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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

noheger.at

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Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#611

I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop. I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason. I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor. It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if…

In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems. It's a throwback to BDUF.

That's a bit like software developers iterating until all unit tests pass, and then considering all user feedback dumb.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#612
post #9

Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.” Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers. Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.

> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista

Not even close.

It's taken a few steps in the wrong direction, but nothing compaered to the user-hostility of Win8 (attempting to move users from 'real Windows' into locked-down dumbed-down touch-centric mobile-like app store hell), let alone Win11 (creating an e-waste mountain, then pushing AI slop into everything)

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#615
Crazy how all the mainstream desktop OSes became shit all at the same time. If I was crazy enough, I might think that the government is giving us a message that we all need to move to Lennox because the state-mandated back doors are being co-opted by a foreign entity to spy on us.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.

I suppose it’s exactly the programmer’s job to make sure cursor grabs the edge of the curved window border, not the arbitrary point outside.

In this specific case, yea, the programmers might be at fault, but most of my gripes with Liquid Glass are not like this. They are design issues. This seems like maybe more of a bug stemming from an underlying design issue (corner radius being ridiculously large).

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#617

This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground. MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power…

We're at the stage where almost any UI change no matter how small on Macs is heavily criticized. It seems a lot of people are getting very upset over a lot of micro detail. There's no way to please all of them. I've upgraded to Tahoe. Honestly, I barely notice any difference. It looks alright. There's very little for me to get upset over here. I'm pretty sure I'm in a bucket that describes the overwhelmingly large majority of users here: indifferent about the changes, overall not too upset, barely notice it.

As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.

The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.

I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.

It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#618
I’ve noticed a gradual increase in my annoyance with technology over the last couple of years. A lot of things now just feel irritating and not-quite-right.

Eg on my iPhone filling in a password sometime is kinda blanks the screen while I’m trying to fill the password in.

My keyboard is absolutely terrible.

Lots of other little annoyances I can’t remember right now.

This window thing is another good example of just not enough thought being put into things.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#619

I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop. I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason. I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor. It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if…

I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it.

Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).

The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.

Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#620
post #43

Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema... https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...

Why did they stop this?

It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars).

And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!

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