The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level. Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.
It is a personal blog. I would not apply the same kind of criticism to a personal blog, even though it does sound ironic. Moreover, turning off JS was an easy solution. There is no solution right now for apple's UI mess (except not updating).
Personal blog or no, I think the UX and usability critiques are equally valid.
Whether or not the author cares will certainly be influenced by the fact it’s just a personal blog. I wouldn’t expect them to change anything for that reason alone, but the criticism stands nonetheless.
Please do! You put an ellipsis where an interesting explanation could go.
Japanese for "cat". Small programs to add a tiny cat that runs to your cursor and then naps - until another cursor move. There's also JS to add a neko to a webpage. Cute, but also not good when trying to focus on reading.
I’ve seen some blogs linked here on HN that do that. It’s so incredibly obnoxious if you have any difficulties with visual processing.
I’m trying to read but my eyes keep jumping to the movement and I lose my place.
I understand people think it’s “fun” but I think it’s just so disrespectful to the reader.
No they took of because they used illegal practices and VC money to undercut competitors.
I think we can pretty safely assume that every large and successful company has done horrible and illegal things to get themselves there. That being said I think design and ease of use still play a significant part in Uber’s success.
Well, I didn't have Balzac on today's HN bingo card, for sure!
"Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime."
Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.
2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.
Windows is borderline unusable to me without Open Shell / Win 7 settings. I refuse to learn yet another icon idiom, just to have it change 2 years later. Thinking of trying Bazzite for my new upcoming 2nd gaming machine (for daughter) build because I'm tired of Windows. If it goes well, may convert multiple Win 10 HTPC/gaming machines.
Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.
All 14" and 16" MacBook Pros (which is all Apple Silicon MacBook Pros except the 13" ones with base M1 or M2) have an SD card reader.
Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.
> Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now. Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time?
> Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time? The userbase has been watered down with a larger proportion of individuals who are not highly technical.
Oh that statement is so 1992. Millions of people getting a Dell or a Gateway and annoying their techie friend “So now what do I do with this?”
I didn't really explain my objections very well in such a throwaway statement. My issue isn't that those things exist; pretty much the opposite. I think it's good that they exist and they almost certainly always should. My problem is when app A implements tabs differently from app B, app C uses the same shortcut for switching windows that app D uses for switching tabs, etc. It just all seems so disjointed. What I wan…
macOS actually has native tab support built in. It supports everything you’d expect from a tab system, including merging windows into tabs and splitting them back out. All third party devs have to do is opt in and tell the OS which windows are intended to participate. It’s been a feature for a long time now. Problem is that most third party apps don’t opt in and instead reimplement tabs themselves. It’s mostly native…
Is it enabled by default?
I only very recently changed my System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Windows > Prefer tabs when opening documents to "Always". I'm pretty sure the default is "In Full Screen".
Now, something like TextEdit creates new files in new tabs rather than new windows. It's great! But by default, everything on macOS seems to use windows rather than tabs. I don't even think most people know about the "Prefer tabs" option at all.
If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason. VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interfa…
> Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen. Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while mu…
It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
do posts like this ever reach the higher up at Apple say Tim Cook ? or they're buried at the lower levels so the next level boss can't look bad. maybe apple or ex-apple people can comment ?