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Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

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Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#491

Post by eddythompson80 »

lyu07282 wrote: post #353
rollcat wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's time for me to look back at Linux. (*Looks at Gnome.*) Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.

The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal

And there are no alternatives.

I learned to love KDE, but I understand why people don't default to it. All other alternatives are dead and it makes sense. The scope of something like KDE or GNOME isn't really reasonable these days. I learned to install the most minimal version of KDE.

The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like:

- Hyprland (for Window management and other random tasks like wallpapers and lockscreen)

- Waybar (for task bar/menu bar)

- Rofi/Wofi (for Spotlight/Search&Launch)

Then you a la carte your File Manager, photo editor, browser, and whatever apps you like.

While I find that somewhat appealing, and those solution are flexible enough to pretty much build whatever you like your DE to be like, they are also extremely complex. For most things there is no "defaults". You don't get to do anything "by default" other than boot into a GUI environment. You configure a shortcut to launch your terminal or apps, a task bar that also has an empty default. Things that have defaults are gonna be extremely "basic" (think html no css). Just the data dump, and it expects you to style it. They are entirely configured (and styled) through a series of conf/css/ini/yaml/json files.

These apps/environment pretty much dominate all the Linux desktop discussion these days. (At least discussion I can find on here or reddit or Twitter when I used to check it)

It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not. They are extremely tedious and a giant pain in the ass for daily use. Maybe it's early days. It's been about 8-6 years now since all the talk has become about new Wayland compositors. There were dozens of them, but Hyprland seems to have the most mindshare? maybe? hard to tell. It's the youngest, but it would take many years to reach KDE or GNOME maturity

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#492

Post by mholt »

ricardobeat wrote: post #400
austinl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achie…

This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#493

Post by KerrAvon »

TylerE wrote: post #386
basisword wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple takes accessibility more seriously than most. I would be shocked if there isn't a setting to instantly remedy this for people with any sort of vision issue.

In some ways. But they have many failings. It’s completely Impossibly to make the gui larger, for instance.

Not so.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/zoom-in-iph3e2e367e/i...

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/customize-the-text-si...

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#494

Post by crazygringo »

stalco wrote: post #397

I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to. As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

OMG that image is hilarious. It's a total disaster.

And it's not like someone had to go out of their way to find something clashing like that. Pulling up control center from the home screen is something you do all the time.

Like, I genuinely would have assumed that control center would need to be non-translucent precisely because of that. But... nope?

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#495

Post by brookst »

layer8 wrote: post #419
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.

Probably, but they tend to also make for an ugly look, like the “Increase Contrast” setting in iOS. The other way around would be better: Have an accessible down-to-earth default, and a secondary “fancy visuals” mode for those who want that.

I have no complaints with the UI settings I use on iOS: reduce motion, reduce transparency, differentiate without color.

Given the huge change and sensitivity to accessibility I'm going to guess the opposite -- it will be designed to look nice without transparency.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#496

Post by jay_kyburz »

sanswork wrote: post #377
slt2021 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base. I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone

In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow. You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices,…

Windows 10 keeps telling me I need to buy a new Desktop in October. I don't remember when I bought it, but it runs fine for everything I do. I've been running Linux for ages on my laptops, I be upgrading my desktop to Linux too!

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#497

Post by tshaddox »

carlosjobim wrote: post #391
coastalpuma wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging po…

You know something that almost never has rounded corners? Glass.

Almost every common glass object I can think of has rounded corners. The only obvious exception is most household window panes. I have to think pretty hard to come up with another one...maybe aquarium tanks? Some mirrors and glass tables, although the images that comes to mind for those are just as likely to be round as square.

I'm very curious which items you went through before concluding that glass almost never has rounded corners.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#499

Post by encom »

plainOldText wrote: post #297
pzo wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I was kind of slowly preparing myself that I might be switching to android and it seems this might be the final straw. Will wait until Sept to see how new iphone and google pixels will look like but most likely I will do the transition (even though been developing for iOS for more than 10 years.

Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.

Apple user friendliness only extends as far as you're willing to do things the Apple way. If you want to do something Apple doesn't approve, it's going to be difficult, impossible, or miserable.

Example: file syncing and password management. Possible, but my Nextcloud and Keepass experience was janky. 3rd party Youtube client, impossible. Adblocking - all solutions I tried were terrible to mediocre (around 2020, but I doubt it improved since). On Android I can run any browser I want and install uBlock. Music: I can just dump my collection of mixed format music files (aac, mp3, mpc, flac, wavpack) over USB and play them with foobar2000. Foobar2000 is available on iphone, but needs dumb workarounds to play files not natively supported by Apple. And so on...

If you're balls deep in the Apple ecosystem, you probably have none of these problems. I never allowed myself to get locked in, which also made it very easy to leave ios behind.

Only thing I miss a little is the ios email and calendar clients. They were alright.

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