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Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

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101–110 of 145 posts

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#101
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>IIRC Apple doesn't do user testing because they know better. Citation needed... >The new designs break Apple's own HIGs and other recommendations like WCAG. You may have missed it, but they redid that HIG and released it during the latest WWDC. This train has left the station and it ain't backin' up. >Keyboard access is being removed or broken across all first-party apps. How about you... list some of these apps? I'…

Just because Apple has put something in their HIG doesn’t mean they’ll keep it there.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#102
post #14
post #4

Sure, this is a sweet little hit of nostalgia -- but it's also symptomatic of just how far Apple's come (back) with the Mac, and why. It's clear that we're way, way over the doldrums of the butterfly keyboard, abandoned Mac Pro, "continues to be a product in our line-up" years. Little things like this, little acknowledgements of the past and the Mac community, suggest to me why: the people in charge of the Mac are no…

> 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…

Different people work on different things.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#103

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…

OSX was also easy to modify and add extensions to for many years, as Objective-C is so extremely dynamic... until Apple started really trying to lock things down on purpose, turning macOS more and more into the miserably rigid iOS.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#104

Idk. Lose 32 bit support forever, get a dog cow? No wonder the Mac platform is such a dumpster fire.

What was lost? Aside from gaming, everything is now 64 bit so it sounds like a successful transition. And there is a lot more wrong with gaming on mac than 32 bit support.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#105
post #78
post #20

> I, er, accidentally updated my laptop to the beta Good to know it wasn't just me. I also expected it to be an installer that let me choose a different volume to install on.

AFAIK, it will present you a choice, _if_ you've already created a separate APFS volume such that there's more than one option of installation target. I saw someone do exactly that (create an APFS volume for Ventura, start the installer, and then choose said volume as the target) in the first YouTube video I saw about the beta's release.

Yeah, that’s what I tried, even named the volume Ventura. It has worked in the past with previous releases e.g. Monterey. It sounds like the original poster (and some commenters) was trying to do this too, had done in the past, and was surprised.

The process didn’t give me an installer, it just jumped to the volume building process. TBH I kinda knew it was messed up, but after cancelling and trying again, I just let it go.

I didn’t see any options in the dev site to pull down a full installer.

My M1 is fairly new, so I have recent practice reinstalling Big Sur from scratch if necessary.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#106

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 comp…

> It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly

The weird part is most current attempts of this are actually really bad at it past initial surface appearances.

Minimalist and “content-first’ UIs look great in screenshots and I guess they prevent new users from getting overwhelmed, but they also hide all the features in a way I find quite hostile. We have an absolute wealth of pixels in our displays today, but tons of software makes you decipher abstract line icons to work out what it can actually do.

The Mac thankfully still has the escape hatch of the menu bar, which almost universally allows you to browse and search all performable actions (and see their keyboard shortcuts inline!), but mobile operating systems don’t even have a touch-centric equivalent of tooltips.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#107
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you prefer the new UI? I can make a list of reasons why it's bad. The only reason I can see why anyone would prefer it is because it looks "cleaner", but that cleanness is artificial and gets in the way when trying to parse and use the software. A good UI designer makes buttons look like buttons so our brain can quickly recognize them as such, without mistaking them for something else. A good designer has the…

> but that cleanness is artificial and gets in the way when trying to parse and use the software. I really don't agree. When software/UIs were simpler, the buttons screaming loudly "I AM A BUTTON!" worked. Now it quickly gets way too busy. It was important when almost everybody was a computer novice and couldn't detect subtle hints and conventions about what is a button and what isn't. Now? Not as much. Look at scree…

I'm running a copy of iTunes 8 right now, and I disagree.

I also disagree that the old style of design is less suited towards complicated software. Apple's iWork software feels like it's suffered the most in terms of usability as a result of modern UI design.

Humans evolved in a world where things have depth, light and shadows. Even you admit that back when user interfaces were designed with that in mind, those interfaces were more friendly to novices. By ignoring these aspects of our visual perception, you're requiring prior knowledge on the part of the user, while simultaneously making it difficult to acquire that knowledge. That's not a good thing, even if you assert that "flat" interfaces are no worse once you get used to them (which I clearly disagree with).

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#108
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new preference panes themselves are very iOS-like, and that's unprecedented.

i reminds more of gnome tbh post big-sur, at least dark-theme, the overall ui looks very much like gnome in many ways...

And modern Gnome is also terrible because they insist on supporting touchscreens as first-class input devices at the expense of sanely sized controls for the remaining 95% of users.

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 comp…

> It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly The weird part is most current attempts of this are actually really bad at it past initial surface appearances. Minimalist and “content-first’ UIs look great in screenshots and I guess they prevent new users from getting overwhelmed, but they also hide all the features in a way I find quite hostile. We have an absolute wealth of pixels in our displ…

I dread the day the menubar disappears...

Re: Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

#110

I have a print of Moof the Dogcow on my wall and it is lovely. Got it at Susan Kare’s shop: https://kareprints.com/products/copy-of-moof-the-dogcow-on-g...

MacForce in Portland used to sell a MOOF! T-shirt, which sadly I have lost or it fell apart over the years.
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