when it gets tired.

https://youtu.be/we8JQe6ugrs

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#89

Post by grishka »

thewebcount wrote: post #82
als0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a done product — it's been one for quite a while. Could they just stop meddling with the UX already and maybe rewrite their PDF parser in a memory-safe language instead? Can't wait for this. And the same for the e-mail app. Even just a Swift rewrite of the 'hairy' parser code would be a reasonable starting point.

Can you elaborate on what problem you have that this rewrite would solve? (Serious question, not trying to be combative.) I can't remember ever having any problem displaying a PDF in macOS, though I don't do anything particularly outlandish with PDFs these days. Does Preview crash frequently for you? (Or does displaying PDFs from within your own apps crash?) I haven't heard of this issue, so just curious what the pro…

The problem is that writing a parser for a file format as complex as PDF in an unsafe language is just asking for trouble. There were many exploits already that involved a specially crafted PDF file to gain RCE, and there would probably be more, unless they do rewrite it. At this point we should just accept that it's next to impossible to write a 100% safe parser in an unsafe language.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#90

Post by tarsinge »

jeffkeen wrote: post #16

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today. The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around w…

For me it’s the Menuette[0] extension, as a child I loved it (icons instead of menu names).

[0] https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/menuette

Post reply on HN